robot_dave: January 2011 Archives
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If I was Taoiseach… what I would do to save Ireland | David McWilliams
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The big lie you have been told is that if we preside over a default on Irish bank debt the financial markets will punish us by taking money out of the country.
This is wrong. The opposite will happen. Money will flow into the country as the markets will conclude that the Irish bank crisis is over and it’s time to invest in a country with huge growth potential.
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Printing is always a troublesome part of the personal computing experience, but this seems to work. You may also need to print directly to the printer instead of spooling, which can lead to the last page not being printed completely.
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Printing from a Windows XP PC to a printer attached to an Airport Extreme Base Station or Airport Express
The following process is used in printing from an XP PC to a printer which is connected to the USB port of the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) or Airport Express (AX).
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The first time you do anything it's going to suck. That just the nature of learning new things: you will make bad new things for a bit until you learn the subtle lessons of the nature of the new thing. You can't be perfect when starting from zero, but you can learn a lot from the initial try and that is an essential step towards learning something new. The key lesson is to not be afraid of failure: embrace it and make it part of your production process. Don't even attempt to deliver V1.0: make every external deliverable v2.0, and set out to fail on the first attempt in a way that teaches you how to not fail for the next.
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No matter how good a cook you are, and no matter how hard you try, the first pancake of the batch always sucks.
It comes out burnt or undercooked or weirdly shaped or just oddly inedible and aesthetically displeasing. Just ask your kids.
At least compared to your normal pancake–and definitely compared to the far superior second and subsequent pancakes that make the cut and get promoted to the pile destined for the breakfast table–the first one’s always a disaster.
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Apple - App Store - Buy, download, and install apps made for Mac.
Steam did this right first - let you buy and update apps from a single central source - and now Apple has opened up an OSX App Store.
- With the Mac App Store, getting the apps you want on your Mac has never been easier. No more boxes, no more disks, no more time-consuming installation. Click once to download and install any app on your Mac. The Mac App Store is now available as a software update for any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
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Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds - CNN.com
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An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.
"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."
Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. "Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession," BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work.
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Swiss bank vaults filling up … with our deposits | David McWilliams
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Last night, over a jar, the bankers told me that the flows of cash from Germany have been huge because the average well-to-do German is taking his savings out of the euro and putting them on deposit here in Switzerland. The fact that the Swiss banks normally offer no interest on deposits and still get huge inflows is indicative of the fragility at the heart of the euro.
They also explained that lots of money is coming from Ireland. These guys, who I worked with years ago, have never really seen any business from Ireland and certainly during the boom they looked on with a sense of trepidation because they had seen this before.
Now they are getting calls from Dublin on a daily basis.
They have concluded that this is because the banks and the Government can’t be trusted. These investment bankers — serious financial people — agree that the Irish taxpayer has no business bailing out the banks. At the table last night were two bondholders, men who invested in the Irish banks in the good times. They are now embarrassed because they were taken in by the Irish and European spin.
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- British road signs use specially designed lettering, and much of it is quite distinctive. Nathaniel Porter and John Prentice have now reproduced the various types of lettering from official documents, and turned them into TrueType fonts that you can download here for free.
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