The automobile is most certainly not more of a ball and chain than an independence-granting device.
It's both, depending on the scenario.
I like to be able to drive into the countryside on a whim.
I also like to be able to get to my nearest big city, see a band or a show, drink more than a pint, then get home.
For your examples: * taking the train to an interview or driving Depends where the interview is. I'm a lot more likely to take the job if the office is convenient for the train.
* taking the train/bus to get groceries or driving To an extent, owning a car modifies your behaviour in this respect. Since you have a car, it's most convenient to drive it to a supermarket. I tend to buy most of my groceries in small quantities from a shop that's a short walk away.
* packing the kids up and taking the train to grandmas -or- driving Depends where Grandma lives.
* going for a weekend picnic in the country on the train... and walking a dozen or so miles. Yeah, this probably the only thing I missed when I didn't have a car -- the ability to get out into the country on a whim.
* going on a business trip, takign a plane, a train, a bus, a taxi, and then doing the same on the way back, lugging your one small bag the whole two days... or driving. I'd only drive on a business trip if the destination left me with no choice. In the UK this is seldom necessary. In a lot of US cities, I've found that if you don't have a car, you feel pretty stranded.
Maybe. But on the comparison to air traffic, do you really think it will board in 10 minutes? In this world of right wing fear mongering and TSA goons? I don't.
If some paranoid American red tape merchant screws up the risk assessment, then maybe.
But I did a 300 mile each way journey this week in the UK, and the boarding process goes like this:
- Book online (optional, but saves money)
- Advertised departure time 9:43
- Collect ticket and seat reservation at station 9:30
- Use ticket to go through automatic barrier
- Make way to platform
- 10 minutes to spare: buy a latte from the platform cafe
- Train arrives on time. Board.
- 5 hours later, arrive at city-centre destination
Added bonus for me: I live 5 minutes walk from the station -- but that's true for many, many urban dwellers in Britain.
Ok, you have a specific condition that precludes you from reading on a moving vehicle (although I find it a little doubtful that it would apply on a long distance train; which is a smooth ride with few sharp corners or sudden stops). But for the rest of us, it's a fine environment for reading.
I used to take a daily 45 minute bus ride to work. I got a newspaper delivered, read one section on the way, another on the way home. It was a very pleasant routine; only improved by my current route to work, which is a 25 minute walk.
As it happens, I'm just back from a trip to Edinburgh, a 5 hour train journey. It was some £30 more expensive than the fuel would have been if I drove, but I was more than happy to pay that for the benefits of:
- Freedom to read, sleep, fiddle with phone, get up and walk around, etc.
- Air conditioning (which my car doesn't have)
- Food and drink brought to me (admittedly not at the best prices)
- Ability to disengage brain
Those benefits add up. In fact, if I made the trip again, and wanted to have a car when I got there, I'd probably still take the train, and hire a car when I arrived, rather than take my own.
Time schedules are inconvenient, transfers suck, they tend to smell, they're not air conditioned (or the number of bodies makes it so hot it doesn't matter if it is)
Sounds like an argument for improving the trains, not write them off altogether.
OTOH driving in the States is a bit different. The roads are emptier; cruise control is ubiquitous. This makes driving less arduous. US long distance routes tend to have great landscapes (On UK motorways, a lot of the time all you can see is road and high verges).
This is precisely why rail is typically only added to the most population-dense areas. It doesn't make sense to use it unless you can walk everywhere else you go
Integrated transport. Rail stations are on bus routes, have taxi ranks, have car hire offices, have bike racks.
Of course, it can't work in sparsely populated areas. The nice thing about putting public transport in densely populated areas is that there's plenty of people there to take advantage.
Not yet. However, unlike previous HTML specifications, HTML5 is attempting to define which formats are required to be supported by media tags.
The HTML5 spec is done. Big players could not agree on a video codec, so the W3C regretfully had the standard leave the choice of codec as an implementation detail. Tsk.
Microsoft and Apple want it to be H.264. Mozilla says they won't support it leaving the specification at a standstill.
To paraphrase the other responder. "Mozilla, Opera and Google want it to be Theora. Apple and MS say they won't support it leaving the specification at a standstill."
Why are you furious at Mozilla for impeding progress, yet happy about Apple doing so?
Both parties are at deadlock. The difference is that Mozilla's position comes from a pragmatic desire to keep the Web open. (And Apple's from a pragmatic desire to profit from their software patent licensing).
And none of the statistical analysis fits with me. No amount of f-stop can make me look better
A good photographer can make you look better in a photo. A good photographer is more likely to adjust the f-stop for shallow depth of focus, in a portrait.
There's the source of the correlation.
Also, DSLRs don't inherently take better photographs; but good photographers do, and are more likely to use a DSLR.
Re:Wasn't even an effective IM to start...
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
It's a problem that you thought it was IM. If you wanted IM, you were right to use IM, and Wave was never going to compete.
Re:Failed because it was stupid
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"Solution in search of a problem"?
Here's the problem. This week, I dragged a work related email out of my archive, hit reply-all, added a couple of extra recipients, top-posted a "why has nothing been done about this yet" comment at the top, and hit send.
There were a few replies, some of which added new people to the conversation. So there were multiple threads going on with different subsets of the relevant people seeing them. Then another colleague chimed in independently, so I forwarded him one of the mails, which contained some, but not all, of the conversation so far.
If all this had happened in a Wave, everyone would have been party to the whole conversation, and latecomers would have been able to catch up.
That it could seamlessly turn into a chat, is great. That we could collaboratively edit a wavelet is useful too.
I'd have used Wave a lot more if we'd had one inside our intranet firewall.
That's because it's chat with a couple of features.
Odd, because to me the chat aspect was minor. It's an email thread in which latecomers can see the whole conversation history. And there was the aspect where people could treat an entry as an editable wiki. If more than one participant happened to be using it at the same time, then it became more like a chat, but that was secondary to the whole thing to me.
I've had successful Waves in which no two people were ever editing it at once.
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm easy to distract. The easier it is to check my mail on my eBook, the more likely I am to do so. An eBook that's *just* an eBook lets me get lost in the book, and that's a feature.
fork() is still the way forward in many, many situations. Having every server session in its own protected memory space gives me warm fuzzy feelings. One can segfault and the rest will keep on running, and that's just the tip of the security iceberg.
select() has advantages, described in other posts here, but it has disadvantages too.
These are valid points. In the Yukon, satnav is pretty useless as a route finder. It's also not much better than a paper map for points of interest. They're sparse and well signposted, usually. Perhaps some obscure trailheads are easier to find by GPS.
It depends on the rural area in question. Rural Wales is a labyrinth of tiny single-track lanes. In Yukon territory, you've typically two choices; towards BC or towards Alaska.
Satnav is terribly useful in Wales. It's literally saved me half a day, when the only paved road home was closed due to a fatal accident and Tom Tom's ability to route around a blocked road came to the rescue.
It's pretty pointless in the Yukon (but a handheld GPS is useful for hiking).
What's interesting here is that people talk a lot about how Open Source == freedom, not "free as in beer". But I'd be willing to be most posters asking about "Open Source" solutions to problems are more concerned with the "no cost" than they are with "I can modify the source".
So, no more sociable gaming sessions where a couple of people take their turn race/fight/whatever and other people watch.
I suppose as long as the game also supports a traditional split screen mode, it'll still work out -- and that mode will have to continue to exist for quite a while, as long as many people don't have 3D hardware.
Could it be that people with certain accents have success with Dragon, while others do not?
I've found with some products (and people!) -- low end products like Nintendo Brain Training and Google that my instinct is to try and speak more clearly. That, to me, is to go closer to British RP.
What actually works is to put on a mock American accent.
See also, ordering a Bud in Texas. You have to ask for a "bird" and then they understand;)
Trying to deny it doesn't make your astroturfing any less obvious.
I remember a while ago, I too was accused of being a paid astroturfer, just for saying that OnLive showed some promise. Stop doing it. It makes you look silly.
OnLive has worked out pretty much as I expected - not quite the miracle they promised, but good enough for many non-hardcore gamers; showing potential to improve as network capacity improves in future; hopelessly mispriced.
I'd sign up, if the price plans made sense, but they don't. (Specifically I'd sign up if there was no subscription fee, and I could rent games by the day/week/month cheaper than buying a physical copy).
Look, we all know this is a ridiculously unfair idea - and PRS has history of promoting ridiculously unfair ideas (e.g. taking a car mechanic to court because having the radio on in their premises constitutes a "public performance").
But, it's their job to push for a world that's skewed towards the people they represent. It's the rest of the world's job to push back.
The best reaction is to say "well, you would want that", then say no.
It *is* still programming, with loops and variables and assignments and comparisons and all of that stuff.
What you get from dragging and dropping blocks around, is the complete inability to generate a syntax error. You drag in an "if" block, and it comes with the corresponding block end, a slot to drag a condition into, a slot to drag the body statements into. You can't mismatch braces, or mistype a keyword, etc.
That's brilliant for kids, who can get a result of some kind quickly. Give them, say, Python, and they'd be struggling to get something that parses.
Anyone in their right mind would want to graduate to a proper, textual, language -- but as an introduction to basic programming concepts, Scratch is a great way to learn, and this builds on that.
This is for kids, or beginners programming at the level of a kid.
Scratch does not use Squeak. Scratch has Java under the covers.
It looks like this has inherited an awful lot from Scratch.
Indeed it is a lot different from Hypercard, thank goodness.
I was disappointed by Scratch's lack of data types (not even arrays or lists!); I wonder whether this fixes that? It's a tricky balance between simplicity (because it's for kids) and flexibility (because people want to get things done).
Slashdot Mirror
The automobile is most certainly not more of a ball and chain than an independence-granting device.
It's both, depending on the scenario.
I like to be able to drive into the countryside on a whim.
I also like to be able to get to my nearest big city, see a band or a show, drink more than a pint, then get home.
For your examples:
* taking the train to an interview or driving
Depends where the interview is. I'm a lot more likely to take the job if the office is convenient for the train.
* taking the train/bus to get groceries or driving
To an extent, owning a car modifies your behaviour in this respect. Since you have a car, it's most convenient to drive it to a supermarket.
I tend to buy most of my groceries in small quantities from a shop that's a short walk away.
* packing the kids up and taking the train to grandmas -or- driving
Depends where Grandma lives.
* going for a weekend picnic in the country on the train... and walking a dozen or so miles.
Yeah, this probably the only thing I missed when I didn't have a car -- the ability to get out into the country on a whim.
* going on a business trip, takign a plane, a train, a bus, a taxi, and then doing the same on the way back, lugging your one small bag the whole two days... or driving.
I'd only drive on a business trip if the destination left me with no choice. In the UK this is seldom necessary. In a lot of US cities, I've found that if you don't have a car, you feel pretty stranded.
At least one of the UK trains has free WiFi on board.
Maybe. But on the comparison to air traffic, do you really think it will board in 10 minutes? In this world of right wing fear mongering and TSA goons? I don't.
If some paranoid American red tape merchant screws up the risk assessment, then maybe.
But I did a 300 mile each way journey this week in the UK, and the boarding process goes like this:
- Book online (optional, but saves money)
- Advertised departure time 9:43
- Collect ticket and seat reservation at station 9:30
- Use ticket to go through automatic barrier
- Make way to platform
- 10 minutes to spare: buy a latte from the platform cafe
- Train arrives on time. Board.
- 5 hours later, arrive at city-centre destination
Added bonus for me: I live 5 minutes walk from the station -- but that's true for many, many urban dwellers in Britain.
Ok, you have a specific condition that precludes you from reading on a moving vehicle (although I find it a little doubtful that it would apply on a long distance train; which is a smooth ride with few sharp corners or sudden stops). But for the rest of us, it's a fine environment for reading.
I used to take a daily 45 minute bus ride to work. I got a newspaper delivered, read one section on the way, another on the way home. It was a very pleasant routine; only improved by my current route to work, which is a 25 minute walk.
As it happens, I'm just back from a trip to Edinburgh, a 5 hour train journey. It was some £30 more expensive than the fuel would have been if I drove, but I was more than happy to pay that for the benefits of:
- Freedom to read, sleep, fiddle with phone, get up and walk around, etc.
- Air conditioning (which my car doesn't have)
- Food and drink brought to me (admittedly not at the best prices)
- Ability to disengage brain
Those benefits add up. In fact, if I made the trip again, and wanted to have a car when I got there, I'd probably still take the train, and hire a car when I arrived, rather than take my own.
Time schedules are inconvenient, transfers suck, they tend to smell, they're not air conditioned (or the number of bodies makes it so hot it doesn't matter if it is)
Sounds like an argument for improving the trains, not write them off altogether.
OTOH driving in the States is a bit different. The roads are emptier; cruise control is ubiquitous. This makes driving less arduous. US long distance routes tend to have great landscapes (On UK motorways, a lot of the time all you can see is road and high verges).
This is precisely why rail is typically only added to the most population-dense areas. It doesn't make sense to use it unless you can walk everywhere else you go
Integrated transport. Rail stations are on bus routes, have taxi ranks, have car hire offices, have bike racks.
Of course, it can't work in sparsely populated areas. The nice thing about putting public transport in densely populated areas is that there's plenty of people there to take advantage.
Not yet. However, unlike previous HTML specifications, HTML5 is attempting to define which formats are required to be supported by media tags.
The HTML5 spec is done. Big players could not agree on a video codec, so the W3C regretfully had the standard leave the choice of codec as an implementation detail. Tsk.
Microsoft and Apple want it to be H.264. Mozilla says they won't support it leaving the specification at a standstill.
To paraphrase the other responder. "Mozilla, Opera and Google want it to be Theora. Apple and MS say they won't support it leaving the specification at a standstill."
Why are you furious at Mozilla for impeding progress, yet happy about Apple doing so?
Both parties are at deadlock. The difference is that Mozilla's position comes from a pragmatic desire to keep the Web open. (And Apple's from a pragmatic desire to profit from their software patent licensing).
And none of the statistical analysis fits with me. No amount of f-stop can make me look better
A good photographer can make you look better in a photo.
A good photographer is more likely to adjust the f-stop for shallow depth of focus, in a portrait.
There's the source of the correlation.
Also, DSLRs don't inherently take better photographs; but good photographers do, and are more likely to use a DSLR.
It's a problem that you thought it was IM. If you wanted IM, you were right to use IM, and Wave was never going to compete.
"Solution in search of a problem"?
Here's the problem. This week, I dragged a work related email out of my archive, hit reply-all, added a couple of extra recipients, top-posted a "why has nothing been done about this yet" comment at the top, and hit send.
There were a few replies, some of which added new people to the conversation. So there were multiple threads going on with different subsets of the relevant people seeing them. Then another colleague chimed in independently, so I forwarded him one of the mails, which contained some, but not all, of the conversation so far.
If all this had happened in a Wave, everyone would have been party to the whole conversation, and latecomers would have been able to catch up.
That it could seamlessly turn into a chat, is great. That we could collaboratively edit a wavelet is useful too.
I'd have used Wave a lot more if we'd had one inside our intranet firewall.
That's because it's chat with a couple of features.
Odd, because to me the chat aspect was minor. It's an email thread in which latecomers can see the whole conversation history. And there was the aspect where people could treat an entry as an editable wiki. If more than one participant happened to be using it at the same time, then it became more like a chat, but that was secondary to the whole thing to me.
I've had successful Waves in which no two people were ever editing it at once.
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm easy to distract. The easier it is to check my mail on my eBook, the more likely I am to do so. An eBook that's *just* an eBook lets me get lost in the book, and that's a feature.
fork() is still the way forward in many, many situations. Having every server session in its own protected memory space gives me warm fuzzy feelings. One can segfault and the rest will keep on running, and that's just the tip of the security iceberg.
select() has advantages, described in other posts here, but it has disadvantages too.
These are valid points. In the Yukon, satnav is pretty useless as a route finder. It's also not much better than a paper map for points of interest. They're sparse and well signposted, usually. Perhaps some obscure trailheads are easier to find by GPS.
But ETA and miles remaining is a boon.
It depends on the rural area in question. Rural Wales is a labyrinth of tiny single-track lanes. In Yukon territory, you've typically two choices; towards BC or towards Alaska.
Satnav is terribly useful in Wales. It's literally saved me half a day, when the only paved road home was closed due to a fatal accident and Tom Tom's ability to route around a blocked road came to the rescue.
It's pretty pointless in the Yukon (but a handheld GPS is useful for hiking).
Well, that depends where you're driving.
Google Navigation does cache images of the entire route -- but this can become problematic if you deviated from the planned route.
What's interesting here is that people talk a lot about how Open Source == freedom, not "free as in beer". But I'd be willing to be most posters asking about "Open Source" solutions to problems are more concerned with the "no cost" than they are with "I can modify the source".
Which is why I like to subtly correct them :)
So, no more sociable gaming sessions where a couple of people take their turn race/fight/whatever and other people watch.
I suppose as long as the game also supports a traditional split screen mode, it'll still work out -- and that mode will have to continue to exist for quite a while, as long as many people don't have 3D hardware.
Could it be that people with certain accents have success with Dragon, while others do not?
I've found with some products (and people!) -- low end products like Nintendo Brain Training and Google that my instinct is to try and speak more clearly. That, to me, is to go closer to British RP.
What actually works is to put on a mock American accent.
See also, ordering a Bud in Texas. You have to ask for a "bird" and then they understand ;)
"... unless you're not a programmer."
In any discussion about Open Source, it's appropriate to mentally substitute the verb "program" with the phrase "program or pay someone to program".
Economically, the two are equivalent.
OSS doesn't just give you the freedom to hack at code yourself. It also gives you the freedom to hack at it by proxy.
Trying to deny it doesn't make your astroturfing any less obvious.
I remember a while ago, I too was accused of being a paid astroturfer, just for saying that OnLive showed some promise. Stop doing it. It makes you look silly.
OnLive has worked out pretty much as I expected - not quite the miracle they promised, but good enough for many non-hardcore gamers; showing potential to improve as network capacity improves in future; hopelessly mispriced.
I'd sign up, if the price plans made sense, but they don't. (Specifically I'd sign up if there was no subscription fee, and I could rent games by the day/week/month cheaper than buying a physical copy).
A 34 year old grandparent is possible without any laws being broken, since the age of consent in the UK is 16, and allowing for gestation.
Look, we all know this is a ridiculously unfair idea - and PRS has history of promoting ridiculously unfair ideas (e.g. taking a car mechanic to court because having the radio on in their premises constitutes a "public performance").
But, it's their job to push for a world that's skewed towards the people they represent. It's the rest of the world's job to push back.
The best reaction is to say "well, you would want that", then say no.
It *is* still programming, with loops and variables and assignments and comparisons and all of that stuff.
What you get from dragging and dropping blocks around, is the complete inability to generate a syntax error. You drag in an "if" block, and it comes with the corresponding block end, a slot to drag a condition into, a slot to drag the body statements into. You can't mismatch braces, or mistype a keyword, etc.
That's brilliant for kids, who can get a result of some kind quickly. Give them, say, Python, and they'd be struggling to get something that parses.
Anyone in their right mind would want to graduate to a proper, textual, language -- but as an introduction to basic programming concepts, Scratch is a great way to learn, and this builds on that.
This is for kids, or beginners programming at the level of a kid.
Scratch does not use Squeak. Scratch has Java under the covers.
It looks like this has inherited an awful lot from Scratch.
Indeed it is a lot different from Hypercard, thank goodness.
I was disappointed by Scratch's lack of data types (not even arrays or lists!); I wonder whether this fixes that? It's a tricky balance between simplicity (because it's for kids) and flexibility (because people want to get things done).
It looks like Scratch, and that's because it's heavily influenced by it, acknowledges that, and uses the same libs.