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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Did you notice how the quality of the results returned by google degraded over the years? When it started they had to take out of the market the competition and they strived to return the best possible results. When they became an oligopoly with their alter ego bing they begun to restrict the navigation to the sites in their friendly network.

    The other big sites played the same game sharing links mostly with the other big known sites, the media took part in the game by attracting the attention on those big known sites. A combination of restricted horizon, but with overload of information to reduce the users need to look outside that horizon. This is the result you see today.


  • It depends on if you are a heavy mouse user or a heavy keyboard user and you are using a laptop with a restricted keyboard. Personally to scroll a document I prefer the buttons page up/down home/end. Often I also use those buttons to select big parts of a file that I want to copy. E. g. Shift+Ctrl+End form me is a useful combination. On the other hand I rarely use the numeric pad for numbers, but I also feel more comfortable typing with the left hand, I guess that a lot more people heavy keyboard user would prefer the numeric pad.

    Yes the mouse is changing the habits for a lot of people, but the numlock may still be useful for some.





  • Like all the big corporations IBM has bought a lot of small competitors in the past. Red Hat was the only name widely known to the public because IBM targets are software tools for business or the backend of the enterprise infrastructure.

    Here there is a list of all their acquisitions.

    Meanwhile from the beginning of the years 2000s they decided they wanted to become a consultancy company and rely more on external developers (especially from Indian companies). Internal developers slowly became demoralised in the middle of repeated rounds of redundancies, the quality of their services declined and they lost a lot of clients.

    You may see IBM as an innovative company, a little bit for their past reputation and a little bit for the recent advanced projects they announced. But although they have some very advanced research centers the bulk of their work is the one they carry out on the client sites. That part of their work is lagging behind. At the end of the '90s you could find many big companies around the world that handed over to IBM almost all their IT systems. Now it does not happen any more. They are one of the many providers.