No, it isn't just you. "Poor RF" "Poor sound quality" AND the keyboard is awkward.
Why would I even want to look at it?
Does it sometimes seem that designers get so excited about the bells and whistles that they forget functionality altogether?
One of the least-cool but most functional gadgets ever invented was the Radio Shack M100 -- even by the standards of the 80's, it looked clunky, it had one of the worst screens in history, but it did what it was designed to do (and actually a few things more -- anyone else ever hook one up to a Macintosh?) But cool? Nope. The darn thing just worked.
How about spending the revenue from the fines on a series of public-service announcements and ads reminding people that the best prevention for these things is for them to produce no results? The big problem with spam, telemarketers, et al is that every now and then someone actually does buy something and encourages them.
Aside from a few very lonesome shut-ins (who are victims of this sort of stuff, not genuine consumers) I don't know of anyone who likes getting spam or telemarketing calls.
Nor will I miss ComputerWare, the old one or its more recent incarnation.
I was delighted when I found a store with abundant Apple products in the late 80's. The problem was that it was impossible for a woman to get waited on in the place, something that only seemed to get worse over the years. (I kept trying.) I admit, the only ComputerWares I've been in were the Palo Alto and Berkeley stores, but their behavior in this respect was 100% consistent. It's very annoying to be in a store, ready to buy, when you can't get the attention of salespeople who are too busy schmoozing male looky-loos.
I was recently in the Soho Apple store in NYC and it was a whole different story: great service, no annoyances. I'm glad someone has finally figured out that the stuff in purses is green, too. Good for Apple.
He invented the "bagless vacuum cleaner" and one of his engineers' "inovations" was to have a clear case round the rubbish it sucked up. They thought it was cool. One of the most interested people in the design was Steve Jobs...The rest is history.
Sorta turns "Garbage in, garbage out" on its head, doesn't it?
When individual countries use codes that are similar, it can make for a lot of confusion. Postal codes for Jerusalem, Israel look remarkably like zips for parts of California.
I always tell people who are sending me snail mail from the U.S. to OMIT the postal code, because inevitably it will slow down the mail -- first it has to go to wherever in California, THEN here. Never mind that it says "ISRAEL" in block letters.
I'm not sure that this new idea is the answer, either, but the current systems only work sometimes.
Right now newspapers and newsstations keep each other in check by double-checking facts.
Not that that works all that well. Columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle noted recently that newspapers no longer bother with fact checkers. Except when someone thinks that there might be a story in someone else's sloppy story, nothing gets checked, ever -- even by the editorial folks at that newspaper.
We're already relying on a system that isn't really there, for the accuracy of what's in the paper.
I'm living in Jerusalem right now, and I assure you that what I've seen in my year here bears no resemblance to either Fox or CNN.
Don't rob yourself of that valuable few percent you get from tactile-kinesthetic involvement!
Keep in mind, too, that learning styles vary, and for an individual, that tactile-kinesthetic factor may be a key item for memory.
I had a very uneven record my last run through school (25 years ago, eek) and before I went back to school, decided to invest in some testing to find out about strengths and weaknesses. The charts that the consultant came back to me with were pretty wild -- I tended to be off the top or off the bottom, with no middle. And sure enough, knowing my learning style and playing to it is critical for me -- and MY responsibility, not the school's.
Learn what works for you, and do it. What things do you remember most easily? How do you rememeber those things? Then translate that into your organization and note taking for class. For some people, that means lots of notes. For me, it means lots of highlighters in many colors. (Small bright objects, etc. Sigh.) Electronics rarely figures into that picture, I notice. I love my laptop, but I need a pencil and a pack of highlighters or I'm lost in a tough class.
Of course, there was the advice of the elderly rabbi who told me the best way to learn any foreign language: foreign languages are best learned in bed. Choose your dates carefully.
In a nutshell the grandmother can provide additional food resources to the weaned children of her child or her childrens mates (to increase their fertility) since she no longer has to provide those resources to her direct children and can produce excess to what she consumes.
Interesting. That supports my current favorite perception about menopause, which is that it actually seems to make a woman operate more efficiently in a lot of ways. "Gains weight easily" translates to "needs less food." "Insomnia" translates into "needs less sleep." Hot flashes, however, only have utility in the wintertime.
Definitely this is the women-not-invited dept., as billed, but it reminds me of a conversation I had with a 98 year old woman in 1982. I was 28, had a toddler and an infant, and was very much afraid that motherhood would be the end of any other kind of creative work for me. (The exhaustion factor alone was daunting.)
Miss Mae said to me, in a Miss-Daisy sort of Southern accent, "Honey, women are not like men -- we get better with age. After all, you can't think straight until your parts settle. I promise, when you are 45, you'll know what you want to do with yourself, and it won't have anything to do with diapers."
She was right about women, or about me, at any rate. I'm 48 and in my first year of professional school while the "baby" is at his first year of college. (What this has to do with my "parts" I am less sure.)
What I notice is that my younger colleagues are quick and bright, but that what I lack in speed I make up in context. And all of us are passionate about what we are doing, but the flavor is a little different depending on age. When we are working well together, the combination of gifts is truly wonderful. Perhaps instead of framing the "game" (of math or of anything else) as a contest, we ought to be looking at ways to make progress that makes use of both the experience of age and the quickness of youth.
SF Chronicle reviewer suggested that the best special effect in the movie was Lara's bra; I nominate it for the Worst Special Effect. (Worse even than bad implants. Scary.)
I do think it was sweet that her dad tried to rescue her in this one. Nice Father's Day movie, Jon.
I suspect that the real difference in this gentleman's mind between Linux and any other operating system is the price. If something is inexpensive (much less -- gasp! -- FREE) there must be something wrong with it.
Kind of elegant, really, that his perception of the "something wrong" is that it is easily modifiable and apparently inexpensive. Identifying two features as bugs is a nice reversal of Microsoft's "it's not a bug, it's a feature" stance.
But why don't women WANT to be in the tech fields? Pyr suggests that it's because more men feel they belong with computers. I've been an observer of a group of computer-inclined high school age people for the past couple of years. (My son is a member of this group.) There was one girl who was interested in "banging out code all night" and who felt she "belonged with computers." The trouble (or so it seemed to me, on the sidelines) was that since she was the ONLY girl in the group. There are other girls in the school who are math or science inclined, but this one girl was the only one who hung with the computer geeks. Seemed to me, watching, that she must be absolutely driven to work with computers, because her situation in the group sure looked miserable from the outside: all her interactions with the others were complicated by hormones (theirs and hers) and by a bunch of gender noise. She couldn't just be one of the boys, because she wasn't a boy. And since there were no other girls in the school THAT DRIVEN to work with computers, she was the only girl in the group. Pretty lonesome situation. So I tend to think that one of the problems is critical mass: that as long as the female geeks are in such small numbers, it takes a pretty remarkable young woman to insist on being a female geek. How to move the process along? I think that some concious and deliberate mentoring from adult women in the field might work wonders.
If I take a trip in my car to an unfamiliar part of my home town, a trip that will cost me, oh, two bucks worth of gas, I generally check the map BEFORE I leave home, just so's I won't get lost. Now, if I'm reading that article properly, some of the folks landing that thing didn't really look at the map closely until AFTER the hardware disappeared. Not before leaving "home", not before getting to the strange part of town, and there was considerably more than two bucks worth of gas involved. I tend to think of money put into the space program as money well spent, but this is ridiculous. I say take their toys away and send them to bed with no supper.
And all such optical goodies, but especially eyeglasses. I, for one, would be in a bad way without mine, and I bet they originally had a gadgety air to them. Matches: Earlier than the Zippo lighter, and more universal. The ballpoint pen. The definition of "gadget" is definitely a problem -- like the contact lens, it appears to be in the eye of the beholder.
Times Square not the whole story
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
I disagree that "a curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it?s ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration." Nope, Jon, that was New Yorkers. Here in the Bay Area, people stayed home, or went to private parties (turnout on the Embarcadero was low). I normally avoid TV, but found myself staying near it all through the day, enjoying the sense of global celebration while I cooked for a bunch of my 16-yr-old's friends. From a very informal poll of friends, I gather I wasn't the only one who was tracking the celebration via TV and/or PC, feeling a part of the whole world, not just my little slice of it. We didn't celebrate technology so much as we just used it to inhance our sense of connection to the whole human race. Seems to me that that's what these boxes are FOR, not to celebrate in and of themselves, but to use as we progress to become more fully human.
Agreed, it isn't news. I find it curious that the news media are much more interested in people who isolate via this technology (like this guy and his dotcom-cum-hype lifestyle) than they are in people who use it to be more connected to the rest of humanity. The real power in the net, as well as in the technology as a whole, is in its ability to put us in touch with each other, not its potential for isolating us behind walls of used pizza.com boxes.
I nominate John Harrison, who devised the first reliable marine chronograph. Not only did he spend a lifetime building a better clock, he was thoroughly unappreciated in that lifetime. And his clocks changed the world -- the marine chronograph made modern navigation possible, and gave us a whole new window into space and time.
Agreed, that #5 should be "cutting the cord" re cell phones and palms. Maybe it should be even higher. Back about July, I began noticing Palm Pilots in the hands of individuals I knew to be rather techno-cautious, maybe even techno-phobic. It's one thing to see geeks with a new tech goodie, it's quite another to see Junior League types turning up with Palm Pilots in their purses. Very, very interesting, I thought, as we exchanged business cards in a most enlightened fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, and the Queen thought she'd had an "annus horribilis" a few years ago!!
No, it isn't just you. "Poor RF" "Poor sound quality" AND the keyboard is awkward.
Why would I even want to look at it?
Does it sometimes seem that designers get so excited about the bells and whistles that they forget functionality altogether?
One of the least-cool but most functional gadgets ever invented was the Radio Shack M100 -- even by the standards of the 80's, it looked clunky, it had one of the worst screens in history, but it did what it was designed to do (and actually a few things more -- anyone else ever hook one up to a Macintosh?) But cool? Nope. The darn thing just worked.
How about spending the revenue from the fines on a series of public-service announcements and ads reminding people that the best prevention for these things is for them to produce no results? The big problem with spam, telemarketers, et al is that every now and then someone actually does buy something and encourages them.
Aside from a few very lonesome shut-ins (who are victims of this sort of stuff, not genuine consumers) I don't know of anyone who likes getting spam or telemarketing calls.
Nor will I miss ComputerWare, the old one or its more recent incarnation.
I was delighted when I found a store with abundant Apple products in the late 80's. The problem was that it was impossible for a woman to get waited on in the place, something that only seemed to get worse over the years. (I kept trying.) I admit, the only ComputerWares I've been in were the Palo Alto and Berkeley stores, but their behavior in this respect was 100% consistent. It's very annoying to be in a store, ready to buy, when you can't get the attention of salespeople who are too busy schmoozing male looky-loos.
I was recently in the Soho Apple store in NYC and it was a whole different story: great service, no annoyances. I'm glad someone has finally figured out that the stuff in purses is green, too. Good for Apple.
He invented the "bagless vacuum cleaner" and one of his engineers' "inovations" was to have a clear case round the rubbish it sucked up. They thought it was cool. One of the most interested people in the design was Steve Jobs...The rest is history.
Sorta turns "Garbage in, garbage out" on its head, doesn't it?
When individual countries use codes that are similar, it can make for a lot of confusion. Postal codes for Jerusalem, Israel look remarkably like zips for parts of California.
I always tell people who are sending me snail mail from the U.S. to OMIT the postal code, because inevitably it will slow down the mail -- first it has to go to wherever in California, THEN here. Never mind that it says "ISRAEL" in block letters.
I'm not sure that this new idea is the answer, either, but the current systems only work sometimes.
Right now newspapers and newsstations keep each other in check by double-checking facts.
Not that that works all that well. Columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle noted recently that newspapers no longer bother with fact checkers. Except when someone thinks that there might be a story in someone else's sloppy story, nothing gets checked, ever -- even by the editorial folks at that newspaper.
We're already relying on a system that isn't really there, for the accuracy of what's in the paper.
I'm living in Jerusalem right now, and I assure you that what I've seen in my year here bears no resemblance to either Fox or CNN.
Don't rob yourself of that valuable few percent you get from tactile-kinesthetic involvement!
Keep in mind, too, that learning styles vary, and for an individual, that tactile-kinesthetic factor may be a key item for memory.
I had a very uneven record my last run through school (25 years ago, eek) and before I went back to school, decided to invest in some testing to find out about strengths and weaknesses. The charts that the consultant came back to me with were pretty wild -- I tended to be off the top or off the bottom, with no middle. And sure enough, knowing my learning style and playing to it is critical for me -- and MY responsibility, not the school's.
Learn what works for you, and do it. What things do you remember most easily? How do you rememeber those things? Then translate that into your organization and note taking for class. For some people, that means lots of notes. For me, it means lots of highlighters in many colors. (Small bright objects, etc. Sigh.) Electronics rarely figures into that picture, I notice. I love my laptop, but I need a pencil and a pack of highlighters or I'm lost in a tough class.
Of course, there was the advice of the elderly rabbi who told me the best way to learn any foreign language: foreign languages are best learned in bed. Choose your dates carefully.
LEGO was the original plug-and-play. Heck, it is plug-AS-play.
In a nutshell the grandmother can provide additional food resources to the weaned children of her child or her childrens mates (to increase their fertility) since she no longer has to provide those resources to her direct children and can produce excess to what she consumes.
Interesting. That supports my current favorite perception about menopause, which is that it actually seems to make a woman operate more efficiently in a lot of ways. "Gains weight easily" translates to "needs less food." "Insomnia" translates into "needs less sleep." Hot flashes, however, only have utility in the wintertime.
Your life past this point is merely an exercise in selfish indulgence.
...?
And yours is an exercise in
Definitely this is the women-not-invited dept., as billed, but it reminds me of a conversation I had with a 98 year old woman in 1982. I was 28, had a toddler and an infant, and was very much afraid that motherhood would be the end of any other kind of creative work for me. (The exhaustion factor alone was daunting.)
Miss Mae said to me, in a Miss-Daisy sort of Southern accent, "Honey, women are not like men -- we get better with age. After all, you can't think straight until your parts settle. I promise, when you are 45, you'll know what you want to do with yourself, and it won't have anything to do with diapers."
She was right about women, or about me, at any rate. I'm 48 and in my first year of professional school while the "baby" is at his first year of college. (What this has to do with my "parts" I am less sure.)
What I notice is that my younger colleagues are quick and bright, but that what I lack in speed I make up in context. And all of us are passionate about what we are doing, but the flavor is a little different depending on age. When we are working well together, the combination of gifts is truly wonderful. Perhaps instead of framing the "game" (of math or of anything else) as a contest, we ought to be looking at ways to make progress that makes use of both the experience of age and the quickness of youth.
SF Chronicle reviewer suggested that the best special effect in the movie was Lara's bra; I nominate it for the Worst Special Effect. (Worse even than bad implants. Scary.) I do think it was sweet that her dad tried to rescue her in this one. Nice Father's Day movie, Jon.
I suspect that the real difference in this gentleman's mind between Linux and any other operating system is the price. If something is inexpensive (much less -- gasp! -- FREE) there must be something wrong with it. Kind of elegant, really, that his perception of the "something wrong" is that it is easily modifiable and apparently inexpensive. Identifying two features as bugs is a nice reversal of Microsoft's "it's not a bug, it's a feature" stance.
But why don't women WANT to be in the tech fields? Pyr suggests that it's because more men feel they belong with computers. I've been an observer of a group of computer-inclined high school age people for the past couple of years. (My son is a member of this group.) There was one girl who was interested in "banging out code all night" and who felt she "belonged with computers." The trouble (or so it seemed to me, on the sidelines) was that since she was the ONLY girl in the group. There are other girls in the school who are math or science inclined, but this one girl was the only one who hung with the computer geeks. Seemed to me, watching, that she must be absolutely driven to work with computers, because her situation in the group sure looked miserable from the outside: all her interactions with the others were complicated by hormones (theirs and hers) and by a bunch of gender noise. She couldn't just be one of the boys, because she wasn't a boy. And since there were no other girls in the school THAT DRIVEN to work with computers, she was the only girl in the group. Pretty lonesome situation. So I tend to think that one of the problems is critical mass: that as long as the female geeks are in such small numbers, it takes a pretty remarkable young woman to insist on being a female geek. How to move the process along? I think that some concious and deliberate mentoring from adult women in the field might work wonders.
If I take a trip in my car to an unfamiliar part of my home town, a trip that will cost me, oh, two bucks worth of gas, I generally check the map BEFORE I leave home, just so's I won't get lost. Now, if I'm reading that article properly, some of the folks landing that thing didn't really look at the map closely until AFTER the hardware disappeared. Not before leaving "home", not before getting to the strange part of town, and there was considerably more than two bucks worth of gas involved. I tend to think of money put into the space program as money well spent, but this is ridiculous. I say take their toys away and send them to bed with no supper.
And all such optical goodies, but especially eyeglasses. I, for one, would be in a bad way without mine, and I bet they originally had a gadgety air to them. Matches: Earlier than the Zippo lighter, and more universal. The ballpoint pen. The definition of "gadget" is definitely a problem -- like the contact lens, it appears to be in the eye of the beholder.
I disagree that "a curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it?s ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration." Nope, Jon, that was New Yorkers. Here in the Bay Area, people stayed home, or went to private parties (turnout on the Embarcadero was low). I normally avoid TV, but found myself staying near it all through the day, enjoying the sense of global celebration while I cooked for a bunch of my 16-yr-old's friends. From a very informal poll of friends, I gather I wasn't the only one who was tracking the celebration via TV and/or PC, feeling a part of the whole world, not just my little slice of it. We didn't celebrate technology so much as we just used it to inhance our sense of connection to the whole human race. Seems to me that that's what these boxes are FOR, not to celebrate in and of themselves, but to use as we progress to become more fully human.
Agreed, it isn't news. I find it curious that the news media are much more interested in people who isolate via this technology (like this guy and his dotcom-cum-hype lifestyle) than they are in people who use it to be more connected to the rest of humanity. The real power in the net, as well as in the technology as a whole, is in its ability to put us in touch with each other, not its potential for isolating us behind walls of used pizza.com boxes.
I nominate John Harrison, who devised the first reliable marine chronograph. Not only did he spend a lifetime building a better clock, he was thoroughly unappreciated in that lifetime. And his clocks changed the world -- the marine chronograph made modern navigation possible, and gave us a whole new window into space and time.
Agreed, that #5 should be "cutting the cord" re cell phones and palms. Maybe it should be even higher. Back about July, I began noticing Palm Pilots in the hands of individuals I knew to be rather techno-cautious, maybe even techno-phobic. It's one thing to see geeks with a new tech goodie, it's quite another to see Junior League types turning up with Palm Pilots in their purses. Very, very interesting, I thought, as we exchanged business cards in a most enlightened fashion.