Whoever is paying the architect is hopefully the arbiter of whether a building functions or not. Of course sometimes they don't care about the occupants, which is a problem, but then it's a difficult field.
I take your point about function regardless of aesthetics and human impact, but my point is that if your building is meant for human use then function must include aesthetics and human impact. That's the whole trouble with brutalism; ignoring those in an attempt to build a "functional" building results in a building that doesn't actually do its job, and is therefore not actually very functional.
At the risk of using a stupid analogy, it's a lot like a computer program's user interface. An interface designed from a purely "functional" standpoint with no regard to how people will actually use the thing can end up being essentially impossible to use. A program designed to be beautiful can also be impossible to be use. But designing it to be functional while taking into account the human factor can leave you with something that is both beautiful and usable.
I think he's saying that he's applying for other jobs after a stint at Accenture. But how he thinks a 50% acceptance rate for job interviews is a bad thing is completely beyond me.
Brutalism isn't function first, it's function only. It's perfectly possible to put function first but still come up with something beautiful.
Also, if a residential building is "completely unsuited for actual human occupation" then it's not actually functional at all, which is pretty far away from putting function first.
We desperately need people who know there way around large data warehouses, can hack some basic SQL and code, and can figure out how to get the data that is locked up by IT into a format that we can use to drive meaningful customer experiences.
Good lord, do you actually use "drive meaningful customer experiences" in your pitch? No wonder you can't find any more qualified people!
Understood. But this seems like what happens today anyway. Try taking a fancy entertainment system out of one car and putting it into a car of a different brand. You may be able to get it up and running with some hacking, but it's going to take a lot of work to get fancy features like steering wheel controls, speed-sensitive volume, or oil-change to function properly. The original manufacturer won't support you in any way. Much like the process of getting OS X to run on a generic PC.
You also realize that, back then, the hardware actually cost those premiums, right?
No, I don't. Case in point, the original Mac was going to be sold for $1,995, at which it would still make a healthy profit. Then they decided it was popular enough that it would still do well at $2,495, and that is the price at which it was introduced. The extra $500 wasn't due to any changes in the hardware or manufacturing process, it was pure profit.
Things were different in the 1980s, too. Back in the 1980s, people bought hardware and put software on. Today, people buy software to put on their hardware. There is a big difference between those, even though it may seem subtle.
People don't care if they've got a P4, an Athlon, Hyperthreading, dual core, or any of that stuff. What they care about is their preferred software running quickly and stable.
I don't buy it. Then as now, most people didn't care what kind of system they had, they cared about what they could do with it. Another case in point, the original Mac did poorly in the marketplace until the introduction of the LaserWriter, at which point desktop publishing software and hardware drove its sales significantly higher. These people didn't buy Macs for the hardware. They bought it for the capabilities, which no other affordable system had.
What would happen to, say, Ford, if they started selling packaged "automotive entertainment systems", but required that they only be installed in a Ford? And, in doing so, they put a proprietary coupler/circuitry/whatever in all Fords so that it would work with a Ford.
And then they didn't advertise the fact of this coupler, but instead advertised "Works with 2008 models!" - like what Apple has been doing with Intel (as people associate "Intel" with "Wintel" - and all the respective vendors).
I'm afraid I don't grasp this analogy at all. Apple hasn't been doing anything underhanded with Intel. All of their Intel machines are regular Intel machines and will happily run Windows, Linux, or any other Intel operating system. I have no idea what the Apple equivalent of this "coupler" would be or what significance it has.
And even that's not a terribly good analogy, as Apple's hardware tends to be the exact same thing (or close enough to not make much of a difference) as their competition.
To the extent that their hardware is the same, their prices are the same as well. Most of what premium does exist is explained by the better physical design and form factor.
BTW, this is Apple's heyday. Not in the 1980s.
It really depends on what you're looking at. In terms of raw dollars, certainly they're doing better now than at any time before. In terms of widespread cultural influence, ditto. In terms of relative dominance within the field of personal computers, not at all. The Apple II was the gold standard for personal computers, and the Mac revolutionized everything. Today's Apple occupies a tiny corner of an enormous Windows universe, and their offering isn't really all that fundamentally different from the competitors.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
And let's remember that this applies to emergencies as well. If you see someone in a crowd who needs medical help, go help him, and call for assistance if he needs it. Don't assume somebody else will do it; everybody else is going to assume that too! If you're the one who needs medical assistance, or you're with that person, don't shout out "call 911." Pick a person out of the crowd, point to him, and say, "You, call 911."
There are over a million registered users on this site. You'll find an extremely wide range of opinions in such a large population. There's nothing strange about finding some people who think Microsoft should be destroyed and finding some other people who think AT&T shouldn't be prosecuted.
For the purposes of this conversation I really couldn't possibly care less about how the US compares to the rest of the world. We're talking about how things were before the AT&T breakup compared to how they are now. The fact that the US is lagging behind certain other parts of the world in some areas is utterly irrelevant to that.
I would love to hear your spiel about why circuit-switched POTS networks still have a point today, if that is in fact what you believe. Because I simply do not see it. Do they have advantages? Yes. Are they worth the extreme cost needed to build and maintain them in the 21st century? Absolutely not.
As for developing packet-switching technology at Bell Labs for ARPAnet, that once again misses the point. AT&T developed lots of cool stuff. But by the time they were broken up they were still providing very little to the public. If AT&T were still around I'm sure that there would be an internet in some form, but I'm also sure that I would not be paying $60/month for a 6Mbit connection to it (laugh if you want, again I'm not comparing to the rest of the world here) or that I'd be able to use it to make free calls all over the world.
That line seems just as arbitrary and pointless as drawing the line at conception to me. What's the difference between a baby one day before birth and one day after birth? Aside from no longer being wet and inside somebody, not very much!
This is easily the most annoying thing about phone support.
First the automated system asks you to enter your account number, telephone number, or what have you. Then you get to sit on hold while they scare up a human.
Then you get to the human. What's the first thing they ask? "What is your account number?" My god, I could just kill them!
But it doesn't stop there! First-level support is useless, so you get past them and they transfer you along to someone more useful. Once you arrive, what's the first thing you hear? You guessed it! "What is your account number?"
Doesn't this repetition cost these companies valuable time and thus money? Is it really that hard to make a support system that will hold on to my information as my call is transferred through your organization?
I'm not talking about treatments which are risky to the fetus, but an outright abortion. However, I could easily be convinced that the second line should be moved back farther.
It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization.
Wow, really? I didn't know that in 1982 you could get ubiquitous cheap cell phones, residential internet connections with speeds of 5Mbit and up, unlimited calling plans to anywhere in the country for less than the cost of two good restaurant meals a month, and calls to other countries for prices so low they're practically free.
Maybe you're referring specifically to the circuit-switched POTS network. Yeah, that's probably in bad shape, along with the canal system, the buggy-whip makers, the steamship yards, and all the other obsolete technology of yesteryear.
The fact that we're talking about a phone network at all is a bit of an anachronism. VoIP has made the phone network utterly obsolete. It's all just data now, so we should be talking about the data network, which is in fine shape and gives us an absurd amount of choice and features for our telephony. This most assuredly never would have happened without the AT&T breakup and subsequent deregulation.
Ahh but when you provide a sperm with an egg the sperm dies it spills out its genetic material and dies, in a similar manner the egg itself other than providing chemical nutrients in the process is consumed. There is no egg or no sperm it is a rather finite transition with a finite beginning and end from sperm and egg to a human embryo. where as the transition from embryo to toddler is no more finite than from toddler to pre-schooler..
This is all totally arbitrary. There's no effective difference between killing a sperm before it fertilizes an egg and killing that egg after it's been fertilized. You can say, hey, this transition is more abrupt than the rest of it, this would be a good place to draw a line. That's perfectly reasonable. But you can't say, this is the only morally right place to draw a line.
And what restriction would that be?
I propose a sort of sliding scale. Abortions for any reason should be allowed up to a certain point, then abortions only for conditions that threaten the life of the mother, then disallowed. Where to put these lines is still a very difficult question, of course, but putting them at, say, the end of the first and second trimesters respectively seems like a reasonable position to me.
I wonder if the phone still technically belongs to the old NTT.
Wouldn't surprise me. I still hear stories of old people who are still paying $3/month (or whatever the cost is), month after month, year after year, decade after decade, to their local phone company to rent a telephone, just because it's what they've always done.
Apple's hardware is still better. Maybe not in the electrical sense, but in the design sense. At the high end, their towers are often cheaper than the competition, and are generally much better put together. With laptops, the Intel switch has led to a lot of people buying Apple-branded laptops just to install Windows on them. The superior quality of the hardware is definitely something that draws people.
As for the OS, it's clear that you don't really know what you're talking about. OS X borrows some pieces of the kernel and bits of userland from FreeBSD. It's certainly not "based on" FreeBSD. OS X has a continuous UNIX lineage that goes back to far before FreeBSD was even conceived.
Yeah, I should have phrased that more precisely. It is illegal to void your warranty because of something like this. Companies can still try it, but you the customer have the law on your side if they do.
No matter how far science advances you can not provide an environment in which a sperm will become a baby, I can not happen.
Nonsense. Provide and egg and the rest essentially takes care of itself.
Yet you are willing to accept prohibitions on murder as reasonable and good but dismiss any claims on the status of the unborn because 'you're not sure' that seems rather lazy of you.
I never dismissed any claims on the status of the unborn. I accept reasonable restrictions on abortion, based on current knowledge. All I reject is claims of certain knowledge of what is right when those claims are based on fuzzy and illogical evidence.
Apple gets away with this sort of stuff because the market is so broken. If there were multiple, practical alternatives for desktop OS's with fast paced innovation driven by competition, Apple would not even be able to bundle their OS and hardware without losing money.
What an enormous wad of bullshit. Apple was doing this sort of bundling long before Microsoft established their monopoly. You remember back in the 80s when there was real desktop competition, right? Well, that time was also the heyday of Apple Computer, Inc. They enjoyed more success in that period than at any other time prior to the past few years, and it was all done in a diverse, competitive market and with a fully integrated hardware/software solution.
1. You should learn; it isn't that difficult. I was changing my mother's car's oil at 15. Just make sure you don't drop the drain plug in the pan:)
At $20 every six months or so (my car tells me when it wants the oil changed, so I ignore the little stickers they put on my windshield), it is absolutely not worth my time to learn how to do this myself.
Go to ramseeker.com, look at Mac Pro memory. 4GB FD-DIMMS (not only with the right electronic specs, but with the proper heat sink, very important as the Mac Pro effectively requires a nonstandard heat sink) for $290 each.
Apple RAM and HD upgrade prices have always been insane, pretty much ever since they started offering such upgrades. It's definitely not new with the Intel Macs, not by a long shot.
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Whoever is paying the architect is hopefully the arbiter of whether a building functions or not. Of course sometimes they don't care about the occupants, which is a problem, but then it's a difficult field.
I take your point about function regardless of aesthetics and human impact, but my point is that if your building is meant for human use then function must include aesthetics and human impact. That's the whole trouble with brutalism; ignoring those in an attempt to build a "functional" building results in a building that doesn't actually do its job, and is therefore not actually very functional.
At the risk of using a stupid analogy, it's a lot like a computer program's user interface. An interface designed from a purely "functional" standpoint with no regard to how people will actually use the thing can end up being essentially impossible to use. A program designed to be beautiful can also be impossible to be use. But designing it to be functional while taking into account the human factor can leave you with something that is both beautiful and usable.
I think he's saying that he's applying for other jobs after a stint at Accenture. But how he thinks a 50% acceptance rate for job interviews is a bad thing is completely beyond me.
Brutalism isn't function first, it's function only. It's perfectly possible to put function first but still come up with something beautiful.
Also, if a residential building is "completely unsuited for actual human occupation" then it's not actually functional at all, which is pretty far away from putting function first.
We desperately need people who know there way around large data warehouses, can hack some basic SQL and code, and can figure out how to get the data that is locked up by IT into a format that we can use to drive meaningful customer experiences.
Good lord, do you actually use "drive meaningful customer experiences" in your pitch? No wonder you can't find any more qualified people!
Understood. But this seems like what happens today anyway. Try taking a fancy entertainment system out of one car and putting it into a car of a different brand. You may be able to get it up and running with some hacking, but it's going to take a lot of work to get fancy features like steering wheel controls, speed-sensitive volume, or oil-change to function properly. The original manufacturer won't support you in any way. Much like the process of getting OS X to run on a generic PC.
You also realize that, back then, the hardware actually cost those premiums, right?
No, I don't. Case in point, the original Mac was going to be sold for $1,995, at which it would still make a healthy profit. Then they decided it was popular enough that it would still do well at $2,495, and that is the price at which it was introduced. The extra $500 wasn't due to any changes in the hardware or manufacturing process, it was pure profit.
Things were different in the 1980s, too. Back in the 1980s, people bought hardware and put software on. Today, people buy software to put on their hardware. There is a big difference between those, even though it may seem subtle.
People don't care if they've got a P4, an Athlon, Hyperthreading, dual core, or any of that stuff. What they care about is their preferred software running quickly and stable.
I don't buy it. Then as now, most people didn't care what kind of system they had, they cared about what they could do with it. Another case in point, the original Mac did poorly in the marketplace until the introduction of the LaserWriter, at which point desktop publishing software and hardware drove its sales significantly higher. These people didn't buy Macs for the hardware. They bought it for the capabilities, which no other affordable system had.
What would happen to, say, Ford, if they started selling packaged "automotive entertainment systems", but required that they only be installed in a Ford? And, in doing so, they put a proprietary coupler/circuitry/whatever in all Fords so that it would work with a Ford.
And then they didn't advertise the fact of this coupler, but instead advertised "Works with 2008 models!" - like what Apple has been doing with Intel (as people associate "Intel" with "Wintel" - and all the respective vendors).
I'm afraid I don't grasp this analogy at all. Apple hasn't been doing anything underhanded with Intel. All of their Intel machines are regular Intel machines and will happily run Windows, Linux, or any other Intel operating system. I have no idea what the Apple equivalent of this "coupler" would be or what significance it has.
And even that's not a terribly good analogy, as Apple's hardware tends to be the exact same thing (or close enough to not make much of a difference) as their competition.
To the extent that their hardware is the same, their prices are the same as well. Most of what premium does exist is explained by the better physical design and form factor.
BTW, this is Apple's heyday. Not in the 1980s.
It really depends on what you're looking at. In terms of raw dollars, certainly they're doing better now than at any time before. In terms of widespread cultural influence, ditto. In terms of relative dominance within the field of personal computers, not at all. The Apple II was the gold standard for personal computers, and the Mac revolutionized everything. Today's Apple occupies a tiny corner of an enormous Windows universe, and their offering isn't really all that fundamentally different from the competitors.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
And let's remember that this applies to emergencies as well. If you see someone in a crowd who needs medical help, go help him, and call for assistance if he needs it. Don't assume somebody else will do it; everybody else is going to assume that too! If you're the one who needs medical assistance, or you're with that person, don't shout out "call 911." Pick a person out of the crowd, point to him, and say, "You, call 911."
There are over a million registered users on this site. You'll find an extremely wide range of opinions in such a large population. There's nothing strange about finding some people who think Microsoft should be destroyed and finding some other people who think AT&T shouldn't be prosecuted.
Oh no, that's not what I was talking about at all. I was talking about every time I have sex!
For the purposes of this conversation I really couldn't possibly care less about how the US compares to the rest of the world. We're talking about how things were before the AT&T breakup compared to how they are now. The fact that the US is lagging behind certain other parts of the world in some areas is utterly irrelevant to that.
I would love to hear your spiel about why circuit-switched POTS networks still have a point today, if that is in fact what you believe. Because I simply do not see it. Do they have advantages? Yes. Are they worth the extreme cost needed to build and maintain them in the 21st century? Absolutely not.
As for developing packet-switching technology at Bell Labs for ARPAnet, that once again misses the point. AT&T developed lots of cool stuff. But by the time they were broken up they were still providing very little to the public. If AT&T were still around I'm sure that there would be an internet in some form, but I'm also sure that I would not be paying $60/month for a 6Mbit connection to it (laugh if you want, again I'm not comparing to the rest of the world here) or that I'd be able to use it to make free calls all over the world.
That line seems just as arbitrary and pointless as drawing the line at conception to me. What's the difference between a baby one day before birth and one day after birth? Aside from no longer being wet and inside somebody, not very much!
This is easily the most annoying thing about phone support.
First the automated system asks you to enter your account number, telephone number, or what have you. Then you get to sit on hold while they scare up a human.
Then you get to the human. What's the first thing they ask? "What is your account number?" My god, I could just kill them!
But it doesn't stop there! First-level support is useless, so you get past them and they transfer you along to someone more useful. Once you arrive, what's the first thing you hear? You guessed it! "What is your account number?"
Doesn't this repetition cost these companies valuable time and thus money? Is it really that hard to make a support system that will hold on to my information as my call is transferred through your organization?
I'm not talking about treatments which are risky to the fetus, but an outright abortion. However, I could easily be convinced that the second line should be moved back farther.
It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization.
Wow, really? I didn't know that in 1982 you could get ubiquitous cheap cell phones, residential internet connections with speeds of 5Mbit and up, unlimited calling plans to anywhere in the country for less than the cost of two good restaurant meals a month, and calls to other countries for prices so low they're practically free.
Maybe you're referring specifically to the circuit-switched POTS network. Yeah, that's probably in bad shape, along with the canal system, the buggy-whip makers, the steamship yards, and all the other obsolete technology of yesteryear.
The fact that we're talking about a phone network at all is a bit of an anachronism. VoIP has made the phone network utterly obsolete. It's all just data now, so we should be talking about the data network, which is in fine shape and gives us an absurd amount of choice and features for our telephony. This most assuredly never would have happened without the AT&T breakup and subsequent deregulation.
Ahh but when you provide a sperm with an egg the sperm dies it spills out its genetic material and dies, in a similar manner the egg itself other than providing chemical nutrients in the process is consumed. There is no egg or no sperm it is a rather finite transition with a finite beginning and end from sperm and egg to a human embryo. where as the transition from embryo to toddler is no more finite than from toddler to pre-schooler..
This is all totally arbitrary. There's no effective difference between killing a sperm before it fertilizes an egg and killing that egg after it's been fertilized. You can say, hey, this transition is more abrupt than the rest of it, this would be a good place to draw a line. That's perfectly reasonable. But you can't say, this is the only morally right place to draw a line.
And what restriction would that be?
I propose a sort of sliding scale. Abortions for any reason should be allowed up to a certain point, then abortions only for conditions that threaten the life of the mother, then disallowed. Where to put these lines is still a very difficult question, of course, but putting them at, say, the end of the first and second trimesters respectively seems like a reasonable position to me.
I wonder if the phone still technically belongs to the old NTT.
Wouldn't surprise me. I still hear stories of old people who are still paying $3/month (or whatever the cost is), month after month, year after year, decade after decade, to their local phone company to rent a telephone, just because it's what they've always done.
Apple's hardware is still better. Maybe not in the electrical sense, but in the design sense. At the high end, their towers are often cheaper than the competition, and are generally much better put together. With laptops, the Intel switch has led to a lot of people buying Apple-branded laptops just to install Windows on them. The superior quality of the hardware is definitely something that draws people.
As for the OS, it's clear that you don't really know what you're talking about. OS X borrows some pieces of the kernel and bits of userland from FreeBSD. It's certainly not "based on" FreeBSD. OS X has a continuous UNIX lineage that goes back to far before FreeBSD was even conceived.
No, that doesn't sound particularly sane to me!
Yeah, I should have phrased that more precisely. It is illegal to void your warranty because of something like this. Companies can still try it, but you the customer have the law on your side if they do.
No matter how far science advances you can not provide an environment in which a sperm will become a baby, I can not happen.
Nonsense. Provide and egg and the rest essentially takes care of itself.
Yet you are willing to accept prohibitions on murder as reasonable and good but dismiss any claims on the status of the unborn because 'you're not sure' that seems rather lazy of you.
I never dismissed any claims on the status of the unborn. I accept reasonable restrictions on abortion, based on current knowledge. All I reject is claims of certain knowledge of what is right when those claims are based on fuzzy and illogical evidence.
Apple gets away with this sort of stuff because the market is so broken. If there were multiple, practical alternatives for desktop OS's with fast paced innovation driven by competition, Apple would not even be able to bundle their OS and hardware without losing money.
What an enormous wad of bullshit. Apple was doing this sort of bundling long before Microsoft established their monopoly. You remember back in the 80s when there was real desktop competition, right? Well, that time was also the heyday of Apple Computer, Inc. They enjoyed more success in that period than at any other time prior to the past few years, and it was all done in a diverse, competitive market and with a fully integrated hardware/software solution.
You are confused. Going from 0.46% to 0.68% is 48% growth, not 0.2% growth. You can't just subtract the two numbers and call it a percentage growth.
1. You should learn; it isn't that difficult. I was changing my mother's car's oil at 15. Just make sure you don't drop the drain plug in the pan :)
At $20 every six months or so (my car tells me when it wants the oil changed, so I ignore the little stickers they put on my windshield), it is absolutely not worth my time to learn how to do this myself.
There are other stores besides Newegg, you know.
Go to ramseeker.com, look at Mac Pro memory. 4GB FD-DIMMS (not only with the right electronic specs, but with the proper heat sink, very important as the Mac Pro effectively requires a nonstandard heat sink) for $290 each.
Apple RAM and HD upgrade prices have always been insane, pretty much ever since they started offering such upgrades. It's definitely not new with the Intel Macs, not by a long shot.