Comment Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode (Score 1) 235
Funny how fast science can turn into outright doomsday panic when grant money is involved.
Grant money or Al Gore.
Funny how fast science can turn into outright doomsday panic when grant money is involved.
Grant money or Al Gore.
"Continued efforts" means Al Gore continues to take your money.
That's the essence of the problem. People like Al Gore act like they are the "experts" and there are similar loonies on the other side of the question. Can't we just do unbiased scientific work and rely on that?
I'll put forth what I always do:
1. It would be nice if global climate change were to be debated not on the basis of politics (etc.) but on a rational, unbiased, scientific basis. If we would stick 100% to the science I think we would come to a sound conclusion in fairly short order. But factor in all the special interests (on all sides) and you get the current mess.
2. Having said that, I also think it is prudent to act as if climate change were real. This is in the Willilam James sense: if it's real, we dare not fail to act. If it isn't real, we still have acted in a manner that supports long-term sustainability (distant paraphrase of James' views about religion).
I am neither a "supporter" or "denier" by the way. Those labels represent the idea that there is room for widely-varying opinion on something that ought to be a matter of science.
My guess is because IT is not given control over security, not listened to and told to "just do it" when they try to point out the security problems during planning.
I was once the security advisor at a Large Place. A senior manager came to me and said, I want to forward all my email to Gmail so I can read it at home. (Much of it was sensitive stuff.) He said, "what do you advise?" I said, obviously, not to do it as it presented unacceptable risk, forwarding internal sensitive email to an external source beyond our control. He replied, "OK, I asked you the question, document that, will you? I can't help it if you gave the wrong answer" and he went ahead and set up forwarding. Actually, had someone set it up because he was clueless about how to do it.
My parents were dumb when I was a kid, and now they show me how i might of been a bit less smarter than I thought I was. With age comes wisdom.
Reminds me of an old Rabbinic saying: Wisdom comes to us when we are too old to use it.
I always pay in full every month, and it caused me to be refused a higher line of credit. Bank of America told me that I didn't have a record of monthly payments (which I did, as I paid in full every month on every credit card, but I guess that doesn't count as they weren't installment payments or loan payments) and therefore didn't qualify for more credit. Then they said that they ran a credit check, and my credit score was 820 (850 is the max you can have), and appended tips for improving my credit rating!
Of course Bank of America is one of the more evil players (they too highlight the minimum balance and have no "auto-pay full balance" option), but then again most of the players are evil to some degree.
Maybe people should start learning how to communicate again, rather than getting wizards to create bullshit for them.
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These people, whose jobs are to propagate information, would probably produce a better result if they used vi.
That was one of the main points in my posting earlier in this discussion. Slicker is not better unless it communicates more effectively, and often it does the exact opposite. Back in the day, some people used WordStar and were happy enough with it. Slick? Hardly. Could you communicate with it? Yup. (Not that I recommend it today, but that isn't my point.)
Another poster made the point that LibreOffice and predecessors don't break the paradigm, and instead try to more or less mimic MS Office (sans ribbon). That is an interesting observation and could generate a long discussion of its own. Even AbiWord, which prides itself on being small and lightweight, has an MS Office feel. That leads me to ask, where could office software go that is new and different, and most importantly, allows for easier and better communication, if the paradigm were to change?
There was an important paradigm shift between the older systems, such as the aforementioned WordStar, and the fully-GUI systems of today, although there are those who argue that this did not enhance communication. But clearly usability for the average user is higher.
What might the next paradigm shift be?
I respect everyone's choices and if you say you need MS Office then go ahead and use it. You use what you find best, I'll use what I find best.
However here's my question. First let's compare current MS Office and a version from, say, 10 years ago. What is getting done better that matters with the newest version? Has productivity increased? Are presentations and documents slicker? Does that mean they communicate their information better? Are spreadsheet models a lot better (maybe they are, I don't know)? Or are they just more complex and maybe buggier?
Now do the same comparison between the latest MS Office and the latest LibreOffice.
There was this guy I used to work with who was considered the organization's PowerPoint guru. He did all sorts of amazing tricks, effects, and whatnot. I will be the first to say there is no way those tricks, effects, and whatnot could have been done with Impress. His presentations wowed his viewers just about 100% of the time.
So, was he getting his message across better?
What actually happened is that the viewers were so busy watching all the pyrotechnics that his message often got lost.
So think about the true value of all the "extras" in MS Office. Certainly there are edge cases where they present value, but is that true for 90% of users 90% percent of the time?
the OS alone uses half of that (32GB)
Holy bloatware, batman.... 32GB for Win 8.1? Is it really that much?
That's the problem with depending on a "free" service.
Isn't that the most important lesson from all of this? Google cancels stuff willy-nilly (admittedly with decent notice). Other stuff disappears completely. Even paid services get acquired, merged, destroyed.
If you rely on a free web service for personal use, you could be in for a shock. If you rely on a free web service to run a business
That said, I use gmail and Google calendar. I should know better....
What's the answer? I suppose I should say, "do it all yourself" but that can be a tall order, especially if you need to sync mobile devices or multiple operating systems. The truth is, I don't know of an easy answer.
Because, uh, Linux upgrades are free, and generally automated?
Free for sure, but generally automated? Not on every distro. It's often easier to do a full save, a fresh install, and then restore whatever you need. My Linux Mint upgrades take about a day of work to get everything back to where I want it. That occurs maybe every 18 months, so I don't mind it so much, and I have complete control over the process and a very high probability of complete success (100% success so far, going back many years before Mint, to Ubuntu and Suse before that). It's an annoyance, but hardly fatal.
HOLY MACRO!