What, in New York? Yes, please. The Eisenhower system was perhaps the biggest economic mistake of the 20th century, the negative repercussions of which we're only beginning to address by enticing people back out of their cars, seduced by the American dream of open roads and white picket fences whose material realization became hours stuck in traffic and dependency on polluting foreign oil.
The urban redevelopment and health care costs (you know, particulate matter?) are going to be fucking enormous over the next fifty years, and we'll be lucky to emerge still a world power in the 22nd century. Not only that, but China and India, with the U.S. as their model, are adopting the same self-destructive cultural worship of the automobile as did our parents. Apologies if this sounds condescending, but this is the sort of thing that collapses civilizations.
Hey, it's New York. Engineering and maintenance projects that would be ridiculous elsewhere are nothing special here, if only because we have the requisite manpower and skills. As another poster said, nitrogen-cooled ducts are already commonplace around the city.
Ever stop to think maybe there's a reason urban real estate is so expensive? This is where people want to live, because it's where information arrives first. Here in the media capital of the world you get all the benefits of being wired to the internet—what, you think you give up the internet when you move to the city?—as well as the conscious and unconscious advantages of claiming membership in the most intricately entwined human networks in society.
Based on experience, I submit that information-dependent industries will always cluster around physical hubs where the built and human infrastructure exists to support them.
However, I think the grid's greatest enemy is it's own users. This country is too power hungry.
The country perhaps, but New Yorkers consume only about one-third the energy, per capita, as do Americans sprawled across the rest of the country. This has everything to do with the inherit energy efficiency of city living, and in a broader sense, federal subsidies that encourage environmentally unfriendly rural lifestyles—subsidies both overt and hidden that will surely diminish over the next few decades as the country starts emphasizing energy conservation.
Pretty good summary here, but this honestly should be common knowledge, and I'm surprised these conclusions aren't as universally obvious (ha!) as evolution.
Yeah, but then how am I supposed to know the bias of whatever random sites get linked to as sources? The reason it's so useful to refer to things like the Times or the Economist or Ha'aretz or even the New York fucking Post is because you've established, through familiarity, what perspective your source brings to the subject. This is just as impossible on Wikipedia as it is for the random sources Wikipedia links to.
Larry Sanger, the creator of Wikipedia, had a great idea and I am sure it will be born out, although definitely not in Wikipedia, or possibly even Sanger's new project. But it will come about in the coming years, and the importance of Sanger's idea will continue...
From what I gather, the community surrounding Wikipedia has rewritten its own history to all but exclude Larry Saenger's involvement, casting Jimbo Wales as the sole founder and motivational force in some sort of oversimplified creation myth. I honestly don't know or care about Saenger or Wales or any drama involving either or both, but if the IRC logs here can be taken at face value—and I don't see any particular reason to discredit them—it's pretty damning of the project's interpretation of its own avowedly open, "neutral" nature.
You can make an educated guess at all of those things based on your prior knowledge of the biases of the New York Times, and thus, you have a pretty good sense what shade of light in which to read the article.
Now tell me, how are you supposed to know the bias of any given article at Wikipedia? By reading the oft-censored talk pages? By presuming rabid Objectivism? By presuming a rabid Islamist, rabid Zionist, or rabid pro-Palestinian viewpoint? By presuming the viewpoint of one doing their damnedest to present an "objective" take in the face of all human experience telling us that's an ever more miserable goal? Seriously, how?
Fine, then pretend I said it. (I didn't, but you Wikipedia apologists are so insufferably slippery to pin down in argument; anyone with legitimate criticisms of the project, like the AC above, seem constantly to be brushed off on irrelevant grounds, and it makes me sick.)
So, let's pretend I wrote the above, because I'm more than willing to sign my name to it as though I had. What say you then?
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I certainly mean no impoliteness, but don't those all boil down to "I don't like to be distracted by seeing more than one window on the screen at once"? (Excluding instances where, as I mentioned before, zoom would expand your window to fullscreen anyway.) I suppose that's understandable, but still... I don't know, if something's really bothering me that much, that's what Cmd-Option-H is for.
Perhaps I'm biased towards zoom because it seems more applicable in general. Fullscreen is a broken concept on widescreen displays; nobody wants to read lines of text hundreds of columns wide.
In what situations do you find yourself needing to maximize, rather than zoom? Keeping in mind that zoom does the same thing as maximize if there's enough content to justify it? I'd honestly be interested to know.
Some of the most brilliant people I know are dyslexic and can't spell worth shit. It's just that their intelligence isn't the sort that lends itself to remembering the difference between "you're" and "your."
Parent is the only reply to get it right. It's not that the cellular providers are ripping us off (well, at least not just that)—it's that SMS bandwidth is extremely limited (see also here, here, here). For shame, Slashdot!
The simplification to which you refer, perhaps more accurately put as the abstraction away of specific complexities, in fact enables us to achieve greater accomplishments more with the mental energies thus liberated. You want to write all your software in assembly language, be my guest—but I think even on Slashdot we can accept that high-level languages allow the programmer to focus on the hard problems, instead of the mundane sort of drudgery that should have become so familiar to you by now.
It's the same with iPods and OS X. The less time you waste fucking around with stupid, everyday shit, the more time you have left to focus on the real challenges.
Exactly. Here's a hint to computer programmers: If the user's not getting what they need from your application, then you fucked up. It's your job to make your software usable. Stop blaming others for problems caused by your shitty UI design skills. Good Christ, I'm sick of the condescension I see coming every day from my fellow developers.
If you could go back in time and talk to Americans in the Civil War era, the vast majority would agree that slavery was the central issue of the war. Some would say it was an economic issue in which slavery played a major role; others would see the war as the Jeffersonian yeomen's stand against Northern urbanism; still others would put it in terms of states' rights, as do their intellectual progeny even today. But in any case you'd find the most consistent, the most compelling and powerfully emotional common thread in all perspectives of the division between North and South to be the push for abolitionism.
Moreover, Lincoln himself saw slavery as inhumane and incompatible with (little-r) republican values, even if (as your quote illustrates nicely) he did not consider its abolition a moral imperative worth pursuing at the cost of turning a nation against itself. This is an old meme which has been discussed to death, and if you remain convinced otherwise, so be it. I just didn't want you to lure anyone else with this particular sexy reinterpretation of history; this is one case where the common knowledge actually gets it right.
Oh Christ, I said I understood "cold, autistic" to fit in this context, specifically of UIs presenting themselves as numbing, alien landscapes to the user because some pale lifeless thing in a cave somewhere took the HIG a little too literally. You're right to criticize my awkward sentence construction, I'll admit—but you try talking poetry to this crowd.
Where the content doesn't have a set size, such as in a web browser, the zoom (resize) button actually maximizes the window to fill the screen.
It doesn't, actually—at least not in a decent web browser like Safari, which resizes the window to precisely fit the content.
Seriously, in this day and age of 30-inch displays, who maximizes anything anymore outside the rare instances where a "Full Screen" option would be better?
Well shit, I'm sorry. If anyone at your school bothered or thought to stage a similar event, it might have gotten coverage. But nobody did. And maybe there's a reason for that.
Where you see inconsistency, I see useful visual cues. Regular windows are for single documents. Brushed metal is for utilities and goal-directed tools. There are gray areas that demand individual judgment, of course, but the general guideline is there.
Slashdot Mirror
What, in New York? Yes, please. The Eisenhower system was perhaps the biggest economic mistake of the 20th century, the negative repercussions of which we're only beginning to address by enticing people back out of their cars, seduced by the American dream of open roads and white picket fences whose material realization became hours stuck in traffic and dependency on polluting foreign oil.
The urban redevelopment and health care costs (you know, particulate matter?) are going to be fucking enormous over the next fifty years, and we'll be lucky to emerge still a world power in the 22nd century. Not only that, but China and India, with the U.S. as their model, are adopting the same self-destructive cultural worship of the automobile as did our parents. Apologies if this sounds condescending, but this is the sort of thing that collapses civilizations.
Hey, it's New York. Engineering and maintenance projects that would be ridiculous elsewhere are nothing special here, if only because we have the requisite manpower and skills. As another poster said, nitrogen-cooled ducts are already commonplace around the city.
Ever stop to think maybe there's a reason urban real estate is so expensive? This is where people want to live, because it's where information arrives first. Here in the media capital of the world you get all the benefits of being wired to the internet—what, you think you give up the internet when you move to the city?—as well as the conscious and unconscious advantages of claiming membership in the most intricately entwined human networks in society.
Based on experience, I submit that information-dependent industries will always cluster around physical hubs where the built and human infrastructure exists to support them.
Pretty good summary here, but this honestly should be common knowledge, and I'm surprised these conclusions aren't as universally obvious (ha!) as evolution.
Yeah, but then how am I supposed to know the bias of whatever random sites get linked to as sources? The reason it's so useful to refer to things like the Times or the Economist or Ha'aretz or even the New York fucking Post is because you've established, through familiarity, what perspective your source brings to the subject. This is just as impossible on Wikipedia as it is for the random sources Wikipedia links to.
You can make an educated guess at all of those things based on your prior knowledge of the biases of the New York Times, and thus, you have a pretty good sense what shade of light in which to read the article.
Now tell me, how are you supposed to know the bias of any given article at Wikipedia? By reading the oft-censored talk pages? By presuming rabid Objectivism? By presuming a rabid Islamist, rabid Zionist, or rabid pro-Palestinian viewpoint? By presuming the viewpoint of one doing their damnedest to present an "objective" take in the face of all human experience telling us that's an ever more miserable goal? Seriously, how?
Fine, then pretend I said it. (I didn't, but you Wikipedia apologists are so insufferably slippery to pin down in argument; anyone with legitimate criticisms of the project, like the AC above, seem constantly to be brushed off on irrelevant grounds, and it makes me sick.)
So, let's pretend I wrote the above, because I'm more than willing to sign my name to it as though I had. What say you then?
Urrgh, MDI... now that's a whole 'nother cultural battle waiting to happen. :)
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I certainly mean no impoliteness, but don't those all boil down to "I don't like to be distracted by seeing more than one window on the screen at once"? (Excluding instances where, as I mentioned before, zoom would expand your window to fullscreen anyway.) I suppose that's understandable, but still... I don't know, if something's really bothering me that much, that's what Cmd-Option-H is for.
Perhaps I'm biased towards zoom because it seems more applicable in general. Fullscreen is a broken concept on widescreen displays; nobody wants to read lines of text hundreds of columns wide.
In what situations do you find yourself needing to maximize, rather than zoom? Keeping in mind that zoom does the same thing as maximize if there's enough content to justify it? I'd honestly be interested to know.
Some of the most brilliant people I know are dyslexic and can't spell worth shit. It's just that their intelligence isn't the sort that lends itself to remembering the difference between "you're" and "your."
Parent is the only reply to get it right. It's not that the cellular providers are ripping us off (well, at least not just that)—it's that SMS bandwidth is extremely limited (see also here, here, here). For shame, Slashdot!
The simplification to which you refer, perhaps more accurately put as the abstraction away of specific complexities, in fact enables us to achieve greater accomplishments more with the mental energies thus liberated. You want to write all your software in assembly language, be my guest—but I think even on Slashdot we can accept that high-level languages allow the programmer to focus on the hard problems, instead of the mundane sort of drudgery that should have become so familiar to you by now.
It's the same with iPods and OS X. The less time you waste fucking around with stupid, everyday shit, the more time you have left to focus on the real challenges.
Exactly. Here's a hint to computer programmers: If the user's not getting what they need from your application, then you fucked up. It's your job to make your software usable. Stop blaming others for problems caused by your shitty UI design skills. Good Christ, I'm sick of the condescension I see coming every day from my fellow developers.
Conjecture, yes—conjecture supported by much more historical evidence than a single letter taken out of context.
If you could go back in time and talk to Americans in the Civil War era, the vast majority would agree that slavery was the central issue of the war. Some would say it was an economic issue in which slavery played a major role; others would see the war as the Jeffersonian yeomen's stand against Northern urbanism; still others would put it in terms of states' rights, as do their intellectual progeny even today. But in any case you'd find the most consistent, the most compelling and powerfully emotional common thread in all perspectives of the division between North and South to be the push for abolitionism.
Moreover, Lincoln himself saw slavery as inhumane and incompatible with (little-r) republican values, even if (as your quote illustrates nicely) he did not consider its abolition a moral imperative worth pursuing at the cost of turning a nation against itself. This is an old meme which has been discussed to death, and if you remain convinced otherwise, so be it. I just didn't want you to lure anyone else with this particular sexy reinterpretation of history; this is one case where the common knowledge actually gets it right.
Oh Christ, I said I understood "cold, autistic" to fit in this context, specifically of UIs presenting themselves as numbing, alien landscapes to the user because some pale lifeless thing in a cave somewhere took the HIG a little too literally. You're right to criticize my awkward sentence construction, I'll admit—but you try talking poetry to this crowd.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but you realize Hong Kong's judiciary derives (still) from the British tradition, I hope?
This is more readable:
tell application "System Events" to get the name of the front window of (the first process whose frontmost is true)
In Applescript:
tell application (name of (info for (path to frontmost application))) to get the name of front window
That's the first thing I came up with, I'm sure someone else can come up with something more elegant.
Seriously, in this day and age of 30-inch displays, who maximizes anything anymore outside the rare instances where a "Full Screen" option would be better?
I read that phrase in a Cormac McCarthy novel and it stuck with me. I don't know—I could see what he meant to describe, and I think it fits here.
Well shit, I'm sorry. If anyone at your school bothered or thought to stage a similar event, it might have gotten coverage. But nobody did. And maybe there's a reason for that.
Where you see inconsistency, I see useful visual cues. Regular windows are for single documents. Brushed metal is for utilities and goal-directed tools. There are gray areas that demand individual judgment, of course, but the general guideline is there.