Fortunately, tabs do not preclude opening more than one window. Which is easier, managing 2 windows with 6 tabs each, or 12 separate windows? Never mind, I know what your answer is, but I disagree.
He'd be wrong, anyways. Grouping things into categories is one of the basic ways that people deal with large sets of objects. Tabs give you a means of grouping web pages when you have many of them open. Falling back to the operating system's top-level window management means that you have one big flat pile of browser windows, far less manageable than a small handful of windows each with a small handful of tabs.
A good professor, with an interesting speaking style, who adds a depth of understanding to the course material that students can't get by just reading the textbook, is a lot less likely to have problems with this.
[...]
Now, granted, there will inevitably be students who are too easily distracted -- "Oooh, shiny!" -- to pay attention even to good profs.
The problem I see with this and many of the other comments posted here is that you're only admitting to the existence of two variables that dictate a student's attentiveness: The student's ability to resist distraction, and the professor's skill at "being interesting".
The third variable that has to be acknowledged is the power of the distractions available to the student. Suppose a professor had to give his lecture in front of a large movie screen on which a porno (no sound) was being projected. When most of the class was paying attention to the porno, rather than the professor, could you honestly argue that it was the fault of the professor for being too boring, or the fault of the students for being too easily distracted?
Now WiFi is clearly a lesser distraction than the porno, but it's also clearly a greater distraction than a pen and a doodle pad. It raises the bar both for the student's ability to focus, and the professor's ability to entertain.
Bull! We currently have the technology (assuming big bucks) to send multi-generational colonies to other star systems.
Even if we did have the required technology (we don't), what would be the point? Those generation ships would never return. We might not even find out what their fate was.
Colonizing other planets is of no value to us here on earth, unless it's possible to set up some sort of regular trade (in goods or knowledge) between ourselves and the colonies. Given the limitations that our current understanding of physics puts on effective communications over such distances (much less actual transportation) that isn't going to happen. Our understanding of physics might change, but it would be stupid to spend time and energy on sending out those ships when we don't know what the future holds, technologically.
Yeah, it would give a few people like yourself warm fuzzies if we did it, because it fulfills a deep need to see yourself as a participant (however minor) in some grand narrative. But without some sort of economic upside, not enough people will be willing to commit the funds to send out the ships. They'd rather fulfill their need for a narrative through religion, which can be much cheaper, when properly implemented.
Interest-Bearing checking
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 2
There's another reason to use credit cards instead of debit cards, though: If your checking account pays interest, using a debit card will deduct from your balance immediately. Using a credit card and paying it off every month, you won't pay any interest to the credit card company, and your bank will pay you interest on the money you spend for the time period between when you buy something and when you actually pay the credit card bill on which it appears. Most of the time the difference won't be very large, but if you're making large purchases, especially early in the month, it's worth the trouble.
Also, regardless of what the liability law says, there's a clear practical difference between the two: If your credit card is misused, you can challenge the charge, and it's up to the company to collect from you. If your debit card is misused, the money is already gone from your account, and the ball is in your court to recover what is rightfully yours.
That we are becoming more and more lazy. We can now order our groceries, work, and pay our bills all in front of our computer....
You're right, this is frightening. Because, of course, the acme of virtue is to put the maximum effort possible into one's grocery shopping and bill paying.
To be more specific, OSX 10.2 on a 1G Tibook with 512M RAM is slow.
The 1GHz TiBook was announced on Wednesday, November 6th. You posted on Thursday, November 7th. How is it that you were able to use this machine only a day after it was announced, long before anyone else (even the bricks-and-mortar Apple stores) has been able to get their hands on one?
I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago; I bought a G4/450 cube. The OS/X public beta came out around the same time, and I bought it, and was pretty disappointed. Found it painfully slow and lacking in useful native apps. So I kept spending all of my time in OS 9.
Then 10.0 came out; I installed it, and still found it painfully slow. Tried using it a while, but ended up going back to OS 9 and staying there.
Then, around the time that 10.1 came out, I bumped my system RAM from 128 to 384. That and installing 10.1 made the system finally fast enough for day-to-day use in OS/X. The machine still felt very sluggish browsing the web compared to my Windows box at work, but I couldn't blame that on the OS: IE wasn't any faster under OS 9 than it was under OS/X. And at that point, no browser on any platform seemed anywhere near as fast to me as IE on windows.
Nowadays, with the upgrade to 10.2 (my machine can use Quartz Extreme), Chimera for my web browsing, and another RAM upgrade, the machine feels quite snappy. It might still be slower than the 1.something GHz Pentium I use at work, but the difference is much smaller now, and nonexistent in terms of its impact on usability.
While some things, like window resizing and menu opening and so on still feel slower than they did under OS 9, Jaguar scales to handle large numbers of running applications much better than 9 did; It's not uncommon for me to have 8-10 programs running at once, many actively doing some work.That would have been pretty hopeless under OS 9.
Basically, I consider this to be desktop computing nirvana. Well, almost. When my new 1 GHz PowerBook gets here in a few weeks, that will be desktop computing nirvana.
So why not buy 2 extra batteries? The total price would still be only $260, considerably less than the $300 they want for the Valence monster. And more significantly to me, the standard PB batteries are much more conveniently sized. The Valence thing is 12" x 9". I'd have a much easier time finding space for 2 extra PowerBook or iBook batteries in my laptop bag.
Also note: The new PowerBooks come with 61 Wh batteries, not 55. The Apple store doesn't seem to be selling the 55 wH batteries seperately, yet, but I'm sure they will, and I'm guessing that we'll see improved iBook batteries, too.
Apple does not 'officially' support them, but I understand that some people are running OS/X on pre-G3 PPCs.
The first G3s were released at the end of 1997. Would you want to run Windows XP on a machine from 1997/98? I doubt it. And if I'm not mistaken, MS only officially supports XP on machines conforming to the PC99 specification (which dates to, you guessed it, 1999). So why aren't you accusing MS of having dropped their entire user base?
My guess is this: Apple appears to 'drop' their user base periodically because Mac users just don't upgrade their machines as often, on average; If you're upgrading your PC every couple of years, it's unlikely that any OS update is going to leave you behind.
So can I watch an entire DVD on a single battery charge?
Yes. Also, if you download something like DVDBackup and use it to copy the DVD to your hard drive before your trip, the Apple DVD player can play it from there, which will probably consume less power than spinning the DVD drive would.
Perhaps the original poster was trying to link to this article. The article is about the Radeon 9000 Mobility, but it includes a Radeon 9000 vs. Radeon 7500 vs. GeForce performance comparison.
will it? light -does- travel underwater, you know.
Water absorbs far more of the light passing through it than air does. Try this: Put on some goggles, jump in the ocean, and estimate how far you can see. Now, surface, and once again, estimate how far you can see. There will likely be several orders of magnitude of difference between the two.
50,000 Geeks * 99$ OS copy = 4.95 million dollars. How's that for capital gain?
For a company the size of Apple, not very good. That $5 million probably wouldn't even cover all of the development costs. Good engineers don't come cheap, and the engineers are just one part of the process of making a real software product.
Er, the article and this dicussion are about tech companies -- companies that have to create products and ideas in order to succeed. This is a very different sort of business than selling coffee.
I think that's a bit redundant. If any company is fourishing, _no_matter_who's_ at the tiller, it'd probably be a bad idea to hire _anyone_ to replace them.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? Read the article, though: Cringely provides several examples of companies that had their management replaced during periods when they were profitable, with money in the bank.
You know, there's a Dilbert strip in which the PHB estimates the size of a development project by assuming that everything he doesn't know how to do is easy.
The various Slashdotters scoffing at the idea of an "art therapist" remind me of that, for some reason...
What worse is, lately, I get people calling who get my answering machine. The power has gone out so much that I just leave the default message (some computerized sounding woman's voice saying "after tone leave message"). I come home and usually have at least one stupid message: "Hello? Can I speak to Anne [or some other name that no one in my house has]? Hello?"
I used to leave the default message on my answering machine, too. At the time, I had a job that would have me out of town for a week at a time, so I would come home to find the occasional marketing message on the machine.
Once, a marketer who got the machine and didn't realize it launched into her little spiel, chattered away for about 30 seconds, until she reached the first point in the script that called for her to ask me a question. So she asked the question, and, getting no response started saying "Hello? Hello?" She continued this for at least a minute before giving up and disconnecting.
If you look around, you can get a 128MB CompactFlash for the price you specify. On my 2MP camera (admittedly, only sufficient for point-and-shoot uses), images consume about 2/3rds of a megabyte each, meaning I could put for close to 200 images on the card, not 90.
Throwing the computer into the mix is silly, since, for most people making this calculation (and especially most slashdotters), the computer is already present. Even if it isn't, it has uses far above and beyond handling digital photos, so 'billing' the entire cost of the computer as part of the cost of digital photography makes no sense.
Photoshop is not needed for dealing with digital photos. I've been taking digital photos for over a year, and have yet to touch Photoshop. Additionally, using Photoshop grants you the ability to do much more with your photos than dropping them off at the local one-hour development place, so a direct price comparison makes no sense.
More and more development places will handle digital photos at prices similar to those they charge for film photos, so there's no need to own a photo-quality printer or ink.
And if you run out of flash cards on vacation, you have several options: If you already own a laptop (lots of us do), take it along and download photos to its harddrive whenever the card gets full. If not, well, it's increasingly easy to find computers with CD burners everywhere, so carry along some blanks and find time on a machine to download and burn images. Admittedly, neither of these solutions are perfect, but the situation isn't nearly as dire as you seem to think.
Sure, the $10/month is more expensive than 'free', but with Rhapsody, I find what I want, faster and with less trouble than I ever did with Gnutella or any other P2P system. And I find more of what I want -- the P2P systems I tried were barely tolerable for finding fairly current, popular music. For, say, old blues recordings, they would be worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
He'd be wrong, anyways. Grouping things into categories is one of the basic ways that people deal with large sets of objects. Tabs give you a means of grouping web pages when you have many of them open. Falling back to the operating system's top-level window management means that you have one big flat pile of browser windows, far less manageable than a small handful of windows each with a small handful of tabs.
[...]
Now, granted, there will inevitably be students who are too easily distracted -- "Oooh, shiny!" -- to pay attention even to good profs.
The problem I see with this and many of the other comments posted here is that you're only admitting to the existence of two variables that dictate a student's attentiveness: The student's ability to resist distraction, and the professor's skill at "being interesting".
The third variable that has to be acknowledged is the power of the distractions available to the student. Suppose a professor had to give his lecture in front of a large movie screen on which a porno (no sound) was being projected. When most of the class was paying attention to the porno, rather than the professor, could you honestly argue that it was the fault of the professor for being too boring, or the fault of the students for being too easily distracted?
Now WiFi is clearly a lesser distraction than the porno, but it's also clearly a greater distraction than a pen and a doodle pad. It raises the bar both for the student's ability to focus, and the professor's ability to entertain.
Because Spielburg was rejected by the school he wanted to go to. Gates wasn't; Gates dropped out of Harvard.
No you won't. Read the article.
Even if we did have the required technology (we don't), what would be the point? Those generation ships would never return. We might not even find out what their fate was.
Colonizing other planets is of no value to us here on earth, unless it's possible to set up some sort of regular trade (in goods or knowledge) between ourselves and the colonies. Given the limitations that our current understanding of physics puts on effective communications over such distances (much less actual transportation) that isn't going to happen. Our understanding of physics might change, but it would be stupid to spend time and energy on sending out those ships when we don't know what the future holds, technologically.
Yeah, it would give a few people like yourself warm fuzzies if we did it, because it fulfills a deep need to see yourself as a participant (however minor) in some grand narrative. But without some sort of economic upside, not enough people will be willing to commit the funds to send out the ships. They'd rather fulfill their need for a narrative through religion, which can be much cheaper, when properly implemented.
There's another reason to use credit cards instead of debit cards, though: If your checking account pays interest, using a debit card will deduct from your balance immediately. Using a credit card and paying it off every month, you won't pay any interest to the credit card company, and your bank will pay you interest on the money you spend for the time period between when you buy something and when you actually pay the credit card bill on which it appears. Most of the time the difference won't be very large, but if you're making large purchases, especially early in the month, it's worth the trouble.
Also, regardless of what the liability law says, there's a clear practical difference between the two: If your credit card is misused, you can challenge the charge, and it's up to the company to collect from you. If your debit card is misused, the money is already gone from your account, and the ball is in your court to recover what is rightfully yours.
You're right, this is frightening. Because, of course, the acme of virtue is to put the maximum effort possible into one's grocery shopping and bill paying.
The 1GHz TiBook was announced on Wednesday, November 6th. You posted on Thursday, November 7th. How is it that you were able to use this machine only a day after it was announced, long before anyone else (even the bricks-and-mortar Apple stores) has been able to get their hands on one?
I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago; I bought a G4/450 cube. The OS/X public beta came out around the same time, and I bought it, and was pretty disappointed. Found it painfully slow and lacking in useful native apps. So I kept spending all of my time in OS 9.
Then 10.0 came out; I installed it, and still found it painfully slow. Tried using it a while, but ended up going back to OS 9 and staying there.
Then, around the time that 10.1 came out, I bumped my system RAM from 128 to 384. That and installing 10.1 made the system finally fast enough for day-to-day use in OS/X. The machine still felt very sluggish browsing the web compared to my Windows box at work, but I couldn't blame that on the OS: IE wasn't any faster under OS 9 than it was under OS/X. And at that point, no browser on any platform seemed anywhere near as fast to me as IE on windows.
Nowadays, with the upgrade to 10.2 (my machine can use Quartz Extreme), Chimera for my web browsing, and another RAM upgrade, the machine feels quite snappy. It might still be slower than the 1.something GHz Pentium I use at work, but the difference is much smaller now, and nonexistent in terms of its impact on usability.
While some things, like window resizing and menu opening and so on still feel slower than they did under OS 9, Jaguar scales to handle large numbers of running applications much better than 9 did; It's not uncommon for me to have 8-10 programs running at once, many actively doing some work.That would have been pretty hopeless under OS 9.
Basically, I consider this to be desktop computing nirvana. Well, almost. When my new 1 GHz PowerBook gets here in a few weeks, that will be desktop computing nirvana.
So why not buy 2 extra batteries? The total price would still be only $260, considerably less than the $300 they want for the Valence monster. And more significantly to me, the standard PB batteries are much more conveniently sized. The Valence thing is 12" x 9". I'd have a much easier time finding space for 2 extra PowerBook or iBook batteries in my laptop bag.
Also note: The new PowerBooks come with 61 Wh batteries, not 55. The Apple store doesn't seem to be selling the 55 wH batteries seperately, yet, but I'm sure they will, and I'm guessing that we'll see improved iBook batteries, too.
Apple does not 'officially' support them, but I understand that some people are running OS/X on pre-G3 PPCs.
The first G3s were released at the end of 1997. Would you want to run Windows XP on a machine from 1997/98? I doubt it. And if I'm not mistaken, MS only officially supports XP on machines conforming to the PC99 specification (which dates to, you guessed it, 1999). So why aren't you accusing MS of having dropped their entire user base?
My guess is this: Apple appears to 'drop' their user base periodically because Mac users just don't upgrade their machines as often, on average; If you're upgrading your PC every couple of years, it's unlikely that any OS update is going to leave you behind.
The G3 and G4 are PPC chips. The move to G3s and G4s was not a platform switch.
Appleworks is only included with the 'consumer' machines -- the iBooks and iMacs. Maybe the eMacs, too.
Yes. Also, if you download something like DVDBackup and use it to copy the DVD to your hard drive before your trip, the Apple DVD player can play it from there, which will probably consume less power than spinning the DVD drive would.
Perhaps the original poster was trying to link to this article. The article is about the Radeon 9000 Mobility, but it includes a Radeon 9000 vs. Radeon 7500 vs. GeForce performance comparison.
Water absorbs far more of the light passing through it than air does. Try this: Put on some goggles, jump in the ocean, and estimate how far you can see. Now, surface, and once again, estimate how far you can see. There will likely be several orders of magnitude of difference between the two.
For a company the size of Apple, not very good. That $5 million probably wouldn't even cover all of the development costs. Good engineers don't come cheap, and the engineers are just one part of the process of making a real software product.
The stickers I've seen up close have been defaced in roughly this manner.
Er, the article and this dicussion are about tech companies -- companies that have to create products and ideas in order to succeed. This is a very different sort of business than selling coffee.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? Read the article, though: Cringely provides several examples of companies that had their management replaced during periods when they were profitable, with money in the bank.
You know, there's a Dilbert strip in which the PHB estimates the size of a development project by assuming that everything he doesn't know how to do is easy.
The various Slashdotters scoffing at the idea of an "art therapist" remind me of that, for some reason...
I used to leave the default message on my answering machine, too. At the time, I had a job that would have me out of town for a week at a time, so I would come home to find the occasional marketing message on the machine.
Once, a marketer who got the machine and didn't realize it launched into her little spiel, chattered away for about 30 seconds, until she reached the first point in the script that called for her to ask me a question. So she asked the question, and, getting no response started saying "Hello? Hello?" She continued this for at least a minute before giving up and disconnecting.
You're doing some desperate deck-stacking, here:
And if you run out of flash cards on vacation, you have several options: If you already own a laptop (lots of us do), take it along and download photos to its harddrive whenever the card gets full. If not, well, it's increasingly easy to find computers with CD burners everywhere, so carry along some blanks and find time on a machine to download and burn images. Admittedly, neither of these solutions are perfect, but the situation isn't nearly as dire as you seem to think.
How many times can you reuse those 3 rolls of film?
The question is: How much do you value your time?
Sure, the $10/month is more expensive than 'free', but with Rhapsody, I find what I want, faster and with less trouble than I ever did with Gnutella or any other P2P system. And I find more of what I want -- the P2P systems I tried were barely tolerable for finding fairly current, popular music. For, say, old blues recordings, they would be worthless.