About 4 years ago. I now use a Mint install at work and a mint install at home. So does my wife, MIL and my parents. Open Office does what I need it to for work and steam for linux has given me most of the games I want to play. What's more is steams streaming capability meant I swapped to a laptop for my primary machine and stuck my old desktop into the garage for when I want to play windows only games.

Is it perfect? God no. Is it better than Windows for what I or anyone I know uses it for? Absolutely! I also don't have to do much in the way of configuration when I give mint to someone who has never used it before. Install and run. The cinnamon desktop is intuitive, it has pre-installed most of the main programs people want and it is basically bullet proof. All I have to do is show someone how to use the app manager and off they run.

If an area is declared a national park you can have your house resumed by the government. In the same way as if they were building a road. A mate of mine owned a house on Phillip Island and had it resumed because his house was right in the middle of the reserve they created for the fairy penguins. It was sad at the time because it was one of the most amazing spots on earth but we understood. We never drove to the house after dark, we always walked the last 3 kms because the penguins were all over the road and there was nothing you could have done to avoid smooshing them.

The saddest part was when they demolished it.

Well given I live in the woods I will tell you that they are not quiet!

Come sundown the cicadas go mental and their noise can make talking to someone else hard. Then there are all the birds! Do you know how loud a cockatoo is!!! Let alone a kookaburra! Then at night you get the demonic noises of fighting possums, the sounds of male koalas and all the frogs. Damn you frogs!

And then if you really really really want to hear a noise that will chill you to your bones - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - that is the sound of the Curlew. When you hear that for the first time in the middle of the night........

It might be a different noise to cars, or sirens, or some morons crap music. But woods, quiet they are not!

How are you thinking about the capital cost of a car? While there is depreciation a car still retains some of its capital value. I buy cars that are 2 years old and sell them after a 3 or 6 year cycle. Across a 3 year period I have never sold a car at less than 60% of what I originally paid for it, and usually it is a higher percentage than that.

Financially I treat my vehicles as a rental. I structure my income so that I pay my fuel, financing, servicing and insurance from my gross income. This means that for my $55,000 car I spend a total of $235 per week pre tax. This is for a budget of 25,000 km per year and an average fuel price of $1.55 per litre (yeah I'm not in the states)

Given that the vehicle is fully financed and that weekly cost includes the finance cost based on the sale value at 3 years I have a TCO of $12,220 per year. That figure would not be significantly lower if I reduced the capital cost of the car.

You have had a significantly different experience to me. My experience with Linux Mint is I just install it and it works. The only thing I have ever had any issues with recently is the optimus chipset from Nvidia because there was no support for switching between video cards.

Now Windows 7 on the other hand has become a monumental pain. I drop the disk in and it installs fine. First boot comes up and none of the network devices are working. I have to go to another machine download the drivers and transfer them via usb. Once I have network up the machine will spend HOURS downloading, rebooting, downloading, rebooting all the updates. Then at the end of the whole process device manager still shows a number of devices it can't recognise (yes I set windows to be able to look online for drivers).

I use windows 7 at home for games, haven't tried win 8 at all and use linux mint at work and at home when not gaming.

Comes from LinkedIn themselves so no way to verify the information.

https://press.linkedin.com/abo...

The term is registered users - so anyone with 2 accounts will be counted twice.

I get a lot of those as well. It is a really really poor method of approaching someone though. It has a terrible strike rate and doesn't differentiate you at all.

Use linkedin to identify who you want to speak to. Then pick up the phone to their business and ask for them.

Definitely used for lead generation. That was kind of what I meant by position. You can search for "Head of IT" in x region with a company of 50 or more staff.

Not quite. You don't have access to contact details on that account. You can only see what their connections would see. You only get contact details when someone sends then in response to an Inmail or accepts a connection request.

If the recruiter works for an agency that has a corporate account chances are they have so many unused InMails that it doesn't matter (inmails are shared between all seat holders and you buy packs). The recruiters this has hurt are the sole operators, and frankly those are the ones you want to deal with anyway.

Personally I think it was a dodgy move because you have no way of knowing when a profile was last active but you are always charged. LinkedIn claim this will improve the quality of Inmails but I doubt it. All I see is that they are trying to give less for the same $$.

Really? I have no idea what Dice charge, wrong market and wrong location. But my average spend on job board postings was about $11 per ad depending on the site.

That said I was a volume advertiser on contract and I no longer do that as the ROI wasn't there.

As a general rule of thumb about 40% of the workforce has a linkedin account. Depending on the industry it can be as low as 10% (hospitality) or as high as 90% (marketing). If you are in an outward facing role you will tend to have a linkedin profile.

Currently linkedin has about 330 million accounts, 100 million or so in the US.

LinkedIn has 2 main income streams. The first is by selling job ads to employers. These are relatively expensive (compared to other job boards) costing $250+

The other is recurring subscriptions which give you additional features. A base account can only "see" 3rd degree connections when doing a search. When you purchase a premium account you are able to get access to the entirety of linkedin's network. This is a huge difference if you are searching for a particular skill set or position.

The other is InMails. These are direct messages that you can send directly to another user without being connected to them. Until January this year LinkedIn guaranteed a response in 7 days or you got your inmail credit back. Now they have flipped it so you get a credit back if you get a response.

A full subscription account costs c$1000 a month. It tends to be used by recruiters and internal HR people the most.

Because a bored lined tunnel is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper at any kind of depth. They are also lower maintenance and will last for a longer period of time. Concrete and sea water don't mix well. This is even assuming that sea floor is nice and smooth and even with no large changes in height.

I'm really really concerned that the people on here don't give their kids any kind of emergency training.

By giving your child a small amount of responsibility you are NOT turning them into primary care givers or causing parentification.

My 4 year old knows how to call the police, ambulance and fire service. She knows which one to call and when. She knows how to unlock my wife's and my mobile and how to dial 000. She knows that it might happen that we are hurt and we can't do it and she knows she will never ever get in trouble if she calls when it wasn't needed. What's more is we have practised it.

For a 2 year old something as complex as explaining a situation to dispatch would probably be too much. But knowing to hit the big red button if mum collapses is not.