Sadly starting a fire or tripping a breaker won't work very well for anyone in IT, they'd just be stuck at work over the weekend making sure everything was working (or in the case of a fire, building new servers with no time to sleep or rest).
I wouldn't know, I've visited Hulu a grand total of four times, every time I was told that I was not allowed to use the site since I'm not in the US.
There is a similar problem with video downloads from the iTunes store, us europeans get "iTunes university" video downloads, that's it.
Basically my choices when it comes to online video content are somewhat limited, there are individual TV channel websites (although a lot of times they seem to deliberately without their "best" content from the web) and Voddler for streaming, for downloading I have to go with torrents. And then the MPAA and their european counterparts complain about piracy...
No, I'm not "making a problem from nothing just to show off that [I've] got an iPhone", it is my honest opinion that when it comes to user interfaces cellphones have always had a lot of issues and I'm not claiming that the iPhone is problem-free, just that it actually had a much better user interface than the vast majority of other cellphones (at least from the point of view of someone who doesn't think being able to quickly SSH to his cellphone so he can setup sendmail to act as a relay or quickly deploy Tomcat to test the latest release of a webapp is more important than the phone being quick and easy to use for basic phone features, those are neat features but if I really need a web or mail server I'll just create a new VM or if it needs to be a physical device and small I'll buy a BeagleBoard).
There are plenty of touchscreen phones with user interfaces that work the same way, the only difference is that instead of hitting a "menu" button you tap a menu button on-screen.
As someone who is in his 20s and cares a great deal about how the user interfaces of the software I use work I can safely say that this is not a matter of the parent poster being too old, most cellphones have atrocious user interfaces. In fact, AFAIK the main reason the iPhone managed to become popular was because the user interface wasn't a complete mess.
A great example of this is a smartphone I owned before buying my current iPhone, in order to open the web browser and to type in a URL you had to perform the following steps:
Unlock phone
Hit a "menu" key.
Use arrow keys to go to the "Internet" folder.
Hit "Enter" key.
Use arrow keys to go to the browser.
Hit "Enter" key.
Wait for 3-10s (depending on how long the phone had gone without a restart).
Hit the "Enter" key to allow the browser to use the already-active 3G connection.
Wait another couple of seconds.
Hit the "menu" key.
Use arrow keys to go to the "Go to page" menu item.
Hit "Enter" key again.
Use arrow keys to go down to the "Other..." item.
Hit "Enter" key again.
Use the horrible phone keypad to type in the URL (a = 1, b = 11, c = 111, d = 2, e = 22 and so on).
Hit "Enter" key.
The same action on my current iPhone:
Unlock phone.
Tap "Safari" icon.
Wait a couple of seconds.
Tap address bar.
Type in URL using on-screen qwerty keyboard.
Tap "OK" button.
Basically, cellphone UIs seem to be designed by the kind of people who have no knowledge on how to create a good, usable UI and until the iPhone showed up the only user friendly alternative when it came to cellphone UIs was to stick to a phone that was as simple as possible.
Oh, it's not just drug companies. My father owns a business installing heating systems and just the "sales" he gets through ordering replacement parts is enough to have the manufacturers shower him with stuff, when you add new sales it just becomes ridiculous. They even send catalogs of stuff he is able to choose between and even though he gives most of it away to the employees of the company he's still managed to snag a pretty good TV, a home theater soundsystem, a stereo for his workshop and an air conditioner for himself. Apparently from the manufacturers' point of view this is a great way to encourage brand loyalty with companies that sell and service their products ("keep selling our products and we'll give you lots of free stuff!").
I believe the issue people are having with your posts is your reasoning which seems to run along the lines of "Bad stuff happens therefore bad stuff is meant to happen and trying to do anything about it is clearly even worse".
Has never worked very well for me (see previous reply to one of the other comments on this subject). Also, I didn't mention this at all (neither did the parent poster), I pointed out that for re-using notes later it is a lot easier to use something besides paper pencil, this is especially true once you get a real job and your notes aren't just "need to remember this to pass this course" but may instead be stuff that you just need to re-use later (for example settings for the new version of an app that you're supposed to deploy on a bunch of servers which one of the devs mentioned at a meeting and which they forgot to put in the docs, or maybe just meeting notes that you need to redistribute to a few other people).
The kind of user that buys a Mac probably doesn't care about "details".
I'm probably going to be accused of being an Apple fanboy here but the same argument can be used for people who buy computers with Windows preinstalled because most computer users really don't care about such "details" but there are definitely Mac users who do know the difference between a virus and a trojan (I've actually tried my hand at constructing both types of programs, a small harmless asm virus back in the DOS days and a C#.NET trojan that just annoyed the user and always tried to spawn a new process every time the user attempted to kill it a few years back, never deployed either (short of sending it to a friend of mine just to be an ass)).
Copying my notes later never seemed to work for me, possibly because I tend to just kind of "zone out" and copy them letter for letter without any thought to the content, I just want to get it done so I can continue with my work (which requires the new copy of the notes).
And is closely related to people who type holding their hands the wrong way (it's also much more closely linked to mouse use and once again the core issue isn't if you use a mouse but rather how).
The problem is that in general laws don't get removed once they're in place. This means that if these guys get a whole bunch of insane laws on the books before they die off the laws will almost certainly hang around for decades to come.
You didn't, I did quite often. Also, at work it's a necessity of life.
As for "reuse" that could be considered plagiarism, since most of my notes are direct quotes from the professor. It's often better to just rewrite.
Sounds like you could've just brought a camcorder if that's how you took notes...
I type pretty fast as well but not as fast as scribbling cursive across a page.
Three questions. One, can you read your scribblings later? Two, why do I get this strange feeling you don't really type all that fast if you can write cursive faster than you can type? Three, how can you consider typing more stressful for your hands than writing with a pen? with a pen you have to "draw" each character, when you type you just hit the right key...
The advantage isn't with the original note-taking moment, it's later when you want to organize your notes or re-use something you wrote down. If you wrote it down on paper you can either write it down again or you can scan it and use OCR software on it (most likely having to correct the output anyway). All of a sudden the computer is faster...
Also, for text-only notes I type a lot faster than I write with a pencil and paper, taking notes using pencil and paper is for me mainly something I do when I need to make quick sketches and graphs, if I'm writing something I'll do it on a computer.
That's actually close to my experience. I used to have a fairly high-end laptop and loved being able to bring it everywhere but when it was time for my last major upgrade I went with a high-end iMac instead, and I also have a small netbook which is great for those times when I need to bring a computer somewhere and I suspect I could make do with an iPad (despite its limitations) instead of the netbook for the times when I need portability.
The desktop fills one niche and the laptop/tablet another and my experience is that even among my friends who are far from geeky but spend a lot of time with their computers is that they tend to gravitate toward owning desktops or at least having a a real keyboard + mouse and a large monitor or use their 42-50" TV as an extra monitor.
It used to be that laptops were extremely expensive compared to the performance they had, these days they've finally gotten to the point where those who really don't need high-end performance, large monitors or such things settle for just a laptop or people who already have a good desktop also buy a laptop ("good" isn't just a matter of raw performance, a desktop that's three years old but has some extra RAM and a good monitor is still perfectly usable even for stuff like graphics work (three years old means it probably has a C2D CPU in the 2+ GHz range and can take at least 4 GiB of RAM btw)).
He should at least make sure the form works with both A4 and Letter size papers, otherwise the company will be in for quite a shock when they decide to expand their business outside the US and find that the most common reaction to mentions of letter size paper is "Letter size? Is that what you call A4?".
No, it's a perfectly sane reaction. Another red flag tends to be the word "against" in the group name, "foo against bar and baf" is a standard "think of the children" group name...
Here's the thing, the vast majority of people in the world can't write their names properly using just 7 bit ASCII. Back in the "good old days" those of us who were still using alphabets somewhat similar to the one used for 7 bit ASCII would use tricks different 8 bit codepages but there's no need for that anymore, we have unicode and with UTF-8 a lot of these problems are solved, if only developers would actually get around to using it.
I'm lucky in the sense that I can write my name with just the regular 26 characters that americans use in their alphabet but unfortunately the order of my names is a bit different from the regular "First M Last" order that americans assume is standard (mine is "House First Middle Last" and traditionally the house name would've been more significant than the middle name).
In particular, systems don't necessarily have to shoehorn insane data into their processing.
It's not just "insane" data, for us non-americans it's common to run across the following problems way too often:
"ASCII only please" - Because 7 bits is plenty.
"First name, middle name initial and surname please" - Because everyone is named John Q Smith, god forbid someone's name not fitting into that mold.
"I'm sorry, I couldn't find your name in my long list of acceptable names" - Because clearly if a name is not in your predefined list of names, it doesn't exist.
"I'm sorry, your name contains/is a dirty word" - Because keeping your staff from seeing dirty words is more important than letting your customers input their names properly...
Well, downsides to drying clothes on a line for me are: Not really feasible for about 2/3 of the year due to freezing temperatures, it rains a bit too often here in the summer (go to bed with moist clothes on line, wake up with wet clothes on line, not exactly an improvement) and I live in the 5th floor which means if something falls off the line it's gone...
Of course, I don't have a dryer of my own, or a washing machine, I use the ones that are available to everyone in the building.
Actually, from what little I've seen it seems that some pornographers have taken to using "fisheye" lenses for their porn, and making sure to keep things that are supposed to seem big in the right spot (to take advantage of the distortion caused by fisheye lenses).
Speaking of that, I'm more worried about the russians being the only ones who have anything even resembling a real doomsday machine. Why hasn't the US or the EU allocated funds to the construction of a doomsday device?
It's not that hard to find, here in Sweden it's next to the label that points out that using high-powered lasers in public without a permit is illegal. Not that teenagers care, apparently there are lots of them who have figured out that lasers are a lot better weapons than knives when you want to hurt some other kid or just slow down the cops (by causing permanent eye damage) after you did something stupid...
Agreed, I love the Reader feature of Safari 5 and personally I actually hope it annoys, pisses off and financially hurts those who insist on spreading one page's worth of content over ten pages cluttered with regular banner ads, those rollover video ads ("Buy our new software/hardware now, it's totally awesome and I'm totally not annoying you by being loud and covering the content you came here for!") and popover javascript/flash banners (lots of tech sites seem to use these as well).
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly starting a fire or tripping a breaker won't work very well for anyone in IT, they'd just be stuck at work over the weekend making sure everything was working (or in the case of a fire, building new servers with no time to sleep or rest).
I wouldn't know, I've visited Hulu a grand total of four times, every time I was told that I was not allowed to use the site since I'm not in the US.
There is a similar problem with video downloads from the iTunes store, us europeans get "iTunes university" video downloads, that's it.
Basically my choices when it comes to online video content are somewhat limited, there are individual TV channel websites (although a lot of times they seem to deliberately without their "best" content from the web) and Voddler for streaming, for downloading I have to go with torrents. And then the MPAA and their european counterparts complain about piracy...
No, I'm not "making a problem from nothing just to show off that [I've] got an iPhone", it is my honest opinion that when it comes to user interfaces cellphones have always had a lot of issues and I'm not claiming that the iPhone is problem-free, just that it actually had a much better user interface than the vast majority of other cellphones (at least from the point of view of someone who doesn't think being able to quickly SSH to his cellphone so he can setup sendmail to act as a relay or quickly deploy Tomcat to test the latest release of a webapp is more important than the phone being quick and easy to use for basic phone features, those are neat features but if I really need a web or mail server I'll just create a new VM or if it needs to be a physical device and small I'll buy a BeagleBoard).
There are plenty of touchscreen phones with user interfaces that work the same way, the only difference is that instead of hitting a "menu" button you tap a menu button on-screen.
As someone who is in his 20s and cares a great deal about how the user interfaces of the software I use work I can safely say that this is not a matter of the parent poster being too old, most cellphones have atrocious user interfaces. In fact, AFAIK the main reason the iPhone managed to become popular was because the user interface wasn't a complete mess.
A great example of this is a smartphone I owned before buying my current iPhone, in order to open the web browser and to type in a URL you had to perform the following steps:
The same action on my current iPhone:
Basically, cellphone UIs seem to be designed by the kind of people who have no knowledge on how to create a good, usable UI and until the iPhone showed up the only user friendly alternative when it came to cellphone UIs was to stick to a phone that was as simple as possible.
No, that's simply a likely outcome of the "filthy jail" option.
Oh, it's not just drug companies. My father owns a business installing heating systems and just the "sales" he gets through ordering replacement parts is enough to have the manufacturers shower him with stuff, when you add new sales it just becomes ridiculous. They even send catalogs of stuff he is able to choose between and even though he gives most of it away to the employees of the company he's still managed to snag a pretty good TV, a home theater soundsystem, a stereo for his workshop and an air conditioner for himself. Apparently from the manufacturers' point of view this is a great way to encourage brand loyalty with companies that sell and service their products ("keep selling our products and we'll give you lots of free stuff!").
I believe the issue people are having with your posts is your reasoning which seems to run along the lines of "Bad stuff happens therefore bad stuff is meant to happen and trying to do anything about it is clearly even worse".
Has never worked very well for me (see previous reply to one of the other comments on this subject). Also, I didn't mention this at all (neither did the parent poster), I pointed out that for re-using notes later it is a lot easier to use something besides paper pencil, this is especially true once you get a real job and your notes aren't just "need to remember this to pass this course" but may instead be stuff that you just need to re-use later (for example settings for the new version of an app that you're supposed to deploy on a bunch of servers which one of the devs mentioned at a meeting and which they forgot to put in the docs, or maybe just meeting notes that you need to redistribute to a few other people).
As for minesweeper, that's called "self control".
The kind of user that buys a Mac probably doesn't care about "details".
I'm probably going to be accused of being an Apple fanboy here but the same argument can be used for people who buy computers with Windows preinstalled because most computer users really don't care about such "details" but there are definitely Mac users who do know the difference between a virus and a trojan (I've actually tried my hand at constructing both types of programs, a small harmless asm virus back in the DOS days and a C#.NET trojan that just annoyed the user and always tried to spawn a new process every time the user attempted to kill it a few years back, never deployed either (short of sending it to a friend of mine just to be an ass)).
Copying my notes later never seemed to work for me, possibly because I tend to just kind of "zone out" and copy them letter for letter without any thought to the content, I just want to get it done so I can continue with my work (which requires the new copy of the notes).
And is closely related to people who type holding their hands the wrong way (it's also much more closely linked to mouse use and once again the core issue isn't if you use a mouse but rather how).
The problem is that in general laws don't get removed once they're in place. This means that if these guys get a whole bunch of insane laws on the books before they die off the laws will almost certainly hang around for decades to come.
I've never done that in my whole life.
You didn't, I did quite often. Also, at work it's a necessity of life.
As for "reuse" that could be considered plagiarism, since most of my notes are direct quotes from the professor. It's often better to just rewrite.
Sounds like you could've just brought a camcorder if that's how you took notes...
I type pretty fast as well but not as fast as scribbling cursive across a page.
Three questions. One, can you read your scribblings later? Two, why do I get this strange feeling you don't really type all that fast if you can write cursive faster than you can type? Three, how can you consider typing more stressful for your hands than writing with a pen? with a pen you have to "draw" each character, when you type you just hit the right key...
The advantage isn't with the original note-taking moment, it's later when you want to organize your notes or re-use something you wrote down. If you wrote it down on paper you can either write it down again or you can scan it and use OCR software on it (most likely having to correct the output anyway). All of a sudden the computer is faster...
Also, for text-only notes I type a lot faster than I write with a pencil and paper, taking notes using pencil and paper is for me mainly something I do when I need to make quick sketches and graphs, if I'm writing something I'll do it on a computer.
That's actually close to my experience. I used to have a fairly high-end laptop and loved being able to bring it everywhere but when it was time for my last major upgrade I went with a high-end iMac instead, and I also have a small netbook which is great for those times when I need to bring a computer somewhere and I suspect I could make do with an iPad (despite its limitations) instead of the netbook for the times when I need portability.
The desktop fills one niche and the laptop/tablet another and my experience is that even among my friends who are far from geeky but spend a lot of time with their computers is that they tend to gravitate toward owning desktops or at least having a a real keyboard + mouse and a large monitor or use their 42-50" TV as an extra monitor.
It used to be that laptops were extremely expensive compared to the performance they had, these days they've finally gotten to the point where those who really don't need high-end performance, large monitors or such things settle for just a laptop or people who already have a good desktop also buy a laptop ("good" isn't just a matter of raw performance, a desktop that's three years old but has some extra RAM and a good monitor is still perfectly usable even for stuff like graphics work (three years old means it probably has a C2D CPU in the 2+ GHz range and can take at least 4 GiB of RAM btw)).
He should at least make sure the form works with both A4 and Letter size papers, otherwise the company will be in for quite a shock when they decide to expand their business outside the US and find that the most common reaction to mentions of letter size paper is "Letter size? Is that what you call A4?".
No, it's a perfectly sane reaction. Another red flag tends to be the word "against" in the group name, "foo against bar and baf" is a standard "think of the children" group name...
Here's the thing, the vast majority of people in the world can't write their names properly using just 7 bit ASCII. Back in the "good old days" those of us who were still using alphabets somewhat similar to the one used for 7 bit ASCII would use tricks different 8 bit codepages but there's no need for that anymore, we have unicode and with UTF-8 a lot of these problems are solved, if only developers would actually get around to using it.
I'm lucky in the sense that I can write my name with just the regular 26 characters that americans use in their alphabet but unfortunately the order of my names is a bit different from the regular "First M Last" order that americans assume is standard (mine is "House First Middle Last" and traditionally the house name would've been more significant than the middle name).
In particular, systems don't necessarily have to shoehorn insane data into their processing.
It's not just "insane" data, for us non-americans it's common to run across the following problems way too often:
Well, downsides to drying clothes on a line for me are: Not really feasible for about 2/3 of the year due to freezing temperatures, it rains a bit too often here in the summer (go to bed with moist clothes on line, wake up with wet clothes on line, not exactly an improvement) and I live in the 5th floor which means if something falls off the line it's gone...
Of course, I don't have a dryer of my own, or a washing machine, I use the ones that are available to everyone in the building.
Actually, from what little I've seen it seems that some pornographers have taken to using "fisheye" lenses for their porn, and making sure to keep things that are supposed to seem big in the right spot (to take advantage of the distortion caused by fisheye lenses).
Speaking of that, I'm more worried about the russians being the only ones who have anything even resembling a real doomsday machine. Why hasn't the US or the EU allocated funds to the construction of a doomsday device?
It's not that hard to find, here in Sweden it's next to the label that points out that using high-powered lasers in public without a permit is illegal. Not that teenagers care, apparently there are lots of them who have figured out that lasers are a lot better weapons than knives when you want to hurt some other kid or just slow down the cops (by causing permanent eye damage) after you did something stupid...
Agreed, I love the Reader feature of Safari 5 and personally I actually hope it annoys, pisses off and financially hurts those who insist on spreading one page's worth of content over ten pages cluttered with regular banner ads, those rollover video ads ("Buy our new software/hardware now, it's totally awesome and I'm totally not annoying you by being loud and covering the content you came here for!") and popover javascript/flash banners (lots of tech sites seem to use these as well).