bornhuetter

I'm a happy FastMail user, but I think this kind of snark is unprofessional.

Americans consider hamburgers to be a type of sandwich. It can be confusing to people from other countries who don't consider meat in a bun (as opposed to meat between slices of bread) to be a a sandwich.

I'm an actuary as well! I would dispute GP that "as an actuary you have to program". The overwhelming majority of actuaries I know barely know how to use VBA. I quit chasing a career in Comp Sci at uni (I started programming at a very young age, and always wanted to be a software engineer) to switch to actuarial science, but now, even though I'm a Fellow, I've quit my job to go into entrepreneurship. I think that being an actuary places us very well to go into startups that take advantage of our analytic and risk management skill set. With the amount of data being collected, that means about 90% of startups.

In practice, forensic accounting is roughly as interesting as archaeology. It makes for some great headlines in the end, but there is an enormous amount of detail and bureaucracy you have to dig through to get there.

drivebyacct2 has been dead for a long time, but he frequently makes insightful and informative comments.

Ok great, that's good to hear. I know how to find my RPi's IP address (I bought one last week and itching to get stuck into it)

Half the point of the RPi is for it to be a cheap, accessible Linux box for learning, and was pretty appalled when I thought that that this tool completely locked out Linux users.

I was excited to try this out until I saw that it won't work on Linux, and won't work on Windows without installing Apple's Bonjour. What possessed them to do this?

Does anyone know if there is a way to use this on Linux or Windows without installing nagware on my main machine?

Really? You must have missed the explanation right there in the middle of the page, underneath the title and picture:

Introducing Kindle MatchBook

For thousands of qualifying books, your past, present, and future print-edition purchases will soon allow you to buy the Kindle edition for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free.

I'm not sure how they could have stated that any more clearly.

I think this is the first time I've laughed out loud when reading a HN comment. I have a suspicion that you're right.

I have not been a Windows developer for many years, so I admit I may be wrong about things from that perspective. As a Windows user, I still think that their products are pretty good at what they do and that a large proportion of the media and its customer base hate everything Microsoft does by default.

I really don't think Microsoft's main product offerings are that bad. The biggest issue with Metro and Windows Phone is a lack of developer support - and I think a significant part of that is caused by a lot of the best developers being either Apple or Google "fanboys". Office remains excellent, Windows 8 is excellent at what it intended for - office productivity, games, VS development etc.

But the media hates them, OEMs mostly don't seem to care very much about making good hardware for PCs, Windows tablets and windows phones. To me this is at least partly a symptom of their image problem.

EDIT: I say this as an open source advocate - I would love it if Linux based systems became more popular, but I recognize the quality of Microsoft's products in terms of what they are intended for.

Your definition and use of the term are correct.

Good news, this really had to happen. One of Microsoft's biggest problems is one of PR - too many people, particularly in the media have just hated Microsoft for years, and Ballmer is not charismatic enough to ever recover from that position. They need new blood, and to shake off the "old Microsoft" image if they want to win hearts and minds again.

I don't think Nate Silver is an actuary, he's a statistician - completely different jobs.

When I went to university (late 90's), the web was still one big geo-cities, there was no such thing as smartphones. I lived in Australia, and unless you were extremely talented you would probably end up working a fairly low paid job doing fairly boring work. The world seems to be a far more exciting and potentially lucrative place for software engineers now.