Posts by Doctor Syntax 42692 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Surely the US has a variety of regional dialects. Were these tested and if not, why not? If they weren't it sounds as if the "experiment" was designed to show racial bias rather than investigate the response to samples that diverge from the mean of the training material. I wonder what the effect would be if promoted with standard British English and regional UK dialects.
Choose variables you want to score. Choose your scoring system. Choose you weightings. Add them up to produce a meaningless figure. Repeat for multiple instances of whatever you're looking at. Pretend you're objective. Democratic evaluation of countries, dogs at a dog show, it makes no difference.
It's an interesting proposition. Have they not realised they're going to be upsetting a lot of voters? As a bipartisan bill I suppose they can all support it. If one side votes against it I wonder how long it will take for the rest to deny they ever supported it.
When all the jibes about "Chinese foot-soldiers" are done the realisation that these are voters is going to dawn and there'd be a big head of steam built up over six months.
"the probability of debris hitting Germany is considered to be very low."
The probability of it hitting any particular place is very low. That doesn't make any difference to the fact that the probability of it hitting somewhere is one.
What's the equivalent in Boeing 737 door plugs which must surely be the Register unit of falling objects?
How did they check? When Whitby Abbey did their vampire stunt a year or two back they had one invigilator (and one really was far from enough to stop it sliding into chaos) checking outfits and counting. Maybe they counted all the receipts and boxes but how do they know they were all his?
Ultimately it should be recognised that the regulators are working to save boeing from itself as much as they are saving the public from Boeing. If trust is lost in the company then airlines find it more difficult to sell journeys on its products and then Boeing finds itself unable to sell planes to airlines. That's a slow process and probably beyond the horizon of its directors.
"Surprisingly, I didn't get the job"
Of course you didn't get the job. You missed the correct answer. Tell the director to reboot his PC on the basis that it might fix the problem anyway but if it didn't you might have time to fix the first user's problem or for you phone's battery to suddenly go flat.
"printers don't live forever."
There's reason to think that older HP lasers do live forever. What's more they don't check for who made or refiled the cartridge. They built HP's reputation for making printers which they've been trading on ever since. That reputation has been circling the drain for some time and now seems to be getting pretty close to going down it.
"But I have no emotional attachment to my printer."
It's not so much the printer that received the emotional attachment as the cash and the sense that customers are being ripped off.
Corporate reality distortion fields work by reluctance to pass on bad news and dress up what does get passed as not really all that bad. In the long run this leaves top management taken by surprise when things go wrong and unable to react. How many boards, I wonder, try to ensure that they get told what they need to know as opposed to what they want to know or what middle management thinks they want to know?
The appropriate response from Microsoft's board ought to be a good kicking for legal and a few firings of whoever quashed the message. I doubt it will happen.
Don't forget what seems to be the intended insult of "legacy", quite ignoring the fact that those legacy applications are usually the ones that are being used in the actual working part of the business that brings in the money to keep the roof over the heads of the dev teams.
"I have an irrational dislike of Apple, not because the technology is bad, I just dislike their business model so I stay away from it"
So you'll appreciate our point when some of us say we also dislike Microsoft's business model.
Does it apply to EU citizens or anyone in the EU? GDPR applies to the latter.
What Apple seems to have lost sight of is that they're going to end up pissing off some of their EU customers. It's not unknown for individuals in the EU to take on US companies who try to play fast and loose with EU rules. Paging Max Schrems?
"The major benefit is that it comes on the device"
On the device? That's a hand-held gaming console. Somebody looking for a laptop or desktop won't see that as a benefit.
Yes, I know it can be downloaded and installed like any other distro but to those whith no interest in gaming its add-ons are going to be regarded as bloat.
Mint or Zorin are probably the best options for Windows refugees at present. I've said before, there really should be an opening for a distro designed to install on a Windows PC by shuffling things around to make space and then use some combination of Wine, virtualisation and or mounting the user's directory on the C: drive as the home directory to use the user's old files and such applications as can't be easily replaced with FOSS alternatives.
How representative are the most popular websites of overall website usage? If the OP is saying that any website counter is not a counter of installed base that's fair enough. A measure of installed base would need to include stuff that doesn't go near any web sites.
OTOH we have a measure that's being taken as some sort of proxy for installed base and if that makes what appears to be a significant change month-on-month it needs more than a claim of unquantifiable bias to impugn that result. It may, of course, be that the overall numbers are that statcounter has are so small that their increase isn't statistically significant. Otherwise you'd need to understand the nature of the bias sufficiently well to show that a change there is what's underlying the apparent change in the overall share.
