Indeed. Just like competent walking or running requires time and practice. Repetitive situations that are eventually rehearsed subconsciously (to the point of prediction) that make it appear that the individual is adept at locomotion, when in actuality, there is a specific percentage of basic scenarios that have simply been memorized.
It is often described that there are four stages to learning something well.
Unconscious incompetence - "I don't know how to do it, and I don't know that I don't know how"
Conscious incompetence - "Man, I really don't know how to do this"
Conscious competence - "I can do this when I concentrate on it"
Unconscious competence - "I can do this without thinking about it, it's natural
To learn to do something, you have to first realize you can't do it (going from stage 1 to 2); then you practice, practice, practice, consciously, bringing you across from step 2 to step 3. After doing it enough, your subconscious is practiced enough at doing it, that you stop thinking about the performance, and it's just natural. When we say someone's a "natural" at some sport or skill, we really just mean they've achieved a great deal of high quality unconscious competence at the activity.
At this point, any tools you might use in this process, will indeed seem to be an extension of your body; they've become a subconscious extension of your mind. The same is true of our body parts. When the baby gets freaked because that hand fell on its head, and eventually starts to realize that he or she exerts some influence on that hand, he's moving from stage 1 to stage 2, realizing he influences that hand, but sucks at it. (After a bad accident, adults often get bumped back to early steps, and have to relearn how to use their body; often harder than learning to use a new tool, because you need to unlearn some unconscious skills to rewrite them.)
With most providers in Canada, you pay to send the message, not to receive it. *Unless* it's sent from a free source, like the provider's web page or email gateway. The basic premise is "*somebody* has to pay." However, the unlimited text message plans are relatively cheap (unless the data plans, the voice plans, and everything else; even caller id is exra, sheeeeeesh. I've given up on using data. Can't wait for more competition. I'll be going Virgin mobile when my Telus contract is up, and hopefully other competition will be here by then...)
With the bloated McAfee and Norton products, that brought systems to more of a standstill than the viruses they let through anyway, I always saw Trend as a bit of a good guy in the market. Their relatively lightweight online scan, Housecalls, always worked well for me in fixing up other people's PC's. (Their last version with Active X and shit became a bit more flaky and a bit more of a dog, but still beat Norton and McAfee, IMHO.)
Now they've fallen into the "asshole" category in my mind (man, it's getting crowded in there). Thankfully since my switch to OS X, I can be a bit more dispassionate about the whole virus scanning tools market. Still pisses me off, though...
The bit about infrared light penetrating the skull seems to set off the BS detector to me. Any of the sciency types amongst us have comment on that? They use ultrasound to penetrate human goo for a reason; I've never heard of infrared being used to get past skin, much less bone.
And of course, even if it does, it could upset your2 phrenological balance:)
We've recently switched to SageTV. I used to like MythTV, but it was such a hassle to set up and keep current with software, listings, etc., and networking the video was quite primitive streaming.
SageTV blew me away. Very easy to set up, runs on Windows, Linux, OS X (both server and client on all), and just plain works. Great looking U.I., every PC becomes a TV to watch recorded shows (or live TV), as well as a little $100 box they sell as a media extender (made by Hauppage).
The cross platform support is impressive, as is the source of video. Right now, we're using it with Satellite (which requires a bit of hacking to set up, streaming from MyTheatre), but it also works with cable, etc., quite nicely.
It also has the start of online content; Podcasts, high def video, etc.. When you realize that content from the online feature and stuff you download is viewed in exactly the same manner as recorded TV shows, the lines do start to blur, and you start asking yourself why do broadcast, in a world where downloading anything is technically possible.
(Hope this didn't sound like too much of an ad for Sage; I'm a former Myth fan, but Sage just works so nicely. $70 for the server, and $30 per client machine [with a 30 day trial] is pretty reasonable pricing, too.)
This is quite brilliant, really. Using charitable (and thus tax-free) dollars to promote your product.
That practice should be illegal (if it isn't) for non-monopolies, and it sure as hell should be wildly illegal for a monopoly.
If this (or other similar activities like buying Windows and donating it) is done through the Bill & Melinda gates foundation, it should lose its charitable organization designation, and pay corporate taxes for such corporate promotion activities.
Watching from Canada (all tucked away down there), it's hard to think anything other than the fact that the government is clearly owned (figuratively, if not somewhat literally) by Microsoft...
200km, wow! As a point of reference, geosyncrhonous satellites on earth are 36,371 km high, and the best resolution earth imagery satellites are at around 500km.
200km! Wow, that's incredibly close to Mercury. For comparison's sake, geosynchronous orbit (where all our TV and most communication satellites live) are at 36,371 km from earth, 181 times as far as this probe went to mercury. Even the highest resolution earth imaging satellites we have orbit at around 500km.
While you can't scoop up the dirt, being that close for visuals has to be nearly as good as landing there...
Actually, the bend-the-ground-pin-out-of-the-way thing was from a prior trip; last year, they did have a ground hole in the outlets, it just didn't seem to be at the same potential as the earth. Which is a bit scarier:)
In my mind, Exchange is the ultimate example of Microsoft's monopolistic protectionism of a closed binary format.
I had a company that did email archiving, and we had a number of requests to support Exchange server. I did a fair bit of research into it, and it seemed that *everything* revolving around Exchange Server, MAPI, Outlook, and so forth, was designed for getting mail *into* Exchange, but never, ever, ever, *out* of exchange. It was truly painful to figure out a way to actually pull mail out of an Exchange Server (and even then, it was a matter of piecing things together, rather than just getting a clean copy of a RFC-like mail message.) I think this type of practice need to be investigated by the Department of Justice.
I see inroads being made into a lot of office apps, but Exchange seems to have a stronghold in the big-corporate email world for now; and it's truly by design.
Reminds me of a trip to Cuba last year. The power in the rooms was 220v, with no ground plug. Many consumer electronics, including my wonderful little Toshiba Libretto (now *that's* a sub-notebook, Apple) work fine on 220, the switching power supply just regulates it properly.
However, I had to bend the ground pin out of the way to plug it in. Things charged and worked fine. However, apparently the brushed aluminum case wasn't quite at true ground with this arrangement. It was more than tingly (if your feet were on the ground; if you lifted them, it was fine). I made a point of only using the power supply to charge it, then use it on battery power, for safety's sake.
It was interesting to see the cavalier attitude towards electricity down there. A worker was doing some construction with an electric drill outside our room; the drill obviously only took 120v, as he hooked up a transformer in our *bathroom* (which was near the door) to power his drill. It was connected to the plug with wires jammed into the outlet, and to the drill by wires wrapped around the prongs. Scary stuff. We stayed clear of our room that day.:) Check out the photos.
At first, I was thinking that focus would be the main issue, since the middle of your lens is where all the light rays from the external world cross at an almost-point. Being so close to that (on the cornea), this lens might have focus issues.
But maybe not. All it really has to do is put incredibly small pixels there to colour (or obscure) the light from a given point. As long as pixels don't overlap too much (when out of focus), it could work.
I will be interesting to see how this develops further.
My memories of Dragon's Lair consisted of putting in a whopping 50c, taking off on a horse, and falling off instantly. I thought WTF??? Pay 50c every time to figure out a single move? Just didn't appeal to me, but it sure looked nice.
On an interesting side note, what's old is new again. From wiki:
"On April 9th, 2007, a Blu-Ray version of Dragon's Lair was released. This uses the same HD transfer as the aforementioned PC release, but went through a 6 month process to clean and remaster the image. Dragon's Lair Blu-Ray is the first title to fully utilize BD-J technology.[2] An HD DVD version has also been announced by Digital Leisure with an August 15th release date.[3]"
Isn't Sun free to work on (fork) the last open source version of InnoDB prior to Oracle's purchase? I seem to remember hearing that an InnoDB fork was a possibility, but nobody had the resources to take it on. Sun would. That would rock, as InnoDB had some nice features/performance...
Again, contrary to rumour, the external optical drive isn't included ($99).
Only one USB port.
No included ethernet ($29, and ties up the sole USB port.)
No line in.
The flip-down with the connectors looks like a possible point of failure (moving parts bad)
It's has a slower CPU than the Macbook.
It has a new micro-DVI connector, so I gotta rebuy the video/svideo out cable (at least it's cheaper, at $19, and they include the microDVI to VGA/DVI connectors).
Internal battery.
The flash drive is only 64G and cost $1000 extra! over the included 80G hard drive.
I like the unit, and might have jumped at a $1500 price, but $1900 (Cdn) + cables + external drive etc., and the few other lacking things might make me hold off for now. I feel they sacrificed a bit too much to be thin, think thin. They could have gone with a smaller screen to reduce it's length/width, and had a bit more thickeness, and thrown more stuff in, maybe...
I'm sure I'll still end up with one, but it's not quite the slam dunk I had hoped it would be, in my mind... The size/weight and battery life will probably win me over, but for now, my Macbook will do:)
Nearly broke my heart when my 15 year old saw my turntable I got out of storage last week, and he laughed, saying "I didn't know you were into rap." Sigh... I had to explain to him you could use it as something other than a "scratchpad."
It's a shame that I'm gunshy with new (to the OS) filesystems. ZFS has so much to offer, but every time I try out a new filesystem, I end up with data loss, even ones that are supposedly new and wonderful and robust. (Even when ext3 was new but stable, I lost stuff on it.) I can't wait to hear lots of positive feedback on its stability and performance, so I can get up the nerve to try it.
I posess a few keyboards that were really nice in their early days, but after some use, became stuff, as if the plastic doesn't slide on the plastic as well. You have to hit the keys dead center, or else they give you a great deal of resistance.
Sadly, one of this is the otherwise beautiful Apple bluetooth keyboard, with one of the best feels to it, otherwise. Does anyone know if it's possible to clean/lubricate such a keyboard to bring back a smooth feel? I have torn down and rebuilt the Apple one, cleaning the plastic parts with isoproply, but it's still stiff. I'm hesistant to put "goo" in there to make it smoother, but maybe it is the best option? What is a good choice? Vaseline, or does it break down plastic? Silicone lubricate? Lithium grease? Any suggestions? I don't want to tast my beautiful bluetooth keyboard, but I do want it to be smoother.
From another post I made, but for this topic, it's a bit more on-topic: =============
There's one example of user interface elegance that has stuck with me for decades, and I use it to remind myself of what's possible, and avoiding making things more complicated than necessary:
I've had telephone answering machines before; they typically had many buttons on them (rewind, stop, play, fast forward, erase, record) and tapes for incoming and outgoing, etc.. Quite complex, for the simple task of playing and recording a message. It really felt like working two confusingly inter-related tape decks.
But then I bought one, which wasn't terribly expensive, that was clean and elegant looking, with *one* big visible button on the outside and one LED. On the side was a volume knob. And the amazing thing is that it was as functional as my prior more complicated machines.
When there was a message, the link blinked. Intuitive. You'd press the big button to hear the messages. Simple. To back up while playing a message, you simply held the big button down (not completely intuitive, but easy to learn/figure out or read in the manual). After playing the messages, the LED would blink quickly for a few seconds; you could then tap the big button to keep your messages, or do nothing to have it turf the messages. (Again, not necessarily intuitive, but trivial to learn/understand and use.) You could also record memos of your own by pressing and holding the button at any time. A lot of functionality built into one button, and not hard to use at all. Very clever.
You could stop it from answering by turning the volume knob all the way down until it clicks; fairly intuitive.
It had one microcassette; the answering message was recorded at the start, and it would record messages after that (fast forwarding as necessary for additional messages before recording). This microcassette was under an opague door (you wouldn't even know was there) on the top of the unit. Opening the door also revealed another smaller button. The single button inside paralleled the use of the outside button to a large degree, but for handling your answering message. Press and hold it to record your message (similar to the memo record of the outside big button). Tap it once to play/check your answering message, pressing/holding it to rewind during the message. Very elegant, yet quite functional.
The thing was a masterpiece of simplicity, elegance, understatement, functionality, and design.
Yes, answering machines are ancient technology now, but the thought that went into that "user interface" design continues to inspire me when I create web interfaces.
And another neat aspect to it: I'm sure the manufacturing cost of the unit was lower than others, due to fewer buttons, a single tape, and simpler design. (It likely had a bit more logic inside to handle the functionality, but overall it was likely cheaper to produce than other models.) Initial design can make such a difference to all aspects of a product's delivery.
I've been thinking of getting a Mac specifically to be able to use Pages
I was pretty excited to try out Pages/Numbers/Keynote quite heavily for a recent product (that was being rendered in PDF in the end, so I could pick my own poison for the behind-the-scenes tools).
After having done so, I don't think I'd use them again. Keynote is pretty slick, and easily better than Powerpoint.
But Pages/Numbers? Not so much. I'm a dedicated admitted Mac Fanboi (because it just works, dammit!) but I think for my next project I'll use Word/Excel.
I wish I had taken detailed notes on the reasons why, but here's my best recollections:
Table of contents: I had real trouble getting indents for subheadings in the TOC. Every time I updated the table of contents (which had to be done with a manual refresh, which I didn't expect from Apple), the formatting was lost, and I had re-indent the subheadings. Every time. Ugh.
Most of the time I edited tables in Pages, the app would crash. I found that if I avoided moving the mouse until I moved to another cell, I could avoid the crash. It appears to have been a Leopard related issue, and a Pages software update seems to have fixed that one.
While I really like the Numbers approach of tossing in chunks of cells, rather than the world being one big never-ending canvas, I wrestled with a number of things in numbers. For one, the object-oriented-ish concept of styles isn't very orthogonal in pages. There's no applying styles, and the later modifying the style, having all affected areas of that style updating automatically. Whever I wanted to change a style, I had to go through the whole thing, updating every little bit.
Drop shadows on tables in Pages looked really, truly cool. However, I noticed that fonts were rendering inconsistently in my document (when creating a PDF, via Adobe Pro, or OSX's built-in PDF generation). Some times the same font looked bigger, other times, smaller. My girlfriend spotted this, and I was in denial for a bit, but in the end, yes, it was there. It turned out that any page with a table containing a drop shadow, had the fonts on the table rendering somewhat bigger/bolder for some reason. I had to eliminate all drop shadows at the last minute to get the fonts to render right. Sheeeesh.
I did a lot of fighting to get the page numbering correct. For the final rendering of the document, I had to update some page numbers and print-to-pdf. Things would be messed up if I didn't adjust the page numbers every time. (I seem to remember this was related to the table of contents somehow; the details are a bit hazy now, but there were two or three things I had to do before every print. Update TOC, fix the TOC formatting, fix some page numbering. Yuck.)
There were a lot of other issues, too.
I really wanted to like Pages/Numbers better than Word/Excel. I *really* did. And hopefully the next release will fix a lot of the problems, and add a bit more object-orientation to the styles. But for now, I'll use Word/Excel (or OpenOffice) over Pages/Numbers.
I'm a big fan of most things Apple; they're done with style, great UI, and reliability. But when I hear people talk about Pages/Numbers like they're the solution to all their woes, it makes me cringe a bit. They're making great progress, but not quite there yet for professional use.
Oh, they'll be dead before that. Artists are leaving record companies in droves. They'll start producing their own music and hiring niche marketing agencies to create demand instead. Even now, the smart ones are already moving in the marketing/concert promoter direction.
While I agree with the sentiment, are artists really leaving in "droves?" Other than indie artists maybe never pursuing a label to start with, how many already-signed artists are leaving the labels? Can you list more than 10? More than 20? Even if you listed 1000, I'm sure it would be something like a tiny single digit percentage (or less) of the total artists on labels, hardly qualifying as droves.
I think it *will* happen, and hopefully at an exponentially increasing rate. But for now, they still have the stranglehold on the artists.
Slashdot Mirror
It is often described that there are four stages to learning something well.
To learn to do something, you have to first realize you can't do it (going from stage 1 to 2); then you practice, practice, practice, consciously, bringing you across from step 2 to step 3. After doing it enough, your subconscious is practiced enough at doing it, that you stop thinking about the performance, and it's just natural. When we say someone's a "natural" at some sport or skill, we really just mean they've achieved a great deal of high quality unconscious competence at the activity.
At this point, any tools you might use in this process, will indeed seem to be an extension of your body; they've become a subconscious extension of your mind. The same is true of our body parts. When the baby gets freaked because that hand fell on its head, and eventually starts to realize that he or she exerts some influence on that hand, he's moving from stage 1 to stage 2, realizing he influences that hand, but sucks at it. (After a bad accident, adults often get bumped back to early steps, and have to relearn how to use their body; often harder than learning to use a new tool, because you need to unlearn some unconscious skills to rewrite them.)
With most providers in Canada, you pay to send the message, not to receive it. *Unless* it's sent from a free source, like the provider's web page or email gateway. The basic premise is "*somebody* has to pay." However, the unlimited text message plans are relatively cheap (unless the data plans, the voice plans, and everything else; even caller id is exra, sheeeeeesh. I've given up on using data. Can't wait for more competition. I'll be going Virgin mobile when my Telus contract is up, and hopefully other competition will be here by then...)
With the bloated McAfee and Norton products, that brought systems to more of a standstill than the viruses they let through anyway, I always saw Trend as a bit of a good guy in the market. Their relatively lightweight online scan, Housecalls, always worked well for me in fixing up other people's PC's. (Their last version with Active X and shit became a bit more flaky and a bit more of a dog, but still beat Norton and McAfee, IMHO.)
Now they've fallen into the "asshole" category in my mind (man, it's getting crowded in there). Thankfully since my switch to OS X, I can be a bit more dispassionate about the whole virus scanning tools market. Still pisses me off, though...
The bit about infrared light penetrating the skull seems to set off the BS detector to me. Any of the sciency types amongst us have comment on that? They use ultrasound to penetrate human goo for a reason; I've never heard of infrared being used to get past skin, much less bone.
:)
And of course, even if it does, it could upset your2 phrenological balance
We've recently switched to SageTV. I used to like MythTV, but it was such a hassle to set up and keep current with software, listings, etc., and networking the video was quite primitive streaming.
SageTV blew me away. Very easy to set up, runs on Windows, Linux, OS X (both server and client on all), and just plain works. Great looking U.I., every PC becomes a TV to watch recorded shows (or live TV), as well as a little $100 box they sell as a media extender (made by Hauppage).
The cross platform support is impressive, as is the source of video. Right now, we're using it with Satellite (which requires a bit of hacking to set up, streaming from MyTheatre), but it also works with cable, etc., quite nicely.
It also has the start of online content; Podcasts, high def video, etc.. When you realize that content from the online feature and stuff you download is viewed in exactly the same manner as recorded TV shows, the lines do start to blur, and you start asking yourself why do broadcast, in a world where downloading anything is technically possible.
(Hope this didn't sound like too much of an ad for Sage; I'm a former Myth fan, but Sage just works so nicely. $70 for the server, and $30 per client machine [with a 30 day trial] is pretty reasonable pricing, too.)
This is quite brilliant, really. Using charitable (and thus tax-free) dollars to promote your product.
That practice should be illegal (if it isn't) for non-monopolies, and it sure as hell should be wildly illegal for a monopoly.
If this (or other similar activities like buying Windows and donating it) is done through the Bill & Melinda gates foundation, it should lose its charitable organization designation, and pay corporate taxes for such corporate promotion activities.
Watching from Canada (all tucked away down there), it's hard to think anything other than the fact that the government is clearly owned (figuratively, if not somewhat literally) by Microsoft...
200km, wow! As a point of reference, geosyncrhonous satellites on earth are 36,371 km high, and the best resolution earth imagery satellites are at around 500km.
200km! Wow, that's incredibly close to Mercury. For comparison's sake, geosynchronous orbit (where all our TV and most communication satellites live) are at 36,371 km from earth, 181 times as far as this probe went to mercury. Even the highest resolution earth imaging satellites we have orbit at around 500km.
While you can't scoop up the dirt, being that close for visuals has to be nearly as good as landing there...
Link to the most recent Canadian one. The pilot reporting a autopilot problem sure does sound like borked avionics...
Actually, the bend-the-ground-pin-out-of-the-way thing was from a prior trip; last year, they did have a ground hole in the outlets, it just didn't seem to be at the same potential as the earth. Which is a bit scarier :)
In my mind, Exchange is the ultimate example of Microsoft's monopolistic protectionism of a closed binary format.
I had a company that did email archiving, and we had a number of requests to support Exchange server. I did a fair bit of research into it, and it seemed that *everything* revolving around Exchange Server, MAPI, Outlook, and so forth, was designed for getting mail *into* Exchange, but never, ever, ever, *out* of exchange. It was truly painful to figure out a way to actually pull mail out of an Exchange Server (and even then, it was a matter of piecing things together, rather than just getting a clean copy of a RFC-like mail message.) I think this type of practice need to be investigated by the Department of Justice.
I see inroads being made into a lot of office apps, but Exchange seems to have a stronghold in the big-corporate email world for now; and it's truly by design.
Reminds me of a trip to Cuba last year. The power in the rooms was 220v, with no ground plug. Many consumer electronics, including my wonderful little Toshiba Libretto (now *that's* a sub-notebook, Apple) work fine on 220, the switching power supply just regulates it properly.
:) Check out the photos.
However, I had to bend the ground pin out of the way to plug it in. Things charged and worked fine. However, apparently the brushed aluminum case wasn't quite at true ground with this arrangement. It was more than tingly (if your feet were on the ground; if you lifted them, it was fine). I made a point of only using the power supply to charge it, then use it on battery power, for safety's sake.
It was interesting to see the cavalier attitude towards electricity down there. A worker was doing some construction with an electric drill outside our room; the drill obviously only took 120v, as he hooked up a transformer in our *bathroom* (which was near the door) to power his drill. It was connected to the plug with wires jammed into the outlet, and to the drill by wires wrapped around the prongs. Scary stuff. We stayed clear of our room that day.
At first, I was thinking that focus would be the main issue, since the middle of your lens is where all the light rays from the external world cross at an almost-point. Being so close to that (on the cornea), this lens might have focus issues.
But maybe not. All it really has to do is put incredibly small pixels there to colour (or obscure) the light from a given point. As long as pixels don't overlap too much (when out of focus), it could work.
I will be interesting to see how this develops further.
On an interesting side note, what's old is new again. From wiki:
Isn't Sun free to work on (fork) the last open source version of InnoDB prior to Oracle's purchase? I seem to remember hearing that an InnoDB fork was a possibility, but nobody had the resources to take it on. Sun would. That would rock, as InnoDB had some nice features/performance...
I like the unit, and might have jumped at a $1500 price, but $1900 (Cdn) + cables + external drive etc., and the few other lacking things might make me hold off for now. I feel they sacrificed a bit too much to be thin, think thin. They could have gone with a smaller screen to reduce it's length/width, and had a bit more thickeness, and thrown more stuff in, maybe...
I'm sure I'll still end up with one, but it's not quite the slam dunk I had hoped it would be, in my mind... The size/weight and battery life will probably win me over, but for now, my Macbook will do
Nearly broke my heart when my 15 year old saw my turntable I got out of storage last week, and he laughed, saying "I didn't know you were into rap." Sigh... I had to explain to him you could use it as something other than a "scratchpad."
Scotty might disagree with that. "Sarah was born in 2000, when Doohan was 80 years old."
It's a shame that I'm gunshy with new (to the OS) filesystems. ZFS has so much to offer, but every time I try out a new filesystem, I end up with data loss, even ones that are supposedly new and wonderful and robust. (Even when ext3 was new but stable, I lost stuff on it.) I can't wait to hear lots of positive feedback on its stability and performance, so I can get up the nerve to try it.
I posess a few keyboards that were really nice in their early days, but after some use, became stuff, as if the plastic doesn't slide on the plastic as well. You have to hit the keys dead center, or else they give you a great deal of resistance.
Sadly, one of this is the otherwise beautiful Apple bluetooth keyboard, with one of the best feels to it, otherwise. Does anyone know if it's possible to clean/lubricate such a keyboard to bring back a smooth feel? I have torn down and rebuilt the Apple one, cleaning the plastic parts with isoproply, but it's still stiff. I'm hesistant to put "goo" in there to make it smoother, but maybe it is the best option? What is a good choice? Vaseline, or does it break down plastic? Silicone lubricate? Lithium grease? Any suggestions? I don't want to tast my beautiful bluetooth keyboard, but I do want it to be smoother.
Thanks....
How many candlepower must that spotlight be? Nuclear powered? Would it really light things up much more than the sunlight?
Poor choice of a metaphor in the heading; had me thinking there was some illumination involved.
From another post I made, but for this topic, it's a bit more on-topic:
=============
There's one example of user interface elegance that has stuck with me for decades, and I use it to remind myself of what's possible, and avoiding making things more complicated than necessary:
I've had telephone answering machines before; they typically had many buttons on them (rewind, stop, play, fast forward, erase, record) and tapes for incoming and outgoing, etc.. Quite complex, for the simple task of playing and recording a message. It really felt like working two confusingly inter-related tape decks.
But then I bought one, which wasn't terribly expensive, that was clean and elegant looking, with *one* big visible button on the outside and one LED. On the side was a volume knob. And the amazing thing is that it was as functional as my prior more complicated machines.
When there was a message, the link blinked. Intuitive. You'd press the big button to hear the messages. Simple. To back up while playing a message, you simply held the big button down (not completely intuitive, but easy to learn/figure out or read in the manual). After playing the messages, the LED would blink quickly for a few seconds; you could then tap the big button to keep your messages, or do nothing to have it turf the messages. (Again, not necessarily intuitive, but trivial to learn/understand and use.) You could also record memos of your own by pressing and holding the button at any time. A lot of functionality built into one button, and not hard to use at all. Very clever.
You could stop it from answering by turning the volume knob all the way down until it clicks; fairly intuitive.
It had one microcassette; the answering message was recorded at the start, and it would record messages after that (fast forwarding as necessary for additional messages before recording). This microcassette was under an opague door (you wouldn't even know was there) on the top of the unit. Opening the door also revealed another smaller button. The single button inside paralleled the use of the outside button to a large degree, but for handling your answering message. Press and hold it to record your message (similar to the memo record of the outside big button). Tap it once to play/check your answering message, pressing/holding it to rewind during the message. Very elegant, yet quite functional.
The thing was a masterpiece of simplicity, elegance, understatement, functionality, and design.
Yes, answering machines are ancient technology now, but the thought that went into that "user interface" design continues to inspire me when I create web interfaces.
And another neat aspect to it: I'm sure the manufacturing cost of the unit was lower than others, due to fewer buttons, a single tape, and simpler design. (It likely had a bit more logic inside to handle the functionality, but overall it was likely cheaper to produce than other models.) Initial design can make such a difference to all aspects of a product's delivery.
I was pretty excited to try out Pages/Numbers/Keynote quite heavily for a recent product (that was being rendered in PDF in the end, so I could pick my own poison for the behind-the-scenes tools).
After having done so, I don't think I'd use them again. Keynote is pretty slick, and easily better than Powerpoint.
But Pages/Numbers? Not so much. I'm a dedicated admitted Mac Fanboi (because it just works, dammit!) but I think for my next project I'll use Word/Excel.
I wish I had taken detailed notes on the reasons why, but here's my best recollections:
Table of contents: I had real trouble getting indents for subheadings in the TOC. Every time I updated the table of contents (which had to be done with a manual refresh, which I didn't expect from Apple), the formatting was lost, and I had re-indent the subheadings. Every time. Ugh.
Most of the time I edited tables in Pages, the app would crash. I found that if I avoided moving the mouse until I moved to another cell, I could avoid the crash. It appears to have been a Leopard related issue, and a Pages software update seems to have fixed that one.
While I really like the Numbers approach of tossing in chunks of cells, rather than the world being one big never-ending canvas, I wrestled with a number of things in numbers. For one, the object-oriented-ish concept of styles isn't very orthogonal in pages. There's no applying styles, and the later modifying the style, having all affected areas of that style updating automatically. Whever I wanted to change a style, I had to go through the whole thing, updating every little bit.
Drop shadows on tables in Pages looked really, truly cool. However, I noticed that fonts were rendering inconsistently in my document (when creating a PDF, via Adobe Pro, or OSX's built-in PDF generation). Some times the same font looked bigger, other times, smaller. My girlfriend spotted this, and I was in denial for a bit, but in the end, yes, it was there. It turned out that any page with a table containing a drop shadow, had the fonts on the table rendering somewhat bigger/bolder for some reason. I had to eliminate all drop shadows at the last minute to get the fonts to render right. Sheeeesh.
I did a lot of fighting to get the page numbering correct. For the final rendering of the document, I had to update some page numbers and print-to-pdf. Things would be messed up if I didn't adjust the page numbers every time. (I seem to remember this was related to the table of contents somehow; the details are a bit hazy now, but there were two or three things I had to do before every print. Update TOC, fix the TOC formatting, fix some page numbering. Yuck.)
There were a lot of other issues, too.
I really wanted to like Pages/Numbers better than Word/Excel. I *really* did. And hopefully the next release will fix a lot of the problems, and add a bit more object-orientation to the styles. But for now, I'll use Word/Excel (or OpenOffice) over Pages/Numbers.
I'm a big fan of most things Apple; they're done with style, great UI, and reliability. But when I hear people talk about Pages/Numbers like they're the solution to all their woes, it makes me cringe a bit. They're making great progress, but not quite there yet for professional use.
Anyone else have the gut reaction that this might be a Microsoft funded/supported initiative?
Honestly, why else would anyone bother with such a weak case?
While I agree with the sentiment, are artists really leaving in "droves?" Other than indie artists maybe never pursuing a label to start with, how many already-signed artists are leaving the labels? Can you list more than 10? More than 20? Even if you listed 1000, I'm sure it would be something like a tiny single digit percentage (or less) of the total artists on labels, hardly qualifying as droves.
I think it *will* happen, and hopefully at an exponentially increasing rate. But for now, they still have the stranglehold on the artists.