Coming from and ex-AOL employee, let me clear this up by saying there are two possibilities as to why AOL is so popular:
A) People are too lazy to care about the difference.
B) People are too stupid to care about the difference.
You left out the real answer:
C) Most people (rightly) view computers are a tool, not an end in themselves.
I see the attitude implied by the previous poster all the time on slashdot. Say it with me: For most people, computers ARE NOT AN END IN THEMSELVES. They are a tool used to aquire and manipulate data. The miscellaneous technical knowledge required to (for example) install Linux has no direct relevance to the process of looking something up on the web. To claim that people use AOL only because they're stupid or lazy is about the same as saying that someone who wants to turn on the lights but doesn't have the knowledge required to wire a house is stupid and lazy.
People specialize. This can be taken too far, but I guarantee that every person reading this depends every day on a number of technologies whose details they do not know in full.
To a sharp ear or eye, analog is vastly better. Now, though it's my opinion that vinyl is better than tape, they're both better digital technology.
But is this because of intrinsic limitations of digital, or is it because digital is a young and immature technology compared to analog? I mean, modern phonographs may sound better than modern CDs. But how would Edison's original phonographs compare?
Rvrs. Engineering will kill Entertainment Industry
People who make this claim demonstrate an astonishing lack of historical perspective. Have you never been to a movie theatre? What about a concert? Here are some hints: Music existed long before the phonograph or CD. Movies existed long before videotape or DVD. The 'entertainment industry' is not entirely dependant upon the model in which people buy hunks of matter encoded with a piece of IP and use a player at home to view or listen to that IP.
The way I see it, shrinkwrap software has become a big business because most people think that purchasing software is like purchasing beer. So people who can afford to pay for software have mostly been willing to do so.
But since they think of themselves as buying a physical object, they're going to expect the same rights they have with physical objects that they've purchased: the right to take it apart (i.e. reverse engineering), the right to tell their friends what they think of it, the right to sell it to someone else (i.e. transfer of licenses). If this new law allows software makers to eliminate these rights, they will be going rather sharply against the grain of the customer's expectation and intuition regarding what he or she has purchased.
Companies that actually use such restrictive licenses and attempt to enforce them will likely face an enormous backlash from customers. This backlash could mean people moving to open source (or at least less restricted) software. Or it could take the form of legislation that reduces the powers granted by copyright over all sorts of IP.
Uhhh, read one of his books, any of them. He has great ideas about what will be done with/on computers in the future. The only idea that kinda sucks is voice recognition... I can't ever imagine really getting into that, especially for programming.
Sure, it'll suck for large-volume text entry and formatting, such as programming, or typing a paper. But how convenient would it be to simply say 'minimize' to minimize your current window, rather than having to take your hands off of the keyboard? I suppose one could set up a keyboard accelerator to handle this, but speech commands are far easier to learn and remember than obscure key combinations.
Because he's not after money. Look, one thousandth of his net worth would be enough to keep him and his entire family in the lap of luxury for the rest of his life. What he has been after is power, the knowledge that his decisions can have sweeping effects on millions of people.
Here's my take: Bill sees the writing on the wall. He knows MS is going to be split up, and running one of the fragments of MS will be a big step down for him compared to what he's doing now. So he's giving up on that, and instead going back to his first love, one that doesn't require the same sort of power that he has now.
let the company do its own thing with only a few changes to make its business model conform to one that has been PROVEN to be successful, namely the one used by the X86 world.
Successful for who?
For hardware vendors? While the x86 platform may be popular, many hardware vendors have come and gone. So an open platform doesn't guarantee success for any specific hardware company. And if Apple opens their hardware up for cloning, that's exactly what they'll be - just another hardware company.
Everyone here seems to forget that Aqua uses PDF not.bmp icons !!!
Where have you seen it documented that the icons are stored in some sort of PDF format? I am under the distinct impression that PDF is a vector format. On the other hand, the specification of width x height resolution (128x128) suggests that the icons are actually being stored as raster images.
While a certain level of intelligence is good, I have to say I value compassion, humor, dependability, and determination quite highly.
While I don't consider intelligence worthless, I'd say a far more important trait (and one that is often confused with intelligence) is 'thoughtfulness' - namely, the habit of stopping and thinking carefully before opening one's mouth. I've known people who were "intelligent" in the sense that they would score high on IQ tests and the like, but whose conversations consisted of a series of kneejerk responses - I hated being around them. And I've known people who would do poorly on tests, but made the most of whatever raw intelligence they had - and found them quite a bit more interesting.
Don't fool yourself into thinking these three new companies will compete with each other. Does anyone dispute that, after AT&T spun off the company, Lucent still provides nearly all AT&T equipment and infrastructure? Microsoft will be no different.
The question is this: Does AT&T buy from Lucent because Lucent is a former part of AT&T, or because Lucent provides high quality products at competitive prices?
Monopoly is not, by itself, a problem. The problem comes when monopoly power is used to eliminiate superior alternatives. If MS gets split into 3 pieces, and competitor to any of the three ever aquires a significant market position, it may not matter - because each of the 3 pieces will probably have to significantly improve its products to fend off those competitors. This is what counts.
Pray tell me: what would exist in this scenario to keep the OS guys from talking to the Apps guys like (presumably) they do today? I just don't get it.
Why do you think the OS guys talk to the app guys today? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because they're buddies?
No: It's because they're part of the same company, and thus, when the company profits because its office-suite product has a monopoly or near-monopoly on the market, the OS guys benefit as well. When the two groups are no longer a part of the same company, the path by which app profits benefit OS people will disappear, or at least be severely restricted, and the OS guys will no longer have a big motivation to conceal information from app people at non-MS companies.
This is true. I am blatantly insincere all the time because I am a sarcastic son-of-a-bitch, even when I don't know I am doing it. This is one of the reasons I think American slang and culture is pretty cool. It is totally obnoxious and makes people uncomfortable. Being perfectly sincere and polite gets boring after about 4.3 nanoseconds.
It's amusing to note how thoroughly sincere you sound in your rejection of sincerity.
Being continually sarcastic and ironic gets boring just as quickly as continual sincerity does. The trick is to figure out when it's appropriate to be sincere and polite, and when it's okay to be a sarcastic SOB. Anything else is just intellectual laziness.
Could someone who has played Alpha Centauri please tell me if it is any good?
Pros:
Neat Atmosphere - futuristic, planet really feels 'alien', as do 'future' technologies
Nice Interface: Governers are reasonably bright, bases include a production queue, so you can set one to build a lot of stuff, and not worry about it for a while. And if I remember correctly, the messages that come when something interesting occurs at a base (such as completion of production) can be set to just show up in a list that you click on, rather than in intrusive modal dialog boxes, which always got on my nerves in the Civs.
3D Terrain
Computer opponents have distinctive personalities.
User-designed units.
Cons:
SLOW, compared to the Civs, probably mostly due to significantly more complex graphics (3D terrain, unit models).
Unit workshop is slow and slightly brain-damaged. You can tell it not to automatically generate new units for you, but even if you do this, it still generates new units when you discover a new reactor technology. I don't want the workshop to ever, under any circumstances, generate new units that I didn't personally design.
Annoying didactic treehugger tendancies: I can't control how 'environmentally friendly' my opponents are, but I still have to suffer from effects like global warming and 'planet' getting pissed off and sending hordes of locusts to rape my cities that result from the, er, 'poor stewardship' of the other players. I got tired of the game because I found after a certain point, the rising seas and locust swarms got entirely unmanagable. I tried editing a config file, and managed to mostly eliminate global warming, but the locusts kept coming. There doesn't seem to be any upper limit on how powerful these assaults become, which sort of sucks. Better configurability, so that I could eliminate this part of the game, would be nice.
WHOOOOOAAAAAAAA THERE BUFALLO BOB... Now just hang on there a minute cowboy..Computers can't replace teachers, a computer is nothing but a fucking tool sparky....eh... the problem with teachers are that THEY ARE NOT TEACHERS. Huh... how's that for a fucking load eh... teachers don't teach, they force you to memorize and spew.
You're absolutely right about computers not replacing teachers. When I hear some of the more, er, 'uncritical' advocates of computers in classrooms go into their rhapsodies about how technology will improve their education, I want to grab them by the ears and (screaming) point out to them that people like Einstein and von Neumann and dozens of other people (including Woz himself, for that matter) somehow managed to become really fucking bright despite the fact that they were educated without the assistance of computers. Throwing computers at the classroom will accomplish little at all - it'll help the kids learn to use a particular sort of platform, but it won't teach them more basic skills, and in fact may distract them from those more basic skills.
As to your comment about teachers not teaching: This is true, but it's not entirely (or even mostly) their fault. To a greater degree than we're willing to admit, schools today are designed to simply keep an eye on kids for enough time each day that both parents can go off to work and earn money to put food on the table and a nice big home theater system in the living room. Is it really necessary for both parents to work in order to support a family? In many cases, yes. But more often than we're willing to admit, it's a means of keeping up with the Jones'.
Both of my parents have worked as teachers (my mother still does), as do a number of my aunts. Here are the two most important things (in their eyes) to improving education: 1) more parental involvement in the process - the kids who have the hardest time learning are usually the ones whose parents never show up for Open House or teacher conferences. 2) smaller class sizes. Personal, one-on-one interaction is a crucial part of education, and the more students that are in a classroom, the less individual attention each gets. Mind you, they don't want smaller classes to make their jobs easier - they want them because it makes them more effective as teachers, and thus makes their jobs more rewarding.
There have, in the past, been various CLI interfaces written for MacOS by third parties, some made to look like DOS, some to look like Unix.
Of course. But what tools and programs existed for those CLIs? What's really significant here isn't the presence of the CLI itself, so much as the fact that it's BSD underneath, meaning that various *nix tools can be easily ported and used from that CLI.
Really, I'm guessing that even if Apple hadn't released the terminal app themselves, some third-party group would have written one that was capable of working with standard *nix shells and tools. And I bet we'll see third-party terminals with additional bells-and-whistles, anyways.
The point is to hide that complexity from the AVERAGE, and NOVICE users. Advanced users can still access the full complexity(subject to the limitations of any closed-source OS that is) of the system though, if they want to.
I think this is a good way to go about things. It's rather similar to the Perl philosophy: "Make the easy stuff easy, and the hard stuff possible."
Now I'm wondering if someone will put together a reasonably-priced X server for this system. With the BSD core and CLI, this system already has a lot more geek appeal than previous Macs. The ability to run X apps would round out the package nicely.
I am, to say the least, extremely intrigued by the new system, and may in fact pick up a lower-end mac so that I can play with it.
I assure you, no piece of good quality, feature rich, rock solid software was written by a group of people coding for 8 hours then going home to enjoy their "real" life every day. Complex problems require dedication to solve in a timely manner. Typically, that dedication will come at the expense of focus on other tasks.
There's a rather nice bit in the movie Pi where Max Cohen's mentor relates to him the story of Archimedes and his discovery of density: Archimedes spent weeks trying to figure out an answer to a problem, and it wasn't until his wife convinced him to take a break (and a bath) that he found a solution.
I suspect that, similarly, most of the 'aha' moments (where one hits upon an algorithm to solve a previously insoluble problem) occur when the programmer is away from the computer. The moments come when I'm doing something completely unrelated - I'll be in the shower, reaching for the shampoo, when inspiration hits, and I'm so excited by it that I can barely finish bathing myself properly because I'm eager to get to work making the idea real.
So while I agree that dedication is important (maybe even up to the 16-hrs/day level, though I'm not so sure), taking the occasional break from absolute dedication is a requirement, as well.
Now this is a tired and untrue argument. While the best language in the world won't probably won't prevent a crappy programmer from producing crappy code, a poor language will most certainly make it much harder for a good programmer to produce good code.
If the quality of the language was irrelevant and only the programmer's skill mattered, all software would still be written in assembly language. It isn't. The conclusion is obvious.
All I'm asserting is that that's the oldest definition of the word justice, and up until the 1960's- to my knowledge- the most common use of the word in America.
It so happens that there's a searchable online version of the 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, located here. I think it's a good reference to test your assertion. Here's what it says about justice:
1. The quality of being just; conformity to the principles of righteousness and rectitude in all things; strict performance of moral obligations; practical conformity to human or divine law; integrity in the dealings of men with each other; rectitude; equity; uprightness.
While the above does mention 'conformity to human [...] law', this is only one of several possible meanings provided. The first, 'conformity to the principles of righteousness' has nothing at all to do with human law.
Other sources agree with you even today. For example, Cambridge Dictionaries online provides this terse definition: "the putting of the law into action". And I understand your desire that the word have such a clear definition - if we are to live in a society governed by law, we need to be able to talk about whether or not law is being properly executed. But given the 1913 Webster's, it seems pretty likely to me that the meaning of 'justice' had become muddied well before the 1960's, and can't really do the job you want it to, today.
I agree that such violence so early in the movie could potentially turn off a large portion of the audience from what it really meant. I think there are a lot of things that movie makers can do too much of, too early, that turns people off of movies - "gross" things come to mind.
Well, the problem isn't merely turning the audience off with violence. For the movie to be successful, Ender needs to be a sympathetic character. Having him beat another schoolchild to death within the first 5 minutes of the movie is maybe not the best way to do this. Granted, in the book, we don't find out that Stilson is dead until somewhat later on. But even if the audience doesn't find out that Stilson dies, Ender isn't going to look too good in their eyes when he continues to brutally assault someone who he's already knocked down.
The basic challenge the movie will face is to bring Ender's inner life to the audience. When we read the book, we get a lot of the reasoning Ender's decision. Bringing that same reasoning to a movie audience without being ham-handed about it or eating a lot of screen time will take a good bit of work. One possible solution is to have the entire story framed as a flashback in the head of an older Ender, and having that older Ender provide some narration for the flashbacks.
I suppose I should go read the actual script and see how this sort of thing is handled.
Funny thing is, everybody expected a worst-case-scenario.
No, they didn't. If they had, we'd have seen far more stockpiling of food, bottled water, etc. than we did.
But really, we're not out of the woods, yet. The power hasn't gone out, nuclear weapons aren't launching themselves, and our credit cards are (mostly) still working. But it's possible and maybe even probable that more subtle Y2K-related flaws exist in various institutional software (particularly in developing nations) that will continue to have effects in the months to come.
Do you have any idea how many people are going to write the wrong date on checks and other documents for (at least) the next month or two?
I sat down to write checks for several bills this morning. The date field on my checks already has a "19" filled in for the first two digits of the year. I toyed briefly with the idea of just writing a "00" after this, so that the checks would all be dated a century ago.
Move to midtown, you'll love it. The suburbs are nice, they get all the yuppies far away from us.
I live in a sort of grey area between Buckhead and Midtown now. It's not completely intolerable (and beats the hell out of Smyrna, where I lived for a year), but I still find myself having to drive nearly everywhere, and getting caught in traffic when I do.
Slashdot Mirror
You left out the real answer:
C) Most people (rightly) view computers are a tool, not an end in themselves.
I see the attitude implied by the previous poster all the time on slashdot. Say it with me: For most people, computers ARE NOT AN END IN THEMSELVES. They are a tool used to aquire and manipulate data. The miscellaneous technical knowledge required to (for example) install Linux has no direct relevance to the process of looking something up on the web. To claim that people use AOL only because they're stupid or lazy is about the same as saying that someone who wants to turn on the lights but doesn't have the knowledge required to wire a house is stupid and lazy.
People specialize. This can be taken too far, but I guarantee that every person reading this depends every day on a number of technologies whose details they do not know in full.
But is this because of intrinsic limitations of digital, or is it because digital is a young and immature technology compared to analog? I mean, modern phonographs may sound better than modern CDs. But how would Edison's original phonographs compare?
People who make this claim demonstrate an astonishing lack of historical perspective. Have you never been to a movie theatre? What about a concert? Here are some hints: Music existed long before the phonograph or CD. Movies existed long before videotape or DVD. The 'entertainment industry' is not entirely dependant upon the model in which people buy hunks of matter encoded with a piece of IP and use a player at home to view or listen to that IP.
The way I see it, shrinkwrap software has become a big business because most people think that purchasing software is like purchasing beer. So people who can afford to pay for software have mostly been willing to do so.
But since they think of themselves as buying a physical object, they're going to expect the same rights they have with physical objects that they've purchased: the right to take it apart (i.e. reverse engineering), the right to tell their friends what they think of it, the right to sell it to someone else (i.e. transfer of licenses). If this new law allows software makers to eliminate these rights, they will be going rather sharply against the grain of the customer's expectation and intuition regarding what he or she has purchased.
Companies that actually use such restrictive licenses and attempt to enforce them will likely face an enormous backlash from customers. This backlash could mean people moving to open source (or at least less restricted) software. Or it could take the form of legislation that reduces the powers granted by copyright over all sorts of IP.
Sure, it'll suck for large-volume text entry and formatting, such as programming, or typing a paper. But how convenient would it be to simply say 'minimize' to minimize your current window, rather than having to take your hands off of the keyboard? I suppose one could set up a keyboard accelerator to handle this, but speech commands are far easier to learn and remember than obscure key combinations.
Because he's not after money. Look, one thousandth of his net worth would be enough to keep him and his entire family in the lap of luxury for the rest of his life. What he has been after is power, the knowledge that his decisions can have sweeping effects on millions of people.
Here's my take: Bill sees the writing on the wall. He knows MS is going to be split up, and running one of the fragments of MS will be a big step down for him compared to what he's doing now. So he's giving up on that, and instead going back to his first love, one that doesn't require the same sort of power that he has now.
Successful for who?
For hardware vendors? While the x86 platform may be popular, many hardware vendors have come and gone. So an open platform doesn't guarantee success for any specific hardware company. And if Apple opens their hardware up for cloning, that's exactly what they'll be - just another hardware company.
Where have you seen it documented that the icons are stored in some sort of PDF format? I am under the distinct impression that PDF is a vector format. On the other hand, the specification of width x height resolution (128x128) suggests that the icons are actually being stored as raster images.
While I don't consider intelligence worthless, I'd say a far more important trait (and one that is often confused with intelligence) is 'thoughtfulness' - namely, the habit of stopping and thinking carefully before opening one's mouth. I've known people who were "intelligent" in the sense that they would score high on IQ tests and the like, but whose conversations consisted of a series of kneejerk responses - I hated being around them. And I've known people who would do poorly on tests, but made the most of whatever raw intelligence they had - and found them quite a bit more interesting.
The question is this: Does AT&T buy from Lucent because Lucent is a former part of AT&T, or because Lucent provides high quality products at competitive prices?
Monopoly is not, by itself, a problem. The problem comes when monopoly power is used to eliminiate superior alternatives. If MS gets split into 3 pieces, and competitor to any of the three ever aquires a significant market position, it may not matter - because each of the 3 pieces will probably have to significantly improve its products to fend off those competitors. This is what counts.
Why do you think the OS guys talk to the app guys today? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because they're buddies?
No: It's because they're part of the same company, and thus, when the company profits because its office-suite product has a monopoly or near-monopoly on the market, the OS guys benefit as well. When the two groups are no longer a part of the same company, the path by which app profits benefit OS people will disappear, or at least be severely restricted, and the OS guys will no longer have a big motivation to conceal information from app people at non-MS companies.
It's amusing to note how thoroughly sincere you sound in your rejection of sincerity.
Being continually sarcastic and ironic gets boring just as quickly as continual sincerity does. The trick is to figure out when it's appropriate to be sincere and polite, and when it's okay to be a sarcastic SOB. Anything else is just intellectual laziness.
Pros:
Cons:
You're absolutely right about computers not replacing teachers. When I hear some of the more, er, 'uncritical' advocates of computers in classrooms go into their rhapsodies about how technology will improve their education, I want to grab them by the ears and (screaming) point out to them that people like Einstein and von Neumann and dozens of other people (including Woz himself, for that matter) somehow managed to become really fucking bright despite the fact that they were educated without the assistance of computers. Throwing computers at the classroom will accomplish little at all - it'll help the kids learn to use a particular sort of platform, but it won't teach them more basic skills, and in fact may distract them from those more basic skills.
As to your comment about teachers not teaching: This is true, but it's not entirely (or even mostly) their fault. To a greater degree than we're willing to admit, schools today are designed to simply keep an eye on kids for enough time each day that both parents can go off to work and earn money to put food on the table and a nice big home theater system in the living room. Is it really necessary for both parents to work in order to support a family? In many cases, yes. But more often than we're willing to admit, it's a means of keeping up with the Jones'.
Both of my parents have worked as teachers (my mother still does), as do a number of my aunts. Here are the two most important things (in their eyes) to improving education: 1) more parental involvement in the process - the kids who have the hardest time learning are usually the ones whose parents never show up for Open House or teacher conferences. 2) smaller class sizes. Personal, one-on-one interaction is a crucial part of education, and the more students that are in a classroom, the less individual attention each gets. Mind you, they don't want smaller classes to make their jobs easier - they want them because it makes them more effective as teachers, and thus makes their jobs more rewarding.
Of course. But what tools and programs existed for those CLIs? What's really significant here isn't the presence of the CLI itself, so much as the fact that it's BSD underneath, meaning that various *nix tools can be easily ported and used from that CLI.
Really, I'm guessing that even if Apple hadn't released the terminal app themselves, some third-party group would have written one that was capable of working with standard *nix shells and tools. And I bet we'll see third-party terminals with additional bells-and-whistles, anyways.
The point is to hide that complexity from the AVERAGE, and NOVICE users. Advanced users can still access the full complexity(subject to the limitations of any closed-source OS that is) of the system though, if they want to.
I think this is a good way to go about things. It's rather similar to the Perl philosophy: "Make the easy stuff easy, and the hard stuff possible."
Don't you mean Great Leap Forward?
Now I'm wondering if someone will put together a reasonably-priced X server for this system. With the BSD core and CLI, this system already has a lot more geek appeal than previous Macs. The ability to run X apps would round out the package nicely.
I am, to say the least, extremely intrigued by the new system, and may in fact pick up a lower-end mac so that I can play with it.
There's a rather nice bit in the movie Pi where Max Cohen's mentor relates to him the story of Archimedes and his discovery of density: Archimedes spent weeks trying to figure out an answer to a problem, and it wasn't until his wife convinced him to take a break (and a bath) that he found a solution.
I suspect that, similarly, most of the 'aha' moments (where one hits upon an algorithm to solve a previously insoluble problem) occur when the programmer is away from the computer. The moments come when I'm doing something completely unrelated - I'll be in the shower, reaching for the shampoo, when inspiration hits, and I'm so excited by it that I can barely finish bathing myself properly because I'm eager to get to work making the idea real.
So while I agree that dedication is important (maybe even up to the 16-hrs/day level, though I'm not so sure), taking the occasional break from absolute dedication is a requirement, as well.
Now this is a tired and untrue argument. While the best language in the world won't probably won't prevent a crappy programmer from producing crappy code, a poor language will most certainly make it much harder for a good programmer to produce good code.
If the quality of the language was irrelevant and only the programmer's skill mattered, all software would still be written in assembly language. It isn't. The conclusion is obvious.
It so happens that there's a searchable online version of the 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, located here. I think it's a good reference to test your assertion. Here's what it says about justice:
While the above does mention 'conformity to human [...] law', this is only one of several possible meanings provided. The first, 'conformity to the principles of righteousness' has nothing at all to do with human law.
Other sources agree with you even today. For example, Cambridge Dictionaries online provides this terse definition: "the putting of the law into action". And I understand your desire that the word have such a clear definition - if we are to live in a society governed by law, we need to be able to talk about whether or not law is being properly executed. But given the 1913 Webster's, it seems pretty likely to me that the meaning of 'justice' had become muddied well before the 1960's, and can't really do the job you want it to, today.
Well, the problem isn't merely turning the audience off with violence. For the movie to be successful, Ender needs to be a sympathetic character. Having him beat another schoolchild to death within the first 5 minutes of the movie is maybe not the best way to do this. Granted, in the book, we don't find out that Stilson is dead until somewhat later on. But even if the audience doesn't find out that Stilson dies, Ender isn't going to look too good in their eyes when he continues to brutally assault someone who he's already knocked down.
The basic challenge the movie will face is to bring Ender's inner life to the audience. When we read the book, we get a lot of the reasoning Ender's decision. Bringing that same reasoning to a movie audience without being ham-handed about it or eating a lot of screen time will take a good bit of work. One possible solution is to have the entire story framed as a flashback in the head of an older Ender, and having that older Ender provide some narration for the flashbacks.
I suppose I should go read the actual script and see how this sort of thing is handled.
No, they didn't. If they had, we'd have seen far more stockpiling of food, bottled water, etc. than we did.
But really, we're not out of the woods, yet. The power hasn't gone out, nuclear weapons aren't launching themselves, and our credit cards are (mostly) still working. But it's possible and maybe even probable that more subtle Y2K-related flaws exist in various institutional software (particularly in developing nations) that will continue to have effects in the months to come.
I sat down to write checks for several bills this morning. The date field on my checks already has a "19" filled in for the first two digits of the year. I toyed briefly with the idea of just writing a "00" after this, so that the checks would all be dated a century ago.
I live in a sort of grey area between Buckhead and Midtown now. It's not completely intolerable (and beats the hell out of Smyrna, where I lived for a year), but I still find myself having to drive nearly everywhere, and getting caught in traffic when I do.
Atlanta isn't an ideal city for anyone. Atlanta isn't even a city - it's a collection of suburbs.