09:49 – Barbara continues to do very well. She has physical therapy every day this week, and is up and walking around frequently.
We finished watching Jericho last night. Well, I watched it while Barbara kind of paid attention to it while she worked her crossword puzzles. On second viewing, I’m even more impressed with it than I was the first time. The best prepping series I’ve ever seen. Yeah, they get some trivial stuff wrong. For example, during a severe winter and a fuel shortage, people continue to live individually or in small groups in their own homes rather than consolidating several families per home to conserve scarce fuel. And, since the Event occurred at harvest time in rural Kansas, there really shouldn’t have been any shortage of food. A large surplus, more like. IIRC, every Kansas farm feeds on average something like 250 people. There should have been grains, beans, and other crops in abundance, and a surplus of meat and dairy products. And Jericho must have had a gigantic warehouse filled with batteries and candles, because three months after they’re isolated, Jericho residents are still using those profligately, with no apparent shortage. Routinely lighting rooms in homes with literally dozens of candles or several battery lanterns, and so on.
But despite those minor quibbles, the writers get it right. They have good leaders and bad leaders. Competent people and incompetent ones. Hotheads and conciliators. Even the good people sometimes behave badly, and most of the bad ones are bad only because they’re forced to be by circumstances. And, beyond the local authorities, government is not their friend. They’re even lucky enough to have a resident wizard.
I liked that series, too, and was bummed when they cancelled it; also liked the “Revolution” series.
We really have zero idea on how things will shake out here; it’s never been done before on this scale. I really hope it never gets that bad but our lords temporal seem to be working very hard to exacerbate the current problems and crises.
Another gorgeous day of sun and blue skies and lo and behold, we’re back in the double digits at 11 degrees, still with no wind, so it doesn’t seem too bad out there.
I know most of you don’t care, but Windows 10 will be free to users of Windows 8.1, 8.0 and 7 as long as you update in the first year of W10’s release. I think MS wants to desperately get people off W7 and the disaster of W8(.1).
What is nice is that there is an integrated interface between desktops, tablets and phones. The demo looked fairly nice and using OneDrive synchronization between devices is nice.
MS also showed off HoloLens which projects 3D images into the real world.
I wonder if these Moonshine Cherries would do for emergency pain relief?
http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2015/01/theyre-like-crack-in-jar.html
Canada should send this cat to the US. Obolacare should pay for it.
A sickly stray cat that was taken in by a family in Canada is set to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
Ten more ways I need to check my privilege!
That was sorta funny; it’d be funnier if the shit wasn’t rigidly enforced on college campuses and in corporate conference rooms. Wow, that’s a lotta c-words right there! There I go again, being hyper-offensive to wimmenz!
I plead guilty to the manspreading thang; hey, I gotta spread my legs out or they get fuckin’ numb! I’m 6’5″ fuh petesakes!
Also, sorry about the huge bag I tote around; I need it for the AR-10 and half a dozen hi-cap mags.
Check this privilege right here, hon!
Dunno – if they get Win-10 right, I might change over a whole raft of computers. Have to think about it, but Win-7 EOL is 2020, which isn’t all that far away. I got stuck with a couple of XP installations after EOL, which was not a good feeling…
The huge question will be: will Win-10 have an interface that Win-7 users find familiar. I don’t use Windows often enough to invest much time in learning a new interface – which is why I have never looked at Win-8.
The two things still missing from the Linux world are (a) decent office software and (b) gaming. Now that Steam is on Linux, (b) is being solved very quickly. We are only left with (a), and I imagine some company will see the opportunity eventually. Bring out a polished commercial product based on LibreOffice – why not?
A lotta bad reports from peeps using/testing Win10 so fah and many simply going back to 8, mainly 8.1. I reversed my “upgrade” to 8.1 and have stayed on basic 8; it seems to work differently on different hardware, big surprise.
One would think that developers would have gotten the office suite right by now in Linux; they’ve had many years to do it. I have no sympathy for them; I use LibreOffice myself but I’m not running an office or a business (yet). Games would be good, I guess, but I haven’t been impressed by the Steam offerings so far.
if they get Win-10 right
One of the reasons I went with iPhone and iPad is that the two devices work the same and work together. Documents and data I change on my iPad are reflected quickly on the iPad (or the other way around). I wanted that type of interaction. I chose not to get a Mac because a lot of stuff does not transfer automatically.
With W10 being the same on phones, tablets and the desktop I may be changing my mind. I saw the demo of the Surface Pro running W10. Merely detaching the keyboard put the OS into tablet mode and when the keyboard was reattached back into desktop mode. Nice feature.
A lotta bad reports from peeps using/testing Win10 so fah
What has been released thus far is far from a finished product. Watching MS’s announcement there were even comments from the demonstrators that some things are still a little rough. The version the demonstrators were using was markedly advanced beyond what has been in the pre-release.
I do know that MS needs to get this version right otherwise MS will be in trouble. The fact that MS is offering free upgrades indicates that MS wants to get as many copies as possible on as many machines as possible. MS wants W7 and W8 to die.
Will I upgrade. Probably because the cost is right. I would not have paid for an upgrade because what I have works and I cannot see shelling out $100+ per machine to get a new OS that works differently. Free is a price point that I can consider it worth the effort.
Remember, Microsoft has a long history of glowing promises and failed delivery. Windows 10 could be Microsoft’s swan song. The user and developer communities are rightfully skeptical. Personal I see the direction going too far to the gaming platform side (holo glasses, Xbox same as a PC just to highlight two) because that is where the money is for them today.
“These are Windows 10’s new desktop features”
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7865973/microsoft-windows-10-new-desktop-features
“A Start Menu? Where’d they get that silly idea?”
Windows 10 could be Microsoft’s swan song.
Indeed it could. I liked what I saw in the demo yesterday. I realize these are highly tuned demonstrations doing what they know works. If W10 does not do well MS will be in trouble in the OS camp. If that happens I am not sure what I will do.
A Start Menu? Where’d they get that silly idea
From Windows 7. Silly you.
Windows 10 would have to spew gold and silver coins from the DVD tray and give me spectacular orgasms before I’d upgrade to it here.
Sticking, reluctantly, with Windows 8 desktop and wife’s Windows 7 laptop, period.
Now I have a recruiter from Boston eagerly setting me up for a phone interview on Monday for an outfit 30 miles south, all interstate, about a half-hour, that does SAAS for medicos. They run Linux, Apache, Tomcat, Chef, AWS, and are big on cloud stuff. I told them I only know a minor percentage of that stuff but they still wanna talk to me; I will talk and endeavor to persuade them that I’m not a good fit. Just doing due diligence here for the benefit of others…
LibreOffice is good enough for business use, at least the word processor and spreadsheet parts. (I haven’t used the other parts enough to have a meaningful opinion.) What it isn’t is 100% compatible with MS Office, either files or look and feel. And Microsoft works very hard to limit file compatibility.
LO’s spreadsheet doesn’t have all of Excel’s powerful features, which I’ll admit can be useful if you know what you’re doing, but 99%+ of users don’t use them. Hell, almost all of the spreadsheets that I’ve seen at work are not used as spreadsheets but as tabular display of textual data, usually with lots of column and row highlighting that obscures whatever point the “author” was trying to make.
Several governments, mostly in Europe but some in the US and elsewhere, have mandated OO or LO for internal use. The only reasons I’ve heard for any of them abandoning that effort are their requirement for MS Office document compatibility. As I said, MS works very hard to maintain that status quo.
When I worked at a crappy sys admin job for the state until 13 years ago, they had me there as a DBA, supposedly to run database stuff on M$ Access that should have been run via Oracle or M$ SQL Server, due to its size and frequency of updates. But they wouldn’t listen to me, about that or much else during my sentence there. Then these same fugly menopausal pigs would demand that I convert the Access crap to their fucking Excel spreadsheets, which is the only piece of sw besides Word that they knew how to use. They loved their pivot tables and other gimcracks and geegaws, man did I hate that place. I finally just walked out with zero notice before I killed somebody.
LibreOffice is good enough for business use, at least the word processor and spreadsheet parts.
The problem that I have run into with open source spreadsheets and Google apps spreadsheet, is the level of support for multiple sheet spreadsheets. If I go dump a 20 sheet spreadsheet into just about any other spreadsheet, I will usually see some sort of corruption outside the primary sheet.
Adding multiple sheets was the true spreadsheet innovation for MS Excel (other than being a Windows app instead of a DOS app). There are 100s of other specialized features but the multiple sheet widget is the best by far. Just about everyone uses it the minute they want some separation of data.
I actually helped Paul DiLascia of Microsoft write an open source Folder Tab Control in C++ quite a few year ago using the multiple sheet control in Excel as a guide. He wrote the basic version of it and I added a few features to it:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5145/Folder-Tab-Control-for-Windows-MFC-like-MS-Excel
I was just saddened to see that he passed away back in 2008. His monthly column in MSDN magazine was just about the only usable article for me in that rag.
I liked that series, too, and was bummed when they cancelled it; also liked the “Revolution” series.
Just saw Billy Burke (Miles Matheson) from “Revolution” in the season ender for “Major Crimes”. He played a truly scummy serial killer of young boys. His role there started in the predecessor of “Major Crimes”, “The Closer”.
which is the only piece of sw besides Word that they knew how to use
Had one manager that insisted she was an expert in using MSWord, a genius in her own opinion. If I ever needed assistance in MSWord I was to ask her. Then I saw one of her documents. She used a hard return at the end of every line, inserted her own page breaks, and had headings on the top of each page. She was using MSWord as a glorified typewriter with spell check. I sent one of her documents back to her after I changed the margins by a couple tenths of an inch. Screwed everything up. I swore that I made no changes and she confirmed it as there was no changes in any of the text. I hope she enjoyed fixing it.
Screwed everything up. I swore that I made no changes and she confirmed it as there was no changes in any of the text. I hope she enjoyed fixing it.
Did she make you go cut her a switch from a tree?
Did she make you go cut her a switch from a tree?
No. She never did figure out why her document was borked. Eventually blamed it on the email client messing with the formatting.
Nice one, Mr. Ray.
Sung to the tune of “Mr. Grinch.”
“He’s a mean one, Mr. Ray….”
All the PHB manglers and their associates and clones have been in love with Excel spreadsheets since M$ foisted them on us all. To a lesser degree, Word, only lesser because so many of them were in love with WordPerfect, especially the lawyers, who refused to give it up or change over. I saw it still for sale the other day the local Staples store, which is closing this week.
But Gawd forbid any of them would consider, en masse, moving for lower cost to the open source alternatives. So mote it be.