Actually, if you fasten your seat belt, it is my understanding that airbags offer only marginal extra protection.
It's probably not legal, though, and compared to the massive weight of the SUV mentioned I doubt that the airbag mechanism makes much difference.
Vehicles are designed with specific weight distributions in mind and so I would think removing things from it willy nilly is likely to create a safety hazard, including an increased likelihood of tipping in SUVs. So watch out.
I think that realistically, if you like other iPods, it would be very difficult to find much wrong with the Nanao. The form factor's extremely cool, the color screen is great, and the price point is same as its predecessor. I would have liked to see a 6gb version, but other than that I see few downsides to it.
The iPod is a great product. Period. Apple makes a lot of great products. I applaud Mossberg for being willing to consider Apple when many reviewers just ignore the company.
Someone else pointed out the Mighty Mouse review, which was negative, as reasonable evidence that Mossberg's not biased. Certainly I would say that he's harder on Apple generall than Apple fanboy magazines are, and harder on Microsoft than Microsoft fanboy magazines are. To me, this indicates that he makes a strong effort to be fair, which is why I like him.
I use a T-Mobile sidekick, and it's saved my bacon.
My cable modem connection at home went down while I was working on the last few stages of what I needed to do remotely. I used the Sidekick's SSH (it's an option but only $10) to SSH to my server and I was able to do everything I needed, even use emacs. My boss was very impressed that I was able to finalize the project using my phone!
Having the flip display/keyboard is really the best design because it enables you to use a large keyboard and have a display big enough to use. I was quite comfortable using emacs on it. Compared to a Blackberry, the keyboard is bigger and the display is bigger, which enormously improves usability.
Web browser support is excellent except that JavaScript is not supported. On the Blackberry, it is, so you might be able to view more sites on the Blackberry. However, JavaScript support on the Blackberry is outstandingly slow so unless you need it bad, I think the Sidekick wins as a web browsing device with the larger screen and keyboard.
Web form support is excellent, especially compared to the somewhat messy implementation on a Palm.
All Smartphone cameras I've seen are miserable, which is a real pity because I would love to be able to use them for casual photography. Not even worth it for that; keep your regular digital camera or buy something like a Canon Digital Elph that easily fits in your pocket.
T-Mobile service is highly variable. Check out a T-Mobile phone in all areas where you are often and make sure it works OK.
Overall, I think the Sidekick wins with the Blackberry an honorable second place. I'd use the Blackberry if you had reception problems with the Sidekick.
For any serious applications, I think having the laptop card as well as a smartphone is an excellent idea. However, laptop batteries run down pretty fast and often it's too awkward to get the laptop out of its case and work on it. I've found that for taking random notes the smartphone is extremely useful for this reason.
Unfortunately, I've never seen the 9500/9300, so I can't compare them.
Perhaps because the average guy goes home, plops on his living room couch, and watches what's already prepared for him on TV. If he's sick of TV, he goes to his DVD collection and pulls one out.
If this imaginary person wanted what you have, he'd buy a Media Center PC - they're not too expensive anymore. But they're not selling, which makes me think people on the average are not that interested in what it does.
Now, I own an iPod and play all my music digitally. There's a huge difference between music and movies, though - I can listen to a single piece of music hundreds of times and still enjoy it, while watching the same movie more than a few times generally isn't of interest to me. So the utility of a giant computerized library of DVDs seems considerably less than the utility of a giant music library.
What kind of hardware/software setup are you using for your home?
I'll take your word that the subject site does validate, and that it's not Flash, but there's no question that a lot of people have a very hard time navigating it.
If it's hard to navigate, does it really matter that it validates?
And if my site is clear and easy to navigate, does it really matter that it doesn't validate?
I looked at the validation report, and for the most part it's things like attributes that should have been quoted that I didn't quote. I do that because I find the page easier to read and maintain that way.
I don't understand the point of being anal as the validators are, as long as my intent is clear, ambiguous and interpreted correctly by all known web browsers.
True. I really like the idea behind myspace, but perhaps they give a little too much freedom to their users. Pick a random girl's profile and the odds are that it will be "pimped out" with illegible colour combinations and a background image completely at odds with the text color.
But it's a little better now because at least we have high-quality monitors.
At that time I was a consultant and was driven nuts by the people who would choose totally illegible color combinations on their computers. Things like cyan on magenta with these only half-legible CGA monitors. And I would change the combinations to good ol' green on black, so I could read it, and everyone complained. The colours weren't pretty, you know.
The other thing I remember from that era was running a small multi-line BBS. It was lots of fun and I got to know a lot of cool people. Tragically, after my BBS went down due to a hardware disaster in 1987, my social life took a giant dive it has not recovered from since.
I love the Internet, but nobody seems to have created a really good way to bring local people together in a friendly way...
The article uses a truly awful flash-based reader. I had a hard time getting past the first page, too.
It's a great article but they should really dump that Flash, especially since lousy Flash font handling makes it a great deal harder to read than a HTML site. Why do people insist on spending weeks or months to create an interface that's worse than what already exists in standard HTML?
That being said, horizontal scroll all the way to the right side of the screen and you'll see "Next". You have to have a really wide screen to access this page properly.
First, thanks for the kind words concerning my post.
I believe Walt Disney himself created those characters and therefore it's pretty straightforward that his corporation should be allowed those rights.
I do think things should drop into the public domain when no longer actively marketed. But I don't see why an author who creates a work should not get royalties forever from that, even if it's big business that gets most of it. He still gets some, and I haven't noticed any reports of J K Rowling's imminent bankruptcy or starvation. Didn't she just buy a castle or something? Obviously the pathetic crumbs she got from the megacorps weren't so pathetic.
Is it really better for the megacorps to be able to publish her work and take all the money for themselves, instead of giving her her pathetic little royalty? At Barnes & Noble, I see nice editions of lots of copyright-expired works, and nobody gets the money from them but Barnes & Noble. Does that seem right or fair?
Now, it's perfectly true that many old works build on the creations of others in the past. But copyright is pretty strict about it being the specific words used or the specific character. If I created a cartoon rodent that looked nothing like Mickey Mouse (or any other cartoon rodents), no problem.
I think the reason I'm willing to stand in support of copyright is that it encourages originality. I'd love to see copyright law enforced against the people who compose "music" based on sound samples from other popular songs, for example. I want to see new popular songs based on fresh ideas, not songs created from old popular songs, using the familiar images from them to evoke emotion that the "author" of the new song cannot do on his own.
In short, I stand for creativitiy and originality, not mindless theft of other peoples' work. I'd like to see more of the former, less of the latter. And I'm very curious now what you think of that stance.
When I lived in Los Angeles, my house cost $428,000 and even though I made $100k a year, my standard of living wasn't that great.
In rural areas you can get nice houses for a quarter that or even less, and so making half what you made in a big city isn't such a problem. In the end, you'll have almost the same standard of living because your costs are so much lower. I'm living in a semi-rural area right now, in a house the size of a castle, and it's still less than half the price of my tiny house in LA. Despite making $58k instead of $100k, my lifestyle has not dimnished one bit, because housing used to eat up half my income and now it doesn't.
I don't think a company that doesn't want to help someone buy a $428,000 house when they could buy a $200,000 or less house in a rural area and offer the same or better standard of living is being so greedy.
A lot of people prefer the rural lifestyle. It's not permanently for me, granted, but a lot of people do love it.
Criticism of Walmart is fashionable in urban areas because there are so many choices. Here, where there are far fewer, Walmart is definitely useful to have around. I don't love it, since it tends to offer mediocre to lousy products, but when you need what it has, it's a great deal better than the nothing that used to be here.
The nice thing about iTunes is that it made music affordable again, and so people like me started buying.
I think the labels are wrong and that they will limit revenue seriously through this plan, especially since it gets the download price very close to that of a music CD. In that case, I'd rather have the CD and the album art and higher bitrate that comes with it.
What's wrong with artists being paid for their compositions?
Why should the "public" own something that's the blood, sweat and tears of an individual, and has nothing to do with the "public"?
Now, I do think that art that is not actively marketed should go into the public domain, because the artist doesn't lose anything by it. But I see no reason why the copyright on American Pie or Mickey Mouse should not be eternal. Someone invented Mickey Mouse; people are still willing to pay for him; why should parasites who put no effort into the character get a free ride?
Bad Products + Strong Network Effects = Evil Results.
I don't think Microsoft's business practices made much difference. I think Microsoft was simply providing what the public wants. Would you, as a member of the public and not a moralist, not prefer Windows with Internet Explorer to Windows without it? Would you really rather have "Microsoft Windows XP Reduced Media Edition" without WMV playback than the real version with it?
No, the problem is network effects and how they make bad products like Windows succeed even though working with them is horrible.
I don't appreciate some of Microsoft's business practices, such as their attempts to prevent Dell and others from installing Linux, but frankly I don't think they have much impact on the real world. I think they show the scared and paranoid outlook MS has; nobody in that company is dumb, and they all know the public hates them... even as it buys their stuff. They have to keep the network effects up, or perish themselves in the long term.
I hate them because I hate their products, and in the end this has driven me into the arms of Apple, and my career into being a multimedia developer instead of a database programmer. So I sit here with my G5 and my Cinema HD Display and chuckle because I can afford to ignore them completely.
D
(Well, not 100% completely since I still have to test my stuff on Windows. Try 98% completely, and that's good enough for me.)
The reason for my personal loathing of Microsoft was that they had crummy products and yet people bought them anyway because of network effects, forcing me to work with them to make a living. I don't like working with bad companies that make bad products, thus my anger at Microsoft and my eventual career change to Mac-based video/multimedia developer.
Google has exceptionally high quality products and that's why they've gained so much market share. If their quality slips, they'll lose share. That's how business works, and how it should work.
I do think they should have dealt more gracefully with the press, but they're young and hopefully they will learn.
This support for vouchers is interesting since Steve Jobs is a well-known prominent Democrat despite the Democratic party being largely owned by the NEA.
I think the clue behind these varying times is that what you really need to do is plug in your laptop and turn off sleep. Then it will run overnight, but it's way too easy to never think to turn off sleep. Under those circumstances with light use of the computer it could take literally weeks to do the indexing!
it's possible that it's still indexing your entire volume, which might take a long time if you have a PowerBook with a high capacity drive.
I know that performance on my dual 2ghz G5 with 5gb RAM took a huge hit for about the first 24 hours after I installed Tiger. I have a lot of disk space (almost 2TB) hung off my machine, thus the long indexing time.
Once that's over, the other replies are right - Spotlight doesn't take up much in the way of resources. But during the initial index, the hit's pretty big and it would not surprise me if it hurt battery life too.
I discovered something very interesting when I was running a large mySQL installation. We had only about 50 users but they were telemarketers continuously beating on the database all day.
Certain reports would kill the system - make it stop entirely for minutes at a time. What I discovered was that this kind of query
select (fields) from calendar where date like '2005-08-15%'
was horribly slow. Instead, use
select (fields) from calendar where date >= '2005-08-15' and date date_add('2005-08-15', interval 1 day)
That was many, many TIMES faster when the field date was indexed. The problem was that the date is stored as a numeric value and not a string.
All that time, the date index was not being used and I didn't even realize it.
Hope this helps someone, if not the original poster someone else.
Compare Gelson's with Whole Foods, though, and it looks downright cheap.
I did control for quality when I mentioned price, though. Their boneless chicken breasts were the best, at $7.99 a pound. Ralph's was a lot cheaper but didn't look nearly as good. They put a lot of care into deboning and deskinning the chicken at Gelson's, and you could really see a difference.
When I lived in Los Angeles, we had a great grocery chain called Gelson's that was impeccably run, had no lines, and had beautiful stores. There were cheaper ways to get food, of course, but none more pleasant, and the price premium to shop there was low and getting lower all the time, as the big chains raised their prices and Gelson's didn't.
In Pittsburgh, where I am now, the local grocery market is such a depressing place that I'm shifting my grocery shopping to Wal-Mart. It's cheaper and service is actually friendlier.
I'm plotting my move to Miami as we speak... Miami has Publix, which is small but very service-oriented.
Seems nice in theory, but there are millions of buildings around that are so deep that sunlight cannot penetrate to the core. At least in theory, this sort of system could really help the inhabitants of those buildings.
Since land is horribly expensive, I expect most buildings not to have courtyards because they are very, very expensive in terms of land.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering what this means, too.
As far as I know, ActiveX is not supported by the Macintosh at all, even in Internet Explorer.
I thought IE was essentially dead for the Mac.
Does this mean Microsoft will develop a new IE for the Mac that supports this version of ActiveX?
D
Actually, if you fasten your seat belt, it is my understanding that airbags offer only marginal extra protection.
It's probably not legal, though, and compared to the massive weight of the SUV mentioned I doubt that the airbag mechanism makes much difference.
Vehicles are designed with specific weight distributions in mind and so I would think removing things from it willy nilly is likely to create a safety hazard, including an increased likelihood of tipping in SUVs. So watch out.
D
I think that realistically, if you like other iPods, it would be very difficult to find much wrong with the Nanao. The form factor's extremely cool, the color screen is great, and the price point is same as its predecessor. I would have liked to see a 6gb version, but other than that I see few downsides to it.
The iPod is a great product. Period. Apple makes a lot of great products. I applaud Mossberg for being willing to consider Apple when many reviewers just ignore the company.
Someone else pointed out the Mighty Mouse review, which was negative, as reasonable evidence that Mossberg's not biased. Certainly I would say that he's harder on Apple generall than Apple fanboy magazines are, and harder on Microsoft than Microsoft fanboy magazines are. To me, this indicates that he makes a strong effort to be fair, which is why I like him.
D
I use a T-Mobile sidekick, and it's saved my bacon.
My cable modem connection at home went down while I was working on the last few stages of what I needed to do remotely. I used the Sidekick's SSH (it's an option but only $10) to SSH to my server and I was able to do everything I needed, even use emacs. My boss was very impressed that I was able to finalize the project using my phone!
Having the flip display/keyboard is really the best design because it enables you to use a large keyboard and have a display big enough to use. I was quite comfortable using emacs on it. Compared to a Blackberry, the keyboard is bigger and the display is bigger, which enormously improves usability.
Web browser support is excellent except that JavaScript is not supported. On the Blackberry, it is, so you might be able to view more sites on the Blackberry. However, JavaScript support on the Blackberry is outstandingly slow so unless you need it bad, I think the Sidekick wins as a web browsing device with the larger screen and keyboard.
Web form support is excellent, especially compared to the somewhat messy implementation on a Palm.
All Smartphone cameras I've seen are miserable, which is a real pity because I would love to be able to use them for casual photography. Not even worth it for that; keep your regular digital camera or buy something like a Canon Digital Elph that easily fits in your pocket.
T-Mobile service is highly variable. Check out a T-Mobile phone in all areas where you are often and make sure it works OK.
Overall, I think the Sidekick wins with the Blackberry an honorable second place. I'd use the Blackberry if you had reception problems with the Sidekick.
For any serious applications, I think having the laptop card as well as a smartphone is an excellent idea. However, laptop batteries run down pretty fast and often it's too awkward to get the laptop out of its case and work on it. I've found that for taking random notes the smartphone is extremely useful for this reason.
Unfortunately, I've never seen the 9500/9300, so I can't compare them.
Hope this helps.
D
Perhaps because the average guy goes home, plops on his living room couch, and watches what's already prepared for him on TV. If he's sick of TV, he goes to his DVD collection and pulls one out.
If this imaginary person wanted what you have, he'd buy a Media Center PC - they're not too expensive anymore. But they're not selling, which makes me think people on the average are not that interested in what it does.
Now, I own an iPod and play all my music digitally. There's a huge difference between music and movies, though - I can listen to a single piece of music hundreds of times and still enjoy it, while watching the same movie more than a few times generally isn't of interest to me. So the utility of a giant computerized library of DVDs seems considerably less than the utility of a giant music library.
What kind of hardware/software setup are you using for your home?
D
I'll take your word that the subject site does validate, and that it's not Flash, but there's no question that a lot of people have a very hard time navigating it.
If it's hard to navigate, does it really matter that it validates?
And if my site is clear and easy to navigate, does it really matter that it doesn't validate?
I looked at the validation report, and for the most part it's things like attributes that should have been quoted that I didn't quote. I do that because I find the page easier to read and maintain that way.
I don't understand the point of being anal as the validators are, as long as my intent is clear, ambiguous and interpreted correctly by all known web browsers.
D
True. I really like the idea behind myspace, but perhaps they give a little too much freedom to their users. Pick a random girl's profile and the odds are that it will be "pimped out" with illegible colour combinations and a background image completely at odds with the text color.
But it's a little better now because at least we have high-quality monitors.
D
At that time I was a consultant and was driven nuts by the people who would choose totally illegible color combinations on their computers. Things like cyan on magenta with these only half-legible CGA monitors. And I would change the combinations to good ol' green on black, so I could read it, and everyone complained. The colours weren't pretty, you know.
...
The other thing I remember from that era was running a small multi-line BBS. It was lots of fun and I got to know a lot of cool people. Tragically, after my BBS went down due to a hardware disaster in 1987, my social life took a giant dive it has not recovered from since.
I love the Internet, but nobody seems to have created a really good way to bring local people together in a friendly way
D
The article uses a truly awful flash-based reader. I had a hard time getting past the first page, too.
It's a great article but they should really dump that Flash, especially since lousy Flash font handling makes it a great deal harder to read than a HTML site. Why do people insist on spending weeks or months to create an interface that's worse than what already exists in standard HTML?
That being said, horizontal scroll all the way to the right side of the screen and you'll see "Next". You have to have a really wide screen to access this page properly.
Hope that helps.
D
First, thanks for the kind words concerning my post.
I believe Walt Disney himself created those characters and therefore it's pretty straightforward that his corporation should be allowed those rights.
I do think things should drop into the public domain when no longer actively marketed. But I don't see why an author who creates a work should not get royalties forever from that, even if it's big business that gets most of it. He still gets some, and I haven't noticed any reports of J K Rowling's imminent bankruptcy or starvation. Didn't she just buy a castle or something? Obviously the pathetic crumbs she got from the megacorps weren't so pathetic.
Is it really better for the megacorps to be able to publish her work and take all the money for themselves, instead of giving her her pathetic little royalty? At Barnes & Noble, I see nice editions of lots of copyright-expired works, and nobody gets the money from them but Barnes & Noble. Does that seem right or fair?
Now, it's perfectly true that many old works build on the creations of others in the past. But copyright is pretty strict about it being the specific words used or the specific character. If I created a cartoon rodent that looked nothing like Mickey Mouse (or any other cartoon rodents), no problem.
I think the reason I'm willing to stand in support of copyright is that it encourages originality. I'd love to see copyright law enforced against the people who compose "music" based on sound samples from other popular songs, for example. I want to see new popular songs based on fresh ideas, not songs created from old popular songs, using the familiar images from them to evoke emotion that the "author" of the new song cannot do on his own.
In short, I stand for creativitiy and originality, not mindless theft of other peoples' work. I'd like to see more of the former, less of the latter. And I'm very curious now what you think of that stance.
D
When I lived in Los Angeles, my house cost $428,000 and even though I made $100k a year, my standard of living wasn't that great.
In rural areas you can get nice houses for a quarter that or even less, and so making half what you made in a big city isn't such a problem. In the end, you'll have almost the same standard of living because your costs are so much lower. I'm living in a semi-rural area right now, in a house the size of a castle, and it's still less than half the price of my tiny house in LA. Despite making $58k instead of $100k, my lifestyle has not dimnished one bit, because housing used to eat up half my income and now it doesn't.
I don't think a company that doesn't want to help someone buy a $428,000 house when they could buy a $200,000 or less house in a rural area and offer the same or better standard of living is being so greedy.
A lot of people prefer the rural lifestyle. It's not permanently for me, granted, but a lot of people do love it.
Criticism of Walmart is fashionable in urban areas because there are so many choices. Here, where there are far fewer, Walmart is definitely useful to have around. I don't love it, since it tends to offer mediocre to lousy products, but when you need what it has, it's a great deal better than the nothing that used to be here.
D
The nice thing about iTunes is that it made music affordable again, and so people like me started buying.
I think the labels are wrong and that they will limit revenue seriously through this plan, especially since it gets the download price very close to that of a music CD. In that case, I'd rather have the CD and the album art and higher bitrate that comes with it.
D
What's wrong with artists being paid for their compositions?
Why should the "public" own something that's the blood, sweat and tears of an individual, and has nothing to do with the "public"?
Now, I do think that art that is not actively marketed should go into the public domain, because the artist doesn't lose anything by it. But I see no reason why the copyright on American Pie or Mickey Mouse should not be eternal. Someone invented Mickey Mouse; people are still willing to pay for him; why should parasites who put no effort into the character get a free ride?
D
Bad Products + Strong Network Effects = Evil Results.
... even as it buys their stuff. They have to keep the network effects up, or perish themselves in the long term.
I don't think Microsoft's business practices made much difference. I think Microsoft was simply providing what the public wants. Would you, as a member of the public and not a moralist, not prefer Windows with Internet Explorer to Windows without it? Would you really rather have "Microsoft Windows XP Reduced Media Edition" without WMV playback than the real version with it?
No, the problem is network effects and how they make bad products like Windows succeed even though working with them is horrible.
I don't appreciate some of Microsoft's business practices, such as their attempts to prevent Dell and others from installing Linux, but frankly I don't think they have much impact on the real world. I think they show the scared and paranoid outlook MS has; nobody in that company is dumb, and they all know the public hates them
I hate them because I hate their products, and in the end this has driven me into the arms of Apple, and my career into being a multimedia developer instead of a database programmer. So I sit here with my G5 and my Cinema HD Display and chuckle because I can afford to ignore them completely.
D
(Well, not 100% completely since I still have to test my stuff on Windows. Try 98% completely, and that's good enough for me.)
The reason for my personal loathing of Microsoft was that they had crummy products and yet people bought them anyway because of network effects, forcing me to work with them to make a living. I don't like working with bad companies that make bad products, thus my anger at Microsoft and my eventual career change to Mac-based video/multimedia developer.
Google has exceptionally high quality products and that's why they've gained so much market share. If their quality slips, they'll lose share. That's how business works, and how it should work.
I do think they should have dealt more gracefully with the press, but they're young and hopefully they will learn.
D
I've never understood why Shakespeare is taught.
In order to understand his works, you have to learn an entirely new vocabulary that's completely useless anywhere else.
I hated Shakespeare because I felt that understanding it was an enormous effort for virtually no return.
Why not teach authors who speak in modern English, and who would therefore actually help people learn it?
D
This support for vouchers is interesting since Steve Jobs is a well-known prominent Democrat despite the Democratic party being largely owned by the NEA.
Strange.
D
Isn't Open DRM by definition trivial to defeat?
Just skip the code that prevents you from unlocking the file, and you're done.
D
I think the clue behind these varying times is that what you really need to do is plug in your laptop and turn off sleep. Then it will run overnight, but it's way too easy to never think to turn off sleep. Under those circumstances with light use of the computer it could take literally weeks to do the indexing!
D
it's possible that it's still indexing your entire volume, which might take a long time if you have a PowerBook with a high capacity drive.
I know that performance on my dual 2ghz G5 with 5gb RAM took a huge hit for about the first 24 hours after I installed Tiger. I have a lot of disk space (almost 2TB) hung off my machine, thus the long indexing time.
Once that's over, the other replies are right - Spotlight doesn't take up much in the way of resources. But during the initial index, the hit's pretty big and it would not surprise me if it hurt battery life too.
D
I discovered something very interesting when I was running a large mySQL installation. We had only about 50 users but they were telemarketers continuously beating on the database all day.
Certain reports would kill the system - make it stop entirely for minutes at a time. What I discovered was that this kind of query
select (fields) from calendar where date like '2005-08-15%'
was horribly slow. Instead, use
select (fields) from calendar where date >= '2005-08-15' and date date_add('2005-08-15', interval 1 day)
That was many, many TIMES faster when the field date was indexed. The problem was that the date is stored as a numeric value and not a string.
All that time, the date index was not being used and I didn't even realize it.
Hope this helps someone, if not the original poster someone else.
D
Naw.
Next time I submit a story, I'll just make sure it's Sunday in August.
Besides, the video did make me laugh, and on a day I could use it, so I'm happy.
D
Compare Gelson's with Whole Foods, though, and it looks downright cheap.
I did control for quality when I mentioned price, though. Their boneless chicken breasts were the best, at $7.99 a pound. Ralph's was a lot cheaper but didn't look nearly as good. They put a lot of care into deboning and deskinning the chicken at Gelson's, and you could really see a difference.
D
When I lived in Los Angeles, we had a great grocery chain called Gelson's that was impeccably run, had no lines, and had beautiful stores. There were cheaper ways to get food, of course, but none more pleasant, and the price premium to shop there was low and getting lower all the time, as the big chains raised their prices and Gelson's didn't.
... Miami has Publix, which is small but very service-oriented.
In Pittsburgh, where I am now, the local grocery market is such a depressing place that I'm shifting my grocery shopping to Wal-Mart. It's cheaper and service is actually friendlier.
I'm plotting my move to Miami as we speak
D
Seems nice in theory, but there are millions of buildings around that are so deep that sunlight cannot penetrate to the core. At least in theory, this sort of system could really help the inhabitants of those buildings.
Since land is horribly expensive, I expect most buildings not to have courtyards because they are very, very expensive in terms of land.
D