Excel is much better for a phone list. It's easier/faster to input data and it offers automatic filtering (you can filter using a list of values for a column, like say filtering by country or city). Excel also has "grouping", similar to the GROUP BY operation in SQL. It's accessed through a wizard in a menu option, no need for formulas.

I'm guessing their farts contain a surprising amount of methane and they singlehandedly double the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, bringing forth the apocalypse while unassumingly chewing grass in the fields.

Why? No. You can measure the standard deviation of any distribution, normal or not. And it is what it is, independent of distribution, it tells you how much you should expect samples to deviate from the average.

Every game I've ever seen from Gameloft had absolutely no concept of gameplay... some actually as far as not being games at all, just something that resembles a game. Granted, I didn't see the NFL game... ... but just having 3D, playbooks and accurate rosters says nothing of the quality of the game as a game.

GameLoft produces games which look and sound good, but are utter and absolute pieces of [poop]. Comparing cell phone games to console games is like pretending that internet fan fiction competes with normal books.

Linux doesn't have OLE, but they're still messing with implementing Bonobo, kpart, etc to re-create basically the same idea.

Plus, OpenOffice.org has it's own component system (UNO) which is very similar to OLE/COM, Mozilla has XUL which is also the same thing and you also have CORBA which is akin to DCOM (which is distributed OLE/COM). Components are not inherently less secure than normal applications... and even better, you have more granular control over their use (separate permissions for use, activation, instantiation, etc.)

It was ActiveX that gave a bad name to COM, but not because it's bad in itself, but rather because it was a poor idea to integrate it to web pages in the way it was done.

Once upon a time I tried iTunes, hated it and uninstalled it. Then the Apple Updater tried to install it every time an update for Safari was available (I keep Safari up to date because I use it to test web sites I develop) and I diligently unchecked it every time and told it to ignore the update... that was until iTunes 9 which I accidentally forgot to uncheck and ended up installing. I went "what the heck, I'll give it another go" but went to WMP and made it the default player for MP3s, WAVs, etc. ... Then when iTunes 9.0.1 came out I updated it (just for security purpouses) and it configured itself once again as default handler for MP3s and other sound files.

I really hate Apple at times like this.

From the article:

In the revised advisory, Microsoft explained why it won't patch Windows XP, the world's most popular operating system. "By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability,

Microsoft has been selling Windows XP SP2 and SP3 for some time now. I really wouldn't expect them patching plain old XP.

There are ways to measure lies in a survey. I'm not an expert, but when I took a statistics class it was explained, and as well as I remember:

- Instead of the 1.000 surveyed people separate a smaller group, say 100.
- Assume the last digit of their telephone numbers are uniformly distributed
- Ask them something along the lines of: "If you lied about file sharing or if the last digit of your phone number is an even number say YES, if not say NO"

If nobody lied you should get something close to 50% YES and 50% NO... but if the result is different you can assume it's because some of them lied (although you don't know which). ... Doing this kind of test you can approximate the percentage of people that would lie to the question.

If the same had been done here in Argentina it would have been completely understandable. Only in recent years we've started seeing more black people in Buenos Aires, and they're still very rare (they're very common in Uruguay, just across the pond... but it's said that argentine black people were killed in the war against Paraguay). Putting a black person in an ad is as representative of argentine people as putting an albino.

On the other hand we have a very large asian community. Mostly Korean and Chinese, AFAIK.

It's not the same nowadays. He can store the photos in Facebook, where even if they are deleted they'll still be accesible.

Eggs at twelve?
Now I now what comes after news at eleven.

My IE8 redirected to Google.. I guess it's because of the Google Toolbar, although it was disabled.

No, those are multiple toolbars placed along multiple lines. Ordinary toolbars don't span many lines... they just hide their elements and offer a drop down menu to access the rest.

If they don't know enough about browsers to download an alternative themselves then they don't have a basis upon which to choose a browser from a list either. It'll go down to name, logo and brand (which might give a boost to Safari and Chrome over Opera and Firefox). If they don't understand why an alternative would be preferible to IE then they don't know enough to browse safely with any other browser either.

I remember, when I was young, installing SCO Unix and being offered an MTA (Sendmail and mdf I think) and being absolutely clueless about what to choose... so I went with sendmail (which I knew by name), which probably didn't do me any favors.