That strategy seems to work well for aluminium oxide, beryllium, chromium, cobalt, diamonds, ferrochromium, ferromanganese, iodine, iridium, mica, niobium, platinum group metals, talc, tantalum, thorium, tin, tungsten and zinc.
Baby steps. That's what the Cruise class is... a step in the right direction. And it could be viable for certain markets, although not necessarily consumers. We're already going towards electric vehicles. The next step could be a plug-in electric car with a roof solar panel option. I could see it being very popular in the warmer climes. Drive to work, leave it in the parking lot and let the sun recharge it for the 8 hours you're not using it anyway. It's that much less time/money you have to spend on recharging your electric car.
It may not have any directly practical applications, but that's different than saying there's no way to adapt this technology in a practical manner.
"For the first time, however, much more practical vehicles will race each other in the new Cruiser class. These vehicles will seat two, three of four people and be road legal. "
I'd call that an interesting thing if getting one in your driveway is the ultimate goal.
Inflation is across the board, cost of living is much more localized. They may be related, but they're definitely not the same thing. The CPI is also tied to *urban* prices, not prices everywhere.
Inflation has been the same where I live and where my parents live (about 150 miles apart in the same state) but my cost of living has gone up about 15% in the last 3 years while their cost of living has increased by about 5% in the same time period.
It's one of the reasons determining minimum wage at the state level is stupid and at the national level is downright moronic. Cost of living can vary dramatically from town to town, nevermind between counties.
Email language also vary based on where you're from, what your history is, your income level, your education level, how many fingers you've lost to chainsaws...
I think Slashdot had an article a while back about being able to use your email language to track down individual people because there are so many different variables.
I have a few things that aren't too rare or even that old, but people will still spend a small chunk of cash on them. I'd turn to eBay first. Even if it's not rare, you can often still get a few hundred bucks for a working system from the 80s or early 90s. Anything from the Windows 95 era or newer seems to be mostly worthless however.
I don't think you're really familiar with the United States. Sure, we have a significantly denser population than Canada, but the US still has extremely vast areas of few or no people. There's still places you can travel hundreds of miles without seeing any sign of civilization. And not just the deserts of the Southwest... every region of the country has at least a few large tracts of land that humans have barely wandered through in all of history, nevermind living memory.
That's like saying workers don't pay taxes because they pass the taxes on to the employer in the form of demanding higher pay checks. It ignores... everything.
I was responding to the guy asking about *some* things they do right. I never said they do everything right or even that they do most things right. I pointed out a few things they've done right with recent products, as well as the issues keeping people from using them in spite of them being done right.
Did you notice I never said any of them were perfect? The iPod is nice and easy to use, except for the price. Linux is cheap and works on a wide range of devices, but many distros have poor support. You can find a caveat for anything. In general, I think Windows 8 is pretty good, it just happens that its flaws are in the most pain in the ass location but 95% of the OS is really good for anyone intelligent enough to realize that even a fatal flaw doesn't mean the rest of the product isn't well done.
Once you get past the UI, Windows 8 and Server 2012 are pretty damned good products. Of course, everyone focuses on the UI because its what people see but you have to remember that Windows does have a lot of other components behind that UI. Office is much the same way, although it's a bit bloated in places. I got to play around with Azure a bit too. I don't know how it compares to competitors, but it is a nifty platform.
Then there's other products like Xbox which seems to have done quite well, including Kinect, and the Surface Pro (RT not so much).
It's easy to focus on the bad because it tends to be in the most obvious places that affect the most people, but there's still plenty of good at Microsoft. Even Internet Explorer has come a long way since IE 6.
Not exactly. Steve Jobs was *the* driving force behind Apple over the last decade or so to the point where the two are almost synonymous. Microsoft, on the other hand, hasn't relied on Bill Gates as the lead visionary and motivator/taskmaster in a long time (and never to the same extent). Jobs was the face of Apple, Gates was/is the face of "don't pick on the nerd, you'll work for his rich ass one day".
That 1/3 pie slice is no longer 1/3 of the pie in value if you only enlarge the slice and not the rest of the pie. Sure, it's still 1/3 of a circle, but it's no longer 1/3 of the pie it was originally from. That's only good for teaching fractions of a circle, which really doesn't come up all that often until you're way past the point of learning basic fractions. The whole idea is to compare the fraction to the whole (or other parts of the whole), and if you're enlarging just one part of it, then you're throwing everybody off for no good reason.
People were fine cooking with fire for X thousand years just fine, pretty damned arrogant for them to invent the microwave.
Just because "that's the way it's always been done" doesn't mean it's the most efficient/effective/bestest way. Sure, it doesn't mean the old way isn't better for some people, but it's even more arrogant to assume the new way isn't better without trying it first, especially based on some anecdotal evidence.
Also, I highly doubt that math was taught the same way across any or every culture over the course of 2000 years.
When we first started fractions and division (third grade or so?), we used groups of discrete units rather than cutting up a single unit. If you have ten pennies and you eat half, how many do you have left? If you have 14 pennies and you throw 1/7th of them at Johnny, how many did you throw? Most kids are still smart enough to see a group of individual objects as a "whole".
Fractions are still useful in the metric system, granted, with more limited application. Halves and quarters are fine, but what about when you need to divide a whole between seven people? Each person can get 1/7 or each person can have 0.142857142857... even rounded to only.14 that's kind of hard to figure out compared to 1/7.
Metric and decimal is great for science, but fractions still have their place in everyday life.
I think a Hershey's bar would be a better choice if they want something that's already marked up. At least then you can break it into halves, quarters, eighths, etc (depending on which size bar you buy). Or just just a regular, unmarked tootsie roll, a ruler and something sharp enough to cut it.
My teachers preferred to use real-world examples, which seemed to help. Cutting a pizza into 8ths or 10ths (who the hell cuts it into fifths?). Doubling or halving chocolate chip cookie recipes (1/3 cup sugar doubled is 2/3 cup. 1/2tsp vanilla halved is 1/4tsp). Sports statistics, word problems, supermarket packaging, etc. It was all better than some arbitrary pie chart that carried no meaning beyond "this slice is bigger than that slice".
Slashdot Mirror
That strategy seems to work well for aluminium oxide, beryllium, chromium, cobalt, diamonds, ferrochromium, ferromanganese, iodine, iridium, mica, niobium, platinum group metals, talc, tantalum, thorium, tin, tungsten and zinc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_National_Stockpile_Center
But what if they *want* it in portrait? It should do what the *user* wants, not what most people think is right.
Baby steps. That's what the Cruise class is... a step in the right direction. And it could be viable for certain markets, although not necessarily consumers. We're already going towards electric vehicles. The next step could be a plug-in electric car with a roof solar panel option. I could see it being very popular in the warmer climes. Drive to work, leave it in the parking lot and let the sun recharge it for the 8 hours you're not using it anyway. It's that much less time/money you have to spend on recharging your electric car.
It may not have any directly practical applications, but that's different than saying there's no way to adapt this technology in a practical manner.
Man, 3000km for groceries? And I thought all the nuts who loved Wegmans and Trader Joes were crazy.
"For the first time, however, much more practical vehicles will race each other in the new Cruiser class. These vehicles will seat two, three of four people and be road legal. "
I'd call that an interesting thing if getting one in your driveway is the ultimate goal.
Inflation is across the board, cost of living is much more localized. They may be related, but they're definitely not the same thing. The CPI is also tied to *urban* prices, not prices everywhere.
Inflation has been the same where I live and where my parents live (about 150 miles apart in the same state) but my cost of living has gone up about 15% in the last 3 years while their cost of living has increased by about 5% in the same time period.
It's one of the reasons determining minimum wage at the state level is stupid and at the national level is downright moronic. Cost of living can vary dramatically from town to town, nevermind between counties.
Email language also vary based on where you're from, what your history is, your income level, your education level, how many fingers you've lost to chainsaws...
I think Slashdot had an article a while back about being able to use your email language to track down individual people because there are so many different variables.
But cost of living and inflation don't always go up at the same rate either. Why should be tie minimum wage to inflation rather than cost of living?
Who are we kidding? Developers don't start at grade B, they clearly start at grade F.
I wouldn't go that far. I still claim French Canadian ancestry rather than French, because at least it's diluted by moose.
I have a few things that aren't too rare or even that old, but people will still spend a small chunk of cash on them. I'd turn to eBay first. Even if it's not rare, you can often still get a few hundred bucks for a working system from the 80s or early 90s. Anything from the Windows 95 era or newer seems to be mostly worthless however.
I don't think you're really familiar with the United States. Sure, we have a significantly denser population than Canada, but the US still has extremely vast areas of few or no people. There's still places you can travel hundreds of miles without seeing any sign of civilization. And not just the deserts of the Southwest... every region of the country has at least a few large tracts of land that humans have barely wandered through in all of history, nevermind living memory.
No unforeseen consequences as long as it's not anomalous radioactive waste.
What Charlton Heston didn't tell you is that Soylent Green was invented by hornets.
That's like saying workers don't pay taxes because they pass the taxes on to the employer in the form of demanding higher pay checks. It ignores... everything.
I was responding to the guy asking about *some* things they do right. I never said they do everything right or even that they do most things right. I pointed out a few things they've done right with recent products, as well as the issues keeping people from using them in spite of them being done right.
Did you notice I never said any of them were perfect? The iPod is nice and easy to use, except for the price. Linux is cheap and works on a wide range of devices, but many distros have poor support. You can find a caveat for anything. In general, I think Windows 8 is pretty good, it just happens that its flaws are in the most pain in the ass location but 95% of the OS is really good for anyone intelligent enough to realize that even a fatal flaw doesn't mean the rest of the product isn't well done.
Once you get past the UI, Windows 8 and Server 2012 are pretty damned good products. Of course, everyone focuses on the UI because its what people see but you have to remember that Windows does have a lot of other components behind that UI. Office is much the same way, although it's a bit bloated in places. I got to play around with Azure a bit too. I don't know how it compares to competitors, but it is a nifty platform.
Then there's other products like Xbox which seems to have done quite well, including Kinect, and the Surface Pro (RT not so much).
It's easy to focus on the bad because it tends to be in the most obvious places that affect the most people, but there's still plenty of good at Microsoft. Even Internet Explorer has come a long way since IE 6.
Not exactly. Steve Jobs was *the* driving force behind Apple over the last decade or so to the point where the two are almost synonymous. Microsoft, on the other hand, hasn't relied on Bill Gates as the lead visionary and motivator/taskmaster in a long time (and never to the same extent). Jobs was the face of Apple, Gates was/is the face of "don't pick on the nerd, you'll work for his rich ass one day".
That 1/3 pie slice is no longer 1/3 of the pie in value if you only enlarge the slice and not the rest of the pie. Sure, it's still 1/3 of a circle, but it's no longer 1/3 of the pie it was originally from. That's only good for teaching fractions of a circle, which really doesn't come up all that often until you're way past the point of learning basic fractions. The whole idea is to compare the fraction to the whole (or other parts of the whole), and if you're enlarging just one part of it, then you're throwing everybody off for no good reason.
People were fine cooking with fire for X thousand years just fine, pretty damned arrogant for them to invent the microwave.
Just because "that's the way it's always been done" doesn't mean it's the most efficient/effective/bestest way. Sure, it doesn't mean the old way isn't better for some people, but it's even more arrogant to assume the new way isn't better without trying it first, especially based on some anecdotal evidence.
Also, I highly doubt that math was taught the same way across any or every culture over the course of 2000 years.
When we first started fractions and division (third grade or so?), we used groups of discrete units rather than cutting up a single unit. If you have ten pennies and you eat half, how many do you have left? If you have 14 pennies and you throw 1/7th of them at Johnny, how many did you throw? Most kids are still smart enough to see a group of individual objects as a "whole".
Fractions are still useful in the metric system, granted, with more limited application. Halves and quarters are fine, but what about when you need to divide a whole between seven people? Each person can get 1/7 or each person can have 0.142857142857... even rounded to only .14 that's kind of hard to figure out compared to 1/7.
Metric and decimal is great for science, but fractions still have their place in everyday life.
I think a Hershey's bar would be a better choice if they want something that's already marked up. At least then you can break it into halves, quarters, eighths, etc (depending on which size bar you buy). Or just just a regular, unmarked tootsie roll, a ruler and something sharp enough to cut it.
My teachers preferred to use real-world examples, which seemed to help. Cutting a pizza into 8ths or 10ths (who the hell cuts it into fifths?). Doubling or halving chocolate chip cookie recipes (1/3 cup sugar doubled is 2/3 cup. 1/2tsp vanilla halved is 1/4tsp). Sports statistics, word problems, supermarket packaging, etc. It was all better than some arbitrary pie chart that carried no meaning beyond "this slice is bigger than that slice".