I actually like the ribbon, especially when working on tables, charts, and the like. My only complaint is that it takes up so much vertical screen real estate.
Should I worry about my privacy if I use this "free" service? I don't really want them to serve me targeted ads based on the contents of my Google Drive. I don't know whether they plan to do anything like this, but still. Giving Google access to my files (in addition to my email, social network, voice mail, contact list, calendar, and reading preferences . .) makes me uneasy.
I've read that google's main goal for these free products is to increase the amount of time people spend online and not to monetize every bit of information that they come across. The more time people spend online, the more people see adsense ads. That's why Chrome and Android aren't spying on people's browsing habits like they technically could be, for example.
And to profile everyone to optimize those ads. People watch plenty of ads on TV. Google is rich because they have very special data used to price the inventory effectively.
There are a lot of companies I do business with that have sold my name to advertisers. Paying a company money doesn't mean they aren't going to make money off of you some other way too.
The idea of Google indexing my harddrive and using this data to better profile me has scary privacy implications. I will pay these services (gmail, etc.) I can opt out of Google viewing my data.
There is a certain element of truth to what you are saying. When I was early in my training I was dissappointed in my choice of medicine as a career because I also thought it lacked an outlet for creativity. As a now experienced physician, there are still times when you get to a point in the care of some patients at which the next step is programmatic and rote (if A then B).
However, sometimes--probably most of the time--the patient's presentation is so unclear (e.g. "I just feel weird. . . ."), there are so many variables to juggle in your head at once (twenty different lab values, the way the liver feels, the imaging findings, the color of the patient's sclera, the smell of their breath, their mood) that things become far too complex for any flowchart. These are the times when you need creativity, "book smarts" and perhaps above all, "emotional intelligence" to be a good doctor. There are plenty of doctors lacking one or more of these elements, and they just aren't very good at the job.
That makes a lot of sense. The above criterion I mentioned does seem to fall apart since I do consider problem solving to be inherently creative even though oftentimes there is only one answer.
Good to hear from an actual physician though. Do you think that your initial disappointment is a unique response or do most med students go through it? I ask because everyone I know who is getting accepted to med school has wanted to be a doctor since high school. I assume that makes med students get tunnel-vision when deciding their career choices and have an idealized, incorrect view of the field. (I figure most future doctors just get over this pretty quickly by finding different, but equally important reasons to be in the field.)
I can't speak for everyone else, but for myself, "tunnel vision" explains it pretty well. At some point in high school, I just decided being a doctor was a totally awesome thing to do. I can't remember the real reasons why I chose medicine, but I know it was somewhat vague. I knew doctors were smart and I thought I was pretty smart. I am embarrassed to admit I also may have fantasized about driving a BMW from my big house with a pool straight to the OR, busting in with an "S" on my chest to save somebody's life.
In college, I was drawn to the humanities and to computer science more than to biology, but I stuck with it. I was a willing victim of the rather unhealthy obsession with "getting in" that most pre-meds develop. Medical school, at least at first, was a rude awakening. It was not intellectually challenging (other than by virtue of the sheer volume of material), it was rote, the hours sucked, the and the culture was unpleasant.
It was not until a couple of years into my residency that I started to really appreciate more of the nuances, and to enjoy practicing medicine. As it stands today, I love what I do. I help people in a tangible way, I make a good living, I am respected and valued by my community, and at as I described above, my creative and intellectual muscles get a daily workout. However, I don't do any busting into ORs and, sadly, I don't drive a BMW.
In my view, one of the reasons for runaway healthcare cost may the way that insurance coverage distances the patient / consumer from the true costs involved. (e.g. "My statin costs $5 a month because that's how much my co-pay is." No.)
Insurance is necessary and useful for catastrophic events like the OP's. By contrast, for routine, predictable health care expenditures, insurance spreads the cost among policyholders / taxpayers to the extent that there is no conception of the actual cost of care. It's like having insurance to put gas in your car, or to pay your utility bill. Every time the money changes hands, you can bet the insurance company takes it's share.
This model will allow (or even cause) drug companies and hospitals to keep costs high to protect reimbursements, all via back-room deals with huge insurance companies. Expensive, government-mandated (or provided) insurance coverage for routine health expenditures will get in between doctors and patients and will drain employers and taxpayers while the insurance companies get richer.
Microsoft Office. LibreOffice is pretty good as a standalone product, but when I used it regularly I had nagging document formatting problems when exchanging files with my work colleagues.
If you depend on a software that is available for Windows only, you're on the borderline whether you're actually using it by choice or not. Especially if the software is Office. At work I have to use Outlook for corporate communication so I run it Windows in a virtual machine. The tools I need for real work are Linux-only (and require native HW access), so this is the only sane choice. Of course, this means I have to have a license for Windows.
Now Visual Studio is a different beast. Comparative tools are definitely available on other OS'es, but many VS users have a preference.
While I'm as much a fan of productivity pr0n as the next guy, every time I look at an org.mode customization walkthrough or something similar I'm reminded of this classic blog post by Merlin Mann: http://www.43folders.com/2005/05/18/because-buying-new-runni...
I agree. This is also evidenced by the way they dribble out their leaks in the most politically damaging (for the US government, particularly) way possible, accompanied by press releases and interviews. If they are about freedom of information, why don't they release all of it, immediately, and free of editorial comment from Assange?
I've been saying for some time that if I were, say, Jimmy Wales or the Wikimedia Foundation I'd be criticising Wikileaks pretty hard for not, y'know, actually being a wiki.
