idealism

A few days ago, IBM announced a new OCR system[1]. Have you by chance compared it to Microsoft's offering? I'm currently looking for the best-in-class OCR solution for scanned PDF documents.

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/exploring-ibms-new-optical-ch...

Though it may not matter much, "WASZP" is also the naming of a popular foiling dinghy sailboat.

Tim Cook, in a creepy speech[1], had the audacity to cite the following as his moral dictum for us all, and the reason why he must censor you and me: "Do not be indifferent to the bloodshed of your fellow man."

He says this while frequently hobnobbing with the likes of MBS at his HQ and overseas.[2]

I guess that whole "being indifferent to bloodshed" rule doesn't apply to censorious industrialist oligarchs like himself and his friends. Sure seems quite indifferent to bloodshed to me. As expected.

The public couldn't ever cancel Tim Cook, though; that would be blasphemy! Ask MBS what he thinks should happen to blasphemers.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvPBZCitHsA [2]: https://i.insider.com/5c63d7f62628984cf0097cd4?width=700

A media corporation that doesn’t want the bad PR around firing their most recognized employee (and co-founder in this case) need only make the life so difficult for that person that they quit in protest. The ol’ “cold shoulder” routine.

Some people would say “Yep! No foul play! He left totally of his own volition!” while others, not playing this corrupt PR game, will see it as the same thing as firing.

I understand what you're saying and agree, although I may suggest that 1700 number come down a bit to maybe 1200. I'm around the 1000-1200 range (just picked it up again recently) and I'd say most of my peers on Chess.com around that range have definitely studied openings and present sneaky traps consistently in the first ~5-15 moves.

Playing as black for me is the real driving force for me to study openings because my black game suffers the most from actual Theory openings around 1200. It's not crucial to winning to study the openings because you can often get by with just basic positional play and simple deduction, but a cursory understanding of the most popular openings is a big bang-for-your-buck way to improve in the low 1k range, IMHO.

I'm 33 now. When I was in 7th grade, the same friend who taught me how to build PCs (also my age) one day brought over a burned CD of Mandrake Linux. Back then Mandrake was a major distro like SUSE, Red Hat, etc. IIRC, it was the heyday of Windows XP. I can't remember whether I did dual-booting or just wiped my whole drive with Mandrake but after I installed it there was little going back to Windows... at least not until I got into PC gaming for a brief stint in my early high school years. Damn EverQuest and Morrowind.

I had already taught myself basic programming with VB6 at the time, so learning more and more about PC power-user stuff was very exciting to me. I remember KDE back then was a treasure trove of great software that just came for free, making Windows XP actually feel inferior. At some point around that time I watched Revolution OS, the Linux documentary. I think I heard about it on ThinkGeek. I must have watched that documentary at least five times then. I was hooked on open-source software and I finally felt like I had some direction in my life: I wanted to help out with the open-source thing any way I could. Suffice it to say, when I started my high school "webmastering" and Computer Science classes, I was closer to the teachers in knowledge than my peers.

I've been a full time Mac user since '06 for desktop use, however recently I've gone back to giving Arch Linux a decent try for my main desktop environment. Gotta say, Linux on the Desktop, particularly with KDE Plasma, is finally what I had hoped it would become. There was a stretch of time in the last 20+ years I've used Linux that every time I tried using Linux seriously there were some major software disadvantages that kept me returning to Mac such as ridiculous issues with Broadcom or Nvidia drivers, no modern-feeling text editor, generally clunky UX, etc. These days pretty much all the software I use is cross-platform, making it very easy make the transition stick.

I think the Linux for the desktop has a very bright future. Remember folks, authoring cross-platform apps that support Linux is very important!