While browsing around with Firefox in Kubuntu I was presented the following offer:
How stupid is that? And why would I even want it? At the moment I’m rather happy with my system, I use Vista on the same machine rather rarely because it is just so slow while Linux is pretty fast and everything I need in everyday use is working. That includes wireless, USB, printing over LAN to a printer attached to XP machine and accessing XP fileshare. Figuring out the last one in Kubuntu didn’t take much time, while in Vista, well after couple of searches I felt I have better things to do with my time. Sure I might eventually take the time to tweak Vista to be faster, but I doubt it’ll be any time soon. I like that I don’t have to bother with typical Windows updates that interrupt usually at the most inconvenient time possible. Sure I update both OS-es but Kubuntu’s updates never disturb me, I’m just notified that there are updates available. The only bugger at the moment would be temperature that is higher in Linux compared to Windows.
Why does Google do this?
I have recently had some searches that give results not expected or wanted. Apparently at least on some occasions Google considers character with and without accent to be equal. In my experience it can be rather annoying. Unfortunately I can’t remember any of my original searches so I made one up. Let’s say you’re searching for “siil naha” (without quotes in search) then you also get results containing “näha” even though it is completely wrong because the meaning of those words are very different. I can understand that with “Émile” and “Emile” it helps but not with every word that has an accented character.
Edit: while I was typing it in I also realised what would be the solution. You can use “siil naha -näha”. Of course without quotes if you’re not searching that specific phrase (and why would you search for such meaningless phrase). Now that I think about it, it would be nice if Google displayed some kind of notice when it uses accent-insensitive search and a clue how to change it to accent-sensitive one. Perhaps some checkbox in advanced options?
Edit 2: after some more careful looking, results containing “näha” also contain “naha” either in text or in links to result page. However emphasizing both words in search results can be confusing. It certainly was for me.
Don’t advertise if your server can’t handle load
It only takes a short story in the news that you can play “Who wants to be an millionaire” online and their server gets slow as a snail. It’s been 10 minutes and I haven’t been able to register even. It was certainly better last week :). I probably have to go and watch TV then.
My filesystem ate a folder
That’s how it looks like. I’m absolutely sure where I saved it and with what name. However the folder with couple of other files is gone overnight and find/ | grep “industrial” returns nothing. Nevertheless Writer saved it successfully giving no error message. I can’t really imagine what happened to it. But since computer-related posts often are in the top at tr.ee, perhaps someone smarter knows the answer. For now I have to get used to the idea of writing my essay once again which is annoying.