17250622
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
While trying to find out how many people are employed by Intel, google led me to this URL
(http://www.intel.com/intel/company/corp1.htm) which says,
quote " Number of employees
The number of Intel employees can be found in our annual report."
if you click the annual report link, you go not to a pdf of the annual report but the investor relation page; in the clutter there is a large box that says 2009 annual report — but the box is static, you have to click the link under it.
That brings you to this weird video that seem designed to show that Intel is cool and hip
There is no link to a pdf of the annual report, which is a pretty standard thing on most corporate websites, instead you get links to selected parts of the annual report in online format.
However, if you perservere, and click several more times on the right links, none of which is entitled "annual report" you do get to a page that has the 2009 AR..but no links to prior years.
After a long wait for the Intel servers (must be Itanium on Windows ME) to get the document.
You find that If you search the document for the word "employee" you don't get any hits that have employee headcount.
So,given all of this, my question to the slashdot community is: among major corporations, does this win some sort of award for give people who visit our corporate site the run around ?
13071180
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
What is your opinion of the design and layout of the official whitehouse webpage, www.whitehouse.gov, and the special site , www.recovery.gov., which was setup to tell people where the money in the 1T (trillion) dollar stimulus bill is going ?
To me, both sites seem glitzy and technically cutting edge — the graphics are great eye candy and there is a lot of fancy video and so forth. But in terms of meeting user needs, the Whitehouse.gov site seems cluttered and dis organized, designed mainly to feed the 24/7 news cycle, by providing a constant update of tidbits that media and news organizations can use. But the site lacks overall focus and organization; in particular, there do not seem to be overview pages that help the ordinary citizen understand all of the stuff related to one issue — if you search "recovery act" you get 1300 odd hits (!) but there is no organization or prioritization of those hits.
I thint the recovery.gov site is a lot better organized; it provides a huge amount of information that you can view in GIS or tabular text format. The site also makes it clear that a lot of people have gotten money; at the micro level, you can search your city or zipcode; in my zipcode alone there are 3 awardees: 225K to some company developing software to analyze 911 calls; 60K to the city for some sort of police training program; and 3K to the city agency that helps poor people. And you can view this info on a map, showing the street grid and the location, or in a text table
At the macro level, the site provides good summary statistics of how many jobs (reported by fund reciepients) have been created or saved, and where those jobs are.
What is odd, is that with all this technology and information, the site isn't convincing — you can spend hours pouring over the data without really getting an overview that convinces you that all these billions of dollars are well spent.
11546400
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
I'm finishing my taxes (here in eastern MA we have an extension to May 11, due to unusually heavy rains that caused significant flooding), and once again, I'm amazed at how bad turbotax is — all the stuff people like to say about M$ is true about turbotax.
Setting aside all the on screen messages that are poorly phrased and cryptic, entering data is a slow and painful process. To enter data, Turbo tax has two main modes; one is the step by step inteview, where you answer one question/screen; the second mode is "forms" where you can enter data directly into whatever form you are interested.
To give an example of how bad turbotax is, consider what you have to do to enter cash contribuitons to a charity; it takes something like six screens; the forms method is, if any thing, even worse, since the forms are in a hierarchical manner, with the final entry generated from worksheets.
But maybe I'm the only one who feels this way.
10815140
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
Although the GOP has denounced the recently enacted health care reform bill, and not one republican member of congress voted for it, The miami herald reports today that one of the chief provisions of the bill, "individual mandates" (you have to buy health insurance, just like you have to buy car insurance) is a Republican idea.
I'm sure there is a lot of hypocrisy on both sides; what is your favorite example
8726168
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
Per this story http://www.gregpalast.com/, the response of the US to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti has been slow. For instance, Iceland — a nation of 300,000 people — managed to get a team of 37 search and rescue specialist , with all the gear they need to be self sufficient, on the ground in Haiti in *24 hours*.
The US ? From the article "AP reported that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama? "
For the open source enthusiast, there is an added twist: Wikipedia has an outstanding article on foreign response to the Haiti Earthquake, that can be used for fact checking.
8700420
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
As a MA voter, I wanted to go and see the President on his visit to our state tomorrow (Sunday, 17 Jan 2010); as many of you may know, there is a special election on Teusday to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Senator Kennedy. Surprisingly, the GOP candidate (Brown) seems to be, according to the polls, tied with the Democratic candidate, state AG Martha Coakley.
Thus, even though Coakley should be a shoe-in, she is in a tight race, and the POTUS is coming to MA to help her.
(Full Disclosure: as a Liberal, I wish to protest what I perceive as a right wing, pro wall street/anti main street bias in Obama's administration)
As of Saturday morning, no details of the visit are available. I can understand, why, for security reasons, they might keep details of Obama's travel under wraps. However, I was very surprised to find that there does not seem to be an online source that describes the Presidents past schedule. Eg, on such and such a day, he was here doing this, then here doing this, and so forth.
I can understand, for security reasons, why they might keep upcoming events under tight wraps, but why is there not a detailed daily diary/schedule available for the POTUS ?
7875954
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
As widely reported (here on ABC news http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/HealthCare/howard-dean-health-care-bill-bigger-bailout-insurance/story?id=9349392/) Howard Dean is urging Democrats to oppose health care reform, as the bill is a "bailout for the insurance industry".
What do you think ? In particular , are the supposed benefits — extension of insurance to 30 million people who are currently uninsured, and preventing insurance companies from denying coverage for pre exisiting conditions — actually going to make it into the real world, or will they die somewhere between passage of the bill and the implementation of the bill, which will take many years and regulations.
We can see that this has alread happened to one "reform": a ban on lifetime benefit caps (a benefit cap is a limit on how much an insurance company will pay; if you are unlucky enough to need very $$ treatments, you can go over the cap under many current plans). The current bills pretend to ban lifetime caps, but they actually ban caps that are "unreasonable". Over the years, who do you think is going to have more influence on the legal definition of "unreasonable" — the insurance industry of someone else ?
5106257
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
I use firefox as my main browser, both at work and at home, but am considering switching back to IE due to one particular problem with FF: it frequently hangs when opening pdfs. This might not be a problem if only the tab specific to the problem pdf (or problem server — I don't know what is actually going on) froze, but what often happens is that all the open tabs freeze, and I have to shut down the browser — a real pain, particularly if I haven't bookmarked the pages or saved other pdfs that were open.
Is this a serious problem for anyone else ?
3892623
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
I'm looking for software that can help my company manage information in documents that may be in pdf, doc or web form. I work for a biotech company with 15 people, and we have large numbers of documents that range from very technical scientific publications (usually pdf) to company reports like 10-Ks, to web pages to newspaper articles to pictures. We use these documents to review and stay current with the scientific literature; to learn about what competitors are doing, gain market information (who is selling how much of what), generate publicity for our products ,and so forth.
We currently use the windows file tree as our organizer, which creates several problems: I can't put one file into multiple bins; I can't use keywords to search; I can't organize files into groups.
What I would like (I think) to do is organize the information by keywords and subjects; associate groups of files into binders, and create summarys for the binders (eg, I might have 5 files that go together, and my own summary of what the five files mean); add sticky notes to anything at anytime (actuallly, I would like keywords and stickys [comments in adobe acrobat] to be the same: words in stickys are keywords, and keywords show up in the stick; add URLS and webpages directly from the browser; have a function that mimics or is compatible with a package like endnote or procite or papyrus or refcite (formats bibliographys in word docs)
I'm not even sure what the solution looks like, but it needs to be cheap (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez. This has a lot of features that scientists need, such as keyword search returns a list of articles that can be viewed by abstract.
1190061
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
Paul Krugman in yesterday's NYT:
OK, a correspondent directs me to John McCain's article, (http://www.contingencies.org/septoct08/mccain.pdf) Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. You might want to be seated before reading this.
Here's what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!
From: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/mccain-on-banking-and-health/
1144237
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
Dear Sir: I cannot be the only person using firefox who really dislikes the changes to the /. GUI in the last year; given the intelligence shown in the original code, I am surprised that you are making these changes.
I submit that any piece of software has a natural evolution, and after a certain point, you have most of the features that you need; if you keep tinkering, you just make the code baroque. /. has reached that point — the changes over the last year are, imo, a net loss to usability.
Every month, I find myself on /. less and less (don't say it,...a good thing)
Please — I love /. and think you are going in the wrong direction !!
Please — poll your readers on this !!
718341
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
Barack Obama (or people associated with him) have a website http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fightthesmearshome/ devoted to dispelling rumors. Aside from the depressing point that so many people are willing to spread such garbage, and that so many people pay attention, I was very impressed with the sophistication of the site — the content, layout, organization are superb. For instance, the site mixes text, photos and video, and does so in a context appropriate way.
405559
submission
cinnamon colbert writes:
much of the writing in the posts on /. violates one of the 1st principals of effective communication: go easy on words like "very" "interesting" and so forth.
Maybe the /coders could put in code which automatically strips out these words, which on wikipedia, are aptly named "weasel words". Which brings up another thought, howcome /. posts and replies don't auto link to relevant wiki articles ?
Finally, can the /. editors have a rule that a post has to go back to an original source if available ? Many times, I see science posts which are based on a news story which is based on a press releas which may or may not (uusally not) give a url for the underlying science, which is usually a report or paper in the peer reviewed literature. The post should have a url to this underlying report which is the basis for the long chain of secondary reports. If the post is based on a press release which is based on an UNpublished peace of work, this should be noted, as unpublished work has (at least to the scientist) a connotion of second rateness.
PS: the wording on the submission page about which section to use is unclear; please rephrase, thanks
