I'm not sure why this is, but I found that after swapping regular soda for diet, I had a slight reduction in my weight but it didn't last. I guess my body found some way to compensate for it, perhaps by eating more of other things.
But I did hear that soft drinks in general tend to lead to bloating. Someone more knowledgeable than I should take that ball and run with it.
I think overall, with a sedentary lifestyle and compulsive urges to snack, the programmer fight against obesity is a pretty difficult one, unless there is some positive incentive (like a girl) involved.
However, it's interesting to note that I lost huge amounts of weight - about half of my total fat - when I vacationed in the Philippines for three weeks. Smaller food portions and having a temporary girlfriend who cared about me and wanted me to lose weight really helped. Her secret was that she did it in an affectionate and teasing way, which I responded to, instead of the usual punitive reaction of Americans. This is why there are so many men looking for Filipina wives!
Another interesting fact is that to manufacturer soft drinks down to a price, they cheap out on the ingredients, so a "Coke Light" in the Philippines, while ostensibly the same product as a "Diet Coke" in the US, actually tastes quite a bit different, even a little strange. This probably helped curb my soft drink appetite.
I think, then, that developing interests outside of the computing realm might actually be the best way to lose weight. Anything that takes you away from the desk and too-available snack foods is probably a good thing.
Until I return to the Philippines in November, I plan to take up boating, with the hopes that it will get me out on the water and more keen to do things away from the computer and the snack jar. We'll see how well it works.
After November, well, two months of doing what I did in the Philippines should have me down to fighting trim. That sure will be strange, but I know the Filipinas will appreciate it.
I'm typing this on a MacOS X computer and of course the performance is fine for what I'm doing, and has been fine for more CPU-intensive tasks like video editing as well.
Perhaps Apple is trading speed for reliability, just as is being suggested?
And if so, any idea if it's worked - is MacOS X any more or less reliable than Linux? It's hard for me to tell since both my MacOS X and Linux systems have been very reliable.
I never worked for SGI, but I loved the spirit of the company and their products.
I think (and thought at the time) they should have focused on a cheaper version of their products and tried to be an Apple alternative. They had the best OS out there until MacOS X came up, and it took a long time for MacOS X to work as well as Irix did. Most people aware of the company had very warm feelings about SGI products and the OS and I think they could have used that.
I reluctantly wound up switching from SGI hardware (used Indigo2s could be had for reasonable prices) to Macs about when MacOS X came out.
To me, there are two basic form factors for a portable device: Something that can fit in my pocket, so it's easy to carry around, and something that I haul around in a case and leave in my car if I'm not going to use it during this part of my trip.
If I'm going to lug something around that's bigger than a Sidekick or an iPod, I'd might as well bring along my laptop, a 17" PowerBook. Then I have everything I need at my fingertips, and I'm not confined to passive reading.
What's the point of a dedicated reading device if you can do so much more with your laptop? You could get a 12" iBook if you want a small form factor and although that's significantly bigger than this, both need you to haul around a case or backpack.
I guess overall, I just don't see the point of this size device at all.
I hated English, not because I don't love to write, but because I hate having to write something I know nobody in their right mind would ever want to read. What's the point of that?
Too much English is taught by analyzing writers who have very little to no relevence in most people's minds.
I really wish I'd had more creative writing classes and that being creative, instead of just reading and digesting what other people have written, was emphasized more in our educational system.
I think you now understand (after trying to figure out the explanation) why I asked the question. It has always seemed to me that sex is sex, and the harm is caused by the sex, and so it should not matter what age the people having the sex is.
Now I have a much better understanding and I think you are entirely right - it would potentially cause less harm because the 17 year olds are all in each other's social groupings and therefore have other social constraints that would prevent them from doing harm.
But perhaps being on myspace or any online hookup environment diminishes these social restrictions you mention and increases the danger of sexual predation, no matter what the age of the participants. Do you think that's an accurate statement?
... which means they will fail in their efforts to seduce the 17-year old, and so they are actually less dangerous than the teen's friends close to her age!
Most Windows(tm) users don't even know what an OS is and have no basis for selecting one.
If we look at the subset of Windows users who actually know alternatives exist - and I'd say that's 1 in 5 or even less - most of them are either used to Windows or would rather use an alternative but need to use software they're famliar with.
But remember, Apple is starting from a small base. If Apple's market share changed from 3% to 6% - which I think is definitely possible - that would be a huge story.
His complaint is that there are two extremely annoying dialogue boxes you have to go thorugh first.
MacOS X handles this by saying that by running a certain program, you're doing something special, you have to type your administrative password. Simple.
Windows handles this by saying "Here's something a program wants to change. Here's what it is. Shall I continue?"
and then if you do say you want to continue, it asks AGAIN.
And then, from what I gather (I haven't used Vista but have read some reviews of this problem) it will ask you again and again if the program continues trying to do priveliged things; you can't just give the program carte blanche, as you would want to do for an installer, for example. This is why there are reports of Vista beta testers really and truly loathing this feature.
I predict 90% of users will just shut it off, which unfortunately appears to eliminate many of Vista's security advantages.
If Microsoft had simply copied Apple, they would have been doing a much better job for their users.
Not my kind of movie, seeing that the hapless heroine spent the whole bloody thing running away, without any kind of respite or comic relief or joy.
That being said, I seem to remember it used a perfectly authentic looking traceroute, even if they had to give each row different colours to make it more visually appealing.
Maybe my memory is failing, but the chat program used there didn't seem any more hokey than AOL chat or the average myspace profile. My theory is that most people quite like hokey.
In the Philippines, cellphones are God. During my three week trip, I became close to a couple of women, and they both had their Cellphones, and treated them like family members.
People in the upper middle class in the Philippines - that means they earn about 50,000 pesos a month, or $1,000 - thought of their phones as status symbols. They would happily show them off to me, and I was suitably impressed. The technology was much, much nicer than what I saw routinely in the US. Everyone had nice cameras, big color screens and Internet browsing.
One of my favorite people, a banker, had one of these fancy cellphones. It cost her 13,000 pesos (about $260, a fortune in a place where the average income is 200 pesos a month [$4]). She used it to send animated GIF jokes using the multimedia messaging system built into the phone.
Personally, I can't say I like cellphones. They are sometimes useful to have but for the most part they mean annoying interruptions. So the fact that even women who were close to me were tapping away on their phones annoyed me at first. But then I gradually started to see it as part of the culture, and became relaxed about it. I gave the cellphone a name: Celly. I would take pictures of my friends with Celly, and I would ask how Celly was and inquire about her health.
One day my banker friend mentioned that Cellly was not feeling well. Apparently it was sending multimedia messages to everyone in her address book. That wasn't the problem; the phone bill for sending those messages was the problem. She asked me what to do, thinking that she would have to take Celly (a Nokia 6630) back to the store.
I told her I might be able to cure Celly for her. We went to the Internet cafe and I did web searches and in time was able to locate f-secure mobile's tool to eradicate the virus. This worked and the virus has not returned. Of course my friend also started being cautious about multimedia messages too, which helped.
Her bill was about US$300. She could afford it but it would require taking money out of her savings. She is currently battling with the phone company over it, and so far, despite competition in the Philippines way beyond what we see here in the US, they have refused to bend. I know most cellphone companies in the US would have taken those charges off the bill, or at least negotiated most of them away, but hers did not.
I think that's an interesting account of the real-world damage cellphone viruses can do. The messages, by the way, were ads for a pornographic cellphone web site which offended many of the recipients.
Like the Blackberry, my T-Mobile sidekick is virus free because it's a closed, proprietary system. Sometimes closed, proprietary systems are the best way to go.
It's a myth, albiet a popular one, that if you build more roads people will magically come to fill them. For a detailed rebuttal of this, scroll down to part 6 (Myth 5: the congestion relief myth) about 40% down. http://www.rppi.org/ps245.html
I live one minute from a turnpike that's so underused you only see four or five other cars in a 12-mile trip. No, people did not mysteriously emerge because the road was built.
I don't see how anyone could argue that public transport is more pleasant than driving a car. You often have to stand up, in a hot, crowded bunch of people. If you can sit, your seat is generally hard and uncomfortable. Often it's hard to see out and figure out where you are so you can see your stop. Your car is a dramatic contrast: Comfortable seats, you can see out clearly, and you don't have to wait 15 minutes in the cold for it to arrive.
Extremely high density makes the NYC subway system work. If people loved public transit, all cities would look like that. Instead, people flee to the suburbs and jobs in the suburbs, and they use their cars to get there. This is how the overwhelming majority of Americans want to live.
The best way to solve the problem of pollution is to design better cars. The way to solve congestion problems is to build better roads. Trying to convince people to use public transport when they could drive is not going to work.
I was agreeing with the author of the article, and thinking it was pretty interesting, until I got to the part at the end advocating mass transit.
Efficient mass transit, unfortunately, requires that we all work in a dense downtown area where a critical mass of people shows up. I don't think that's true of most of Houston. Mass transit is also unpleasant to use and generally very slow. Despite billions being thrown at it, mass transit still has an average market share of around 3%. More and bigger roads, logically enough, would be the better solution. Reducing congestion would save an enormous amount of money, almost certainly more than we could ever save from an impossible task like increasing mass transit market share to, say, 10%. This web site has lots of information on this and related issues.
When I got a new, high-paying job when I lived in California, my solution to the problem was to buy a house that was 10 minutes from my office. I highly recommend that as the fastest and most ecologically sound solution. I could drive my 1991 Mercedes 420SEL (14mpg) with a clear conscience, knowing I was using less gas than many Prius drivers with long commutes.
Now I work out of my home in the country, with about a meeting a week in the city, and that works out fine too, especially since my boss is fairly nocternal. Late night commuting is, of course, very fast.
Loyalty actually is a good value. I would not question the desire of an artist to "give back" to her loyal fans.
But the buyers of concert tickets are anonymous. There is no indication of whether the person paying $50 or $250 or $1,000 or whatever the price is someone who has been loyal for years or someone just curious about the name.
Actually, if you want loyal fans and not curious people, charge whatever the traffic will bear. I'm sure everyone paying $250 for Madonna tickets is a loyal fan and not just someone idly curious about her.
I've always wondered why the artists didn't capture more of the price of tickets. That is, as the above person said, why should they charge $50 per ticket and have scalpers pick them up and re-sell them for $250? That's just plain dumb. Charge $250 for the tickets, capture the whole value and become richer.
If I were an artist, it's exactly what I would do. Someone has to gain from the intense demand for these tickets, and it had might as well be me instead of some faceless agency who hires teenagers to wait in line and grab all the tickets... right?
D
Disclaimer: I would not actually buy Madonna tickets.
Re:It makes no difference when you're a monopoly
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention 2005, and 2004, and how about 2003, and 2002 and 2001 and....
Well, I think you get the idea.
Nonetheless, I think Microsoft does want to ship a good product. Curiously enough, they believe they are subject to competition much more than the outside world does.
Unfortunately, they have created something so complex that it has serious problems. Remember Vista's system requirements?
Actually, the article was pretty clear on how it worked, but I'll explain it a little better since I guess (from your post) it was confusing.
When you write a blog entry in LiveJournal, you're give an opportunity to select a "mood" from a dropdown list of moods. So you can say you're
happy sad loved excited lonely (etc)
by just picking the appropriate word.
Now, as you know, emotional data taken from a dropdown list at the end of writing a blog post might not be worth taking all that seriously, but it's data, and you can try to analyze it.
Now, some people are laughing at this by saying that it should of course be obvious that people are likely to be feeling loved or lonely around Valentines' day. But actually this is an important observation, since it says that what people pick in the dropdown can be related to real events. Of course we know people are loved/lonely on Valentines' day; what we didn't know is if what they picked on the dropdown was meaningful. Now we know it is, and so (in theory) we can use this to predict events or people's behaviour based on what they say.
The Harry Potter example showed that this could in fact be done, and this means that further reasearch might be promising. For example, let's say there was a "suicidal" mood in the list. It would be interesting to track whether actual suciides were predictable or at least more likely after showing those moods, so that an early warning system for such behavior could be created.
On paper, it seems possible that lives could be saved that way, which makes this a non-trivial application indeed. To support my theory, note the previous news reports we've seen here that note that suicidal behavior was often predictable in hindsight from what people wrote on their Myspace profiles. If this could be determined from moods, which are trivial to check automatically, it might be a very interesting result indeed.
I think he's referring to the score of 5 the moderation system has (at this moment) given the parent post.
I think he is confusing giving the parent post a 5, and giving Paul's article a 5.
The parent is saying "It's great Paul is willing to be honest about this, considering that his entire income probably comes from Windows". Despite the completely stupid conclusion (that Microsoft can be forgiven), I join the post in commending Paul in supplying accurate information.
Anyone reading the entire article has all the facts needed to make their own conclusion, which is extremely negative towards Vista.
I'm not going to lie: It feels good to be a Mac user. I know, I know, we're smug. Looks like we have reason to be.
I was under the impression that the original IBM engineering team went with the purchase, and so the new Thinkpads were made by essentially the same people and company.
Surprisingly enough, the folks who wrote that article would really like to get paid.
You do know people do this for a living, right?
I have no problem with the Wall Street Journal promoting its articles here. They are great articles and that's what matters.
D
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
I was on vacation in the Philippines in February and I had to get some work done back home.
In many places, there was no wifi or Internet cafes that let me hook up my Powerbook, so I couldn't use SSH that way.
A quick Google for 'ssh java client' found MindTerm. It worked well enough for me to do the job, although it would occasionally ask me if I wanted to quit out of the blue. It would then hang and I'd have to abort IE/Firefox and start over again.
In a pinch, though, where there were no other options, I sure was grateful for it.
The only MacOS X developer that I know of which doesn't have nearly immediate Intel versions of their products is Adobe, and that's because they have a lot of legacy code that makes the process complex.
I don't know why Avie left, but he may just be ready for a rest. He's certainly wealthy enough to do whatever he wants, and he's left at a time when MacOS X is in a stable, happy condition. He may simply feel his work is over. I've heard that he had little effect in the company over the last three years.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure why this is, but I found that after swapping regular soda for diet, I had a slight reduction in my weight but it didn't last. I guess my body found some way to compensate for it, perhaps by eating more of other things.
But I did hear that soft drinks in general tend to lead to bloating. Someone more knowledgeable than I should take that ball and run with it.
I think overall, with a sedentary lifestyle and compulsive urges to snack, the programmer fight against obesity is a pretty difficult one, unless there is some positive incentive (like a girl) involved.
However, it's interesting to note that I lost huge amounts of weight - about half of my total fat - when I vacationed in the Philippines for three weeks. Smaller food portions and having a temporary girlfriend who cared about me and wanted me to lose weight really helped. Her secret was that she did it in an affectionate and teasing way, which I responded to, instead of the usual punitive reaction of Americans. This is why there are so many men looking for Filipina wives!
Another interesting fact is that to manufacturer soft drinks down to a price, they cheap out on the ingredients, so a "Coke Light" in the Philippines, while ostensibly the same product as a "Diet Coke" in the US, actually tastes quite a bit different, even a little strange. This probably helped curb my soft drink appetite.
I think, then, that developing interests outside of the computing realm might actually be the best way to lose weight. Anything that takes you away from the desk and too-available snack foods is probably a good thing.
Until I return to the Philippines in November, I plan to take up boating, with the hopes that it will get me out on the water and more keen to do things away from the computer and the snack jar. We'll see how well it works.
After November, well, two months of doing what I did in the Philippines should have me down to fighting trim. That sure will be strange, but I know the Filipinas will appreciate it.
D
There have been some rumors about Apple changing its kernel now that Avie has retired.
Perhaps Steve Jobs has come to agree with this.
D
I'm typing this on a MacOS X computer and of course the performance is fine for what I'm doing, and has been fine for more CPU-intensive tasks like video editing as well.
Perhaps Apple is trading speed for reliability, just as is being suggested?
And if so, any idea if it's worked - is MacOS X any more or less reliable than Linux? It's hard for me to tell since both my MacOS X and Linux systems have been very reliable.
D
I never worked for SGI, but I loved the spirit of the company and their products.
I think (and thought at the time) they should have focused on a cheaper version of their products and tried to be an Apple alternative. They had the best OS out there until MacOS X came up, and it took a long time for MacOS X to work as well as Irix did. Most people aware of the company had very warm feelings about SGI products and the OS and I think they could have used that.
I reluctantly wound up switching from SGI hardware (used Indigo2s could be had for reasonable prices) to Macs about when MacOS X came out.
That's exactly what I want to know.
To me, there are two basic form factors for a portable device: Something that can fit in my pocket, so it's easy to carry around, and something that I haul around in a case and leave in my car if I'm not going to use it during this part of my trip.
If I'm going to lug something around that's bigger than a Sidekick or an iPod, I'd might as well bring along my laptop, a 17" PowerBook. Then I have everything I need at my fingertips, and I'm not confined to passive reading.
What's the point of a dedicated reading device if you can do so much more with your laptop? You could get a 12" iBook if you want a small form factor and although that's significantly bigger than this, both need you to haul around a case or backpack.
I guess overall, I just don't see the point of this size device at all.
D
I hated English, not because I don't love to write, but because I hate having to write something I know nobody in their right mind would ever want to read. What's the point of that?
Too much English is taught by analyzing writers who have very little to no relevence in most people's minds.
I really wish I'd had more creative writing classes and that being creative, instead of just reading and digesting what other people have written, was emphasized more in our educational system.
D
I think you now understand (after trying to figure out the explanation) why I asked the question. It has always seemed to me that sex is sex, and the harm is caused by the sex, and so it should not matter what age the people having the sex is.
Now I have a much better understanding and I think you are entirely right - it would potentially cause less harm because the 17 year olds are all in each other's social groupings and therefore have other social constraints that would prevent them from doing harm.
But perhaps being on myspace or any online hookup environment diminishes these social restrictions you mention and increases the danger of sexual predation, no matter what the age of the participants. Do you think that's an accurate statement?
D
... which means they will fail in their efforts to seduce the 17-year old, and so they are actually less dangerous than the teen's friends close to her age!
D
Most Windows(tm) users don't even know what an OS is and have no basis for selecting one.
If we look at the subset of Windows users who actually know alternatives exist - and I'd say that's 1 in 5 or even less - most of them are either used to Windows or would rather use an alternative but need to use software they're famliar with.
But remember, Apple is starting from a small base. If Apple's market share changed from 3% to 6% - which I think is definitely possible - that would be a huge story.
D
I'm curious about something from the perspective of a parent that has always puzzled me.
if your kid has 15 year old male friends, they probably want to sleep with her.
If your kid has 17 year old male friends, they probably want to sleep with her.
If your kid has 50 year old male friends, they probably want to sleep with her.
What makes the behavior of the 50 year old worse, or even different, from the behavior of the younger friends?
D
His complaint is that there are two extremely annoying dialogue boxes you have to go thorugh first.
MacOS X handles this by saying that by running a certain program, you're doing something special, you have to type your administrative password. Simple.
Windows handles this by saying "Here's something a program wants to change. Here's what it is. Shall I continue?"
and then if you do say you want to continue, it asks AGAIN.
And then, from what I gather (I haven't used Vista but have read some reviews of this problem) it will ask you again and again if the program continues trying to do priveliged things; you can't just give the program carte blanche, as you would want to do for an installer, for example. This is why there are reports of Vista beta testers really and truly loathing this feature.
I predict 90% of users will just shut it off, which unfortunately appears to eliminate many of Vista's security advantages.
If Microsoft had simply copied Apple, they would have been doing a much better job for their users.
D
I bought Boo Hoo, the book one of the founders wrote on their failure.
I have to say that it was great reading, despite the outcome.
D
Not my kind of movie, seeing that the hapless heroine spent the whole bloody thing running away, without any kind of respite or comic relief or joy.
That being said, I seem to remember it used a perfectly authentic looking traceroute, even if they had to give each row different colours to make it more visually appealing.
Maybe my memory is failing, but the chat program used there didn't seem any more hokey than AOL chat or the average myspace profile. My theory is that most people quite like hokey.
D
In the Philippines, cellphones are God. During my three week trip, I became close to a couple of women, and they both had their Cellphones, and treated them like family members.
People in the upper middle class in the Philippines - that means they earn about 50,000 pesos a month, or $1,000 - thought of their phones as status symbols. They would happily show them off to me, and I was suitably impressed. The technology was much, much nicer than what I saw routinely in the US. Everyone had nice cameras, big color screens and Internet browsing.
One of my favorite people, a banker, had one of these fancy cellphones. It cost her 13,000 pesos (about $260, a fortune in a place where the average income is 200 pesos a month [$4]). She used it to send animated GIF jokes using the multimedia messaging system built into the phone.
Personally, I can't say I like cellphones. They are sometimes useful to have but for the most part they mean annoying interruptions. So the fact that even women who were close to me were tapping away on their phones annoyed me at first. But then I gradually started to see it as part of the culture, and became relaxed about it. I gave the cellphone a name: Celly. I would take pictures of my friends with Celly, and I would ask how Celly was and inquire about her health.
One day my banker friend mentioned that Cellly was not feeling well. Apparently it was sending multimedia messages to everyone in her address book. That wasn't the problem; the phone bill for sending those messages was the problem. She asked me what to do, thinking that she would have to take Celly (a Nokia 6630) back to the store.
I told her I might be able to cure Celly for her. We went to the Internet cafe and I did web searches and in time was able to locate f-secure mobile's tool to eradicate the virus. This worked and the virus has not returned. Of course my friend also started being cautious about multimedia messages too, which helped.
Her bill was about US$300. She could afford it but it would require taking money out of her savings. She is currently battling with the phone company over it, and so far, despite competition in the Philippines way beyond what we see here in the US, they have refused to bend. I know most cellphone companies in the US would have taken those charges off the bill, or at least negotiated most of them away, but hers did not.
I think that's an interesting account of the real-world damage cellphone viruses can do. The messages, by the way, were ads for a pornographic cellphone web site which offended many of the recipients.
Like the Blackberry, my T-Mobile sidekick is virus free because it's a closed, proprietary system. Sometimes closed, proprietary systems are the best way to go.
D
It's a myth, albiet a popular one, that if you build more roads people will magically come to fill them. For a detailed rebuttal of this, scroll down to part 6 (Myth 5: the congestion relief myth) about 40% down.
http://www.rppi.org/ps245.html
I live one minute from a turnpike that's so underused you only see four or five other cars in a 12-mile trip. No, people did not mysteriously emerge because the road was built.
I don't see how anyone could argue that public transport is more pleasant than driving a car. You often have to stand up, in a hot, crowded bunch of people. If you can sit, your seat is generally hard and uncomfortable. Often it's hard to see out and figure out where you are so you can see your stop. Your car is a dramatic contrast: Comfortable seats, you can see out clearly, and you don't have to wait 15 minutes in the cold for it to arrive.
Extremely high density makes the NYC subway system work. If people loved public transit, all cities would look like that. Instead, people flee to the suburbs and jobs in the suburbs, and they use their cars to get there. This is how the overwhelming majority of Americans want to live.
The best way to solve the problem of pollution is to design better cars. The way to solve congestion problems is to build better roads. Trying to convince people to use public transport when they could drive is not going to work.
D
I was agreeing with the author of the article, and thinking it was pretty interesting, until I got to the part at the end advocating mass transit.
Efficient mass transit, unfortunately, requires that we all work in a dense downtown area where a critical mass of people shows up. I don't think that's true of most of Houston. Mass transit is also unpleasant to use and generally very slow. Despite billions being thrown at it, mass transit still has an average market share of around 3%. More and bigger roads, logically enough, would be the better solution. Reducing congestion would save an enormous amount of money, almost certainly more than we could ever save from an impossible task like increasing mass transit market share to, say, 10%. This web site has lots of information on this and related issues.
When I got a new, high-paying job when I lived in California, my solution to the problem was to buy a house that was 10 minutes from my office. I highly recommend that as the fastest and most ecologically sound solution. I could drive my 1991 Mercedes 420SEL (14mpg) with a clear conscience, knowing I was using less gas than many Prius drivers with long commutes.
Now I work out of my home in the country, with about a meeting a week in the city, and that works out fine too, especially since my boss is fairly nocternal. Late night commuting is, of course, very fast.
D
Loyalty actually is a good value. I would not question the desire of an artist to "give back" to her loyal fans.
... right?
But the buyers of concert tickets are anonymous. There is no indication of whether the person paying $50 or $250 or $1,000 or whatever the price is someone who has been loyal for years or someone just curious about the name.
Actually, if you want loyal fans and not curious people, charge whatever the traffic will bear. I'm sure everyone paying $250 for Madonna tickets is a loyal fan and not just someone idly curious about her.
I've always wondered why the artists didn't capture more of the price of tickets. That is, as the above person said, why should they charge $50 per ticket and have scalpers pick them up and re-sell them for $250? That's just plain dumb. Charge $250 for the tickets, capture the whole value and become richer.
If I were an artist, it's exactly what I would do. Someone has to gain from the intense demand for these tickets, and it had might as well be me instead of some faceless agency who hires teenagers to wait in line and grab all the tickets
D
Disclaimer: I would not actually buy Madonna tickets.
Not to mention 2005, and 2004, and how about 2003, and 2002 and 2001 and ....
Well, I think you get the idea.
Nonetheless, I think Microsoft does want to ship a good product. Curiously enough, they believe they are subject to competition much more than the outside world does.
Unfortunately, they have created something so complex that it has serious problems. Remember Vista's system requirements?
D
Actually, the article was pretty clear on how it worked, but I'll explain it a little better since I guess (from your post) it was confusing.
When you write a blog entry in LiveJournal, you're give an opportunity to select a "mood" from a dropdown list of moods. So you can say you're
happy
sad
loved
excited
lonely
(etc)
by just picking the appropriate word.
Now, as you know, emotional data taken from a dropdown list at the end of writing a blog post might not be worth taking all that seriously, but it's data, and you can try to analyze it.
Now, some people are laughing at this by saying that it should of course be obvious that people are likely to be feeling loved or lonely around Valentines' day. But actually this is an important observation, since it says that what people pick in the dropdown can be related to real events. Of course we know people are loved/lonely on Valentines' day; what we didn't know is if what they picked on the dropdown was meaningful. Now we know it is, and so (in theory) we can use this to predict events or people's behaviour based on what they say.
The Harry Potter example showed that this could in fact be done, and this means that further reasearch might be promising. For example, let's say there was a "suicidal" mood in the list. It would be interesting to track whether actual suciides were predictable or at least more likely after showing those moods, so that an early warning system for such behavior could be created.
On paper, it seems possible that lives could be saved that way, which makes this a non-trivial application indeed. To support my theory, note the previous news reports we've seen here that note that suicidal behavior was often predictable in hindsight from what people wrote on their Myspace profiles. If this could be determined from moods, which are trivial to check automatically, it might be a very interesting result indeed.
Hope that helped people's understanding.
D
I think he's referring to the score of 5 the moderation system has (at this moment) given the parent post.
I think he is confusing giving the parent post a 5, and giving Paul's article a 5.
The parent is saying "It's great Paul is willing to be honest about this, considering that his entire income probably comes from Windows". Despite the completely stupid conclusion (that Microsoft can be forgiven), I join the post in commending Paul in supplying accurate information.
Anyone reading the entire article has all the facts needed to make their own conclusion, which is extremely negative towards Vista.
I'm not going to lie: It feels good to be a Mac user. I know, I know, we're smug. Looks like we have reason to be.
D
It really would be nice to have a PowerBook with a TrackPoint.
...
That's the one thing I miss about switching from ThinkPad to PowerBook.
The trackpad thing just doesn't work for me. I'm about 10x faster on a trackpoint
But I'm not about to go back to Windows or Linux to get one.
D
I was under the impression that the original IBM engineering team went with the purchase, and so the new Thinkpads were made by essentially the same people and company.
Is this wrong?
D
Surprisingly enough, the folks who wrote that article would really like to get paid.
You do know people do this for a living, right?
I have no problem with the Wall Street Journal promoting its articles here. They are great articles and that's what matters.
D
I was on vacation in the Philippines in February and I had to get some work done back home.
In many places, there was no wifi or Internet cafes that let me hook up my Powerbook, so I couldn't use SSH that way.
A quick Google for 'ssh java client' found MindTerm. It worked well enough for me to do the job, although it would occasionally ask me if I wanted to quit out of the blue. It would then hang and I'd have to abort IE/Firefox and start over again.
In a pinch, though, where there were no other options, I sure was grateful for it.
D
The only MacOS X developer that I know of which doesn't have nearly immediate Intel versions of their products is Adobe, and that's because they have a lot of legacy code that makes the process complex.
I don't know why Avie left, but he may just be ready for a rest. He's certainly wealthy enough to do whatever he wants, and he's left at a time when MacOS X is in a stable, happy condition. He may simply feel his work is over. I've heard that he had little effect in the company over the last three years.
D