Quick--which is better--a quick three line e-mail, or listening to some idiot ramble on for a couple of minutes as he gradually gets to the point and remembers the three things he needed to tell you? Now add to that the fact that you need to sit and write down the details of his ramblings, and often play the message twice to make out bits of it. Aargh!
I make a point of only listening to voicemail when I've run out of e-mail to respond to, and only responding to voicemail with e-mail. I note this in my directory profile. I also used to have my voicemail message say "If your message is urgent or important, please send me e-mail or an instant message... if not, please speak after the tone."
Another good trick is to let your voice mail fill up until it disables itself.
Neither Perl nor Python support Unicode, if by "support Unicode" you mean "allow use of Unicode strings like you'd use ASCII strings". They all require hackery involving library calls, which means all your code needs to be rewritten.
Java does support Unicode. It's one of the things that Sun got right. Java programs are Unicode, Java's standard strings are Unicode, so if you suddenly need to use Unicode, you don't need to rewrite everything.
If Ruby supported Unicode, I'd switch to Ruby. If Python supported Unicode and didn't suffer tab damage, I'd switch to Python. As it is, if I'm doomed to using a broken scripting language, I'll stick with the one I already know, Perl.
The minute Ruby supports Unicode, at least as far as having UTF8 as its native string type, I'm gonna switch to Ruby. Until then, I already know Perl...
He makes the point that why would we carry around some fragile copy of the data when we can just have it delivered across the network to whichever device requires it.
Because setting up a suitable server and network connection is beyond the capabilities of the average person, and will still be so in ten years; and because the smart early adopter knows better than to trust his entire digital life to a single corporation.
I've seen multiple ISPs go under, and they would have taken my e-mail with them if I'd been dumb enough to trust that my mail would always be available to be delivered across the network from their servers. Joe Sixpack is starting to learn that lesson with his "free web mail" service that seemed like such a good idea at the time. Think he wants to put his entire music, movie and book collections on the same system?
1. GSM mobile phones. 2. Metric. (*) 3. Standard international dialing. (00 + country)
And one I won't be holding my breath for:
4. A universal healthcare system.
(*) Laugh all you like, global corporations are gonna use metric for everything, not stupid US-only units. Eventually this will trickle down to everyday life. It may take decades, but...
The fact that people feel the need to try and come up with ways to use the dual screens, suggests strongly to me that it's a gimmick--a solution in search of a problem.
It confirms what many gamers already know, which is that SCEA are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I mean, SCEA declined to distribute Vib Ribbon, Wipeout Fusion, Dropship... It's not just 2D games they reject, it's just about anything that isn't a FPS or movie tie-in.
Maybe they're right from a commercial standpoint; maybe Joe Sixpack is only interested in playing Unreal Syphon Quakesplitters 3. But it's pretty sad for gamers.
The problem is, those who cooperate with Microsoft get shafted too. The typical process goes like this:
1. Company signs agreement with Microsoft to cross-license technology. 2. Microsoft takes technology and incorporates it into Windows, gives it away for free, bundled. 3. Company has no revenue, goes bust. 4. Microsoft ejects husk of dead company, keeps technology.
It happened to Vivo. It happened to L+H. It almost happened to Real, except they had secretly been working on G2 and hadn't licensed that. If Kodak had been a small company, it would have happened to them too.
99% of the people who have a warez version of Photoshop do not need it, in fact they would be better off with Elements because it would help them learn how to do stuff.
Instead, we see forums cluttered with obvious questions about how to do stuff with Photoshop.
If you're doing web graphics and photo manipulation, you do not need the full version of Photoshop. Really. You can resize, blur, sharpen, chop, crop, distort and adjust your images with Elements. You can make multi-layered composited images out of images extracted via channels and given alpha masks. Really. I do it all the time.
The people who need the full Photoshop are the ones doing four-color CMYK separation, or processing thousands of files in complex workflows. They can afford the $700.
It seems as though Sony wanted EverQuest for the Mac to fail. They didn't bother creating a demo version or offering trial accounts, they charged $50 for the software, they restricted users to a special "Mac ghetto", and then after a couple of months they announced they wouldn't be doing any more work to fix bugs or add more content.
It's hard to see what else they could have done to ensure failure short of putting stickers on the box saying "Don't buy this".
Of course, there's an implicit assumption that truth (or reality) is that which the greatest number of people agree with.
I happen to disagree with that assumption. I think that there are a many subjects regarding which the vast majority of people are not just ignorant, but hold false beliefs as true.
Oh, IKEA are infamous for awful customer service and poor quality control. That's why they're so cheap. In the UK they don't deliver, they won't put items aside for you, and they won't tell you if something's in stock. You just have to visit every now and again and gradually collect all the pieces you need for your shelf system.
The classic book on the subject is "The Mac Is Not A Typewriter". I believe there's also a version "The PC Is Not A Typewriter", though the former isn't exactly Mac-specific.
If you think American customer service is awful, you should try England.
Also, bear in mind that customer service in the US varies enormously from state to state. Compare Texas or Minnesota with Massachusetts or New York and there's a world of difference.
I've had great customer service from American Express.
I moved to the US. Called AmEx, next day there was a brand new US-issued AmEx card waiting on my desk.
Amtrak tried to double-charge me for one train journey. I called AmEx, told them the problem and the date of the transaction, they said they'd deal with it. They called Amtrak and dealt with it, the charge was refunded on my next bill. No paperwork, even.
Actually, electronic music is the most difficult to encode, because triangle and square waves require an infinite series of fourier terms to represent exactly. Try feeding some analog electronica to LAME --alt-preset standard and watch the bit rate shoot up to 300+, then feed it some orchestral stuff and see the comparison.
You don't want to hook the headphone socket of your iPod up to your headphones, either. Get a headphone amp and you'll head an incredible improvement in sound quality.
Never is a strong word... the biggest argument I have against this is that my eyes hate to read a line of text which spans across my monitor. This is just my preference, but I have a feeling many people share this pet peeve -- if I find a site which is too wide for my eyes, I have to resize my browser window, which is not something a user should have to do to view a site.
Well, imagine how I feel when a site is too wide for my browser window, and I have to scroll sideways or make the browser window bigger. I usually avoid sites like that.
It's not so much painful to use as just plain ugly. I mean, would it kill him to learn basic typography? I'm just asking for some proper dashes and quotes, and maybe to have the names of the publications on the front page be the same size as the article titles.
It doesn't take a graphic design genius to learn that cyan and yellow isn't a good color combination, or that HTML actually supports bulleted lists, or that indentation can make things easier to read.
Hell, maybe one day his site will even validate as legitimate HTML.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically, they're rationalization matrices?
Voicemail is the most enormous waste of time.
Quick--which is better--a quick three line e-mail, or listening to some idiot ramble on for a couple of minutes as he gradually gets to the point and remembers the three things he needed to tell you? Now add to that the fact that you need to sit and write down the details of his ramblings, and often play the message twice to make out bits of it. Aargh!
I make a point of only listening to voicemail when I've run out of e-mail to respond to, and only responding to voicemail with e-mail. I note this in my directory profile. I also used to have my voicemail message say "If your message is urgent or important, please send me e-mail or an instant message... if not, please speak after the tone."
Another good trick is to let your voice mail fill up until it disables itself.
Neither Perl nor Python support Unicode, if by "support Unicode" you mean "allow use of Unicode strings like you'd use ASCII strings". They all require hackery involving library calls, which means all your code needs to be rewritten.
Java does support Unicode. It's one of the things that Sun got right. Java programs are Unicode, Java's standard strings are Unicode, so if you suddenly need to use Unicode, you don't need to rewrite everything.
If Ruby supported Unicode, I'd switch to Ruby. If Python supported Unicode and didn't suffer tab damage, I'd switch to Python. As it is, if I'm doomed to using a broken scripting language, I'll stick with the one I already know, Perl.
The minute Ruby supports Unicode, at least as far as having UTF8 as its native string type, I'm gonna switch to Ruby. Until then, I already know Perl...
Yes, but hopefully they won't let you register catholic-priests.love.kids.us.
Because setting up a suitable server and network connection is beyond the capabilities of the average person, and will still be so in ten years; and because the smart early adopter knows better than to trust his entire digital life to a single corporation.
I've seen multiple ISPs go under, and they would have taken my e-mail with them if I'd been dumb enough to trust that my mail would always be available to be delivered across the network from their servers. Joe Sixpack is starting to learn that lesson with his "free web mail" service that seemed like such a good idea at the time. Think he wants to put his entire music, movie and book collections on the same system?
Other inevitable and overdue US switchovers:
1. GSM mobile phones.
2. Metric. (*)
3. Standard international dialing. (00 + country)
And one I won't be holding my breath for:
4. A universal healthcare system.
(*) Laugh all you like, global corporations are gonna use metric for everything, not stupid US-only units. Eventually this will trickle down to everyday life. It may take decades, but...
The fact that people feel the need to try and come up with ways to use the dual screens, suggests strongly to me that it's a gimmick--a solution in search of a problem.
It confirms what many gamers already know, which is that SCEA are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I mean, SCEA declined to distribute Vib Ribbon, Wipeout Fusion, Dropship... It's not just 2D games they reject, it's just about anything that isn't a FPS or movie tie-in.
Maybe they're right from a commercial standpoint; maybe Joe Sixpack is only interested in playing Unreal Syphon Quakesplitters 3. But it's pretty sad for gamers.
The problem is, those who cooperate with Microsoft get shafted too. The typical process goes like this:
1. Company signs agreement with Microsoft to cross-license technology.
2. Microsoft takes technology and incorporates it into Windows, gives it away for free, bundled.
3. Company has no revenue, goes bust.
4. Microsoft ejects husk of dead company, keeps technology.
It happened to Vivo. It happened to L+H. It almost happened to Real, except they had secretly been working on G2 and hadn't licensed that. If Kodak had been a small company, it would have happened to them too.
Sounds like the to-do list software I have for Palm, Life Balance. They have Mac and Windows versions too.
I have Photoshop Elements. I bought it for $30.
99% of the people who have a warez version of Photoshop do not need it, in fact they would be better off with Elements because it would help them learn how to do stuff.
Instead, we see forums cluttered with obvious questions about how to do stuff with Photoshop.
If you're doing web graphics and photo manipulation, you do not need the full version of Photoshop. Really. You can resize, blur, sharpen, chop, crop, distort and adjust your images with Elements. You can make multi-layered composited images out of images extracted via channels and given alpha masks. Really. I do it all the time.
The people who need the full Photoshop are the ones doing four-color CMYK separation, or processing thousands of files in complex workflows. They can afford the $700.
The version with Doolittle playing the bottle organ is the long version; the short version is the "Director's Cut".
It seems as though Sony wanted EverQuest for the Mac to fail. They didn't bother creating a demo version or offering trial accounts, they charged $50 for the software, they restricted users to a special "Mac ghetto", and then after a couple of months they announced they wouldn't be doing any more work to fix bugs or add more content.
It's hard to see what else they could have done to ensure failure short of putting stickers on the box saying "Don't buy this".
Of course, there's an implicit assumption that truth (or reality) is that which the greatest number of people agree with.
I happen to disagree with that assumption. I think that there are a many subjects regarding which the vast majority of people are not just ignorant, but hold false beliefs as true.
Just make the software decode GIFs and replace them with PNGs. The user doesn't notice anything except that the site gets faster.
Oh, IKEA are infamous for awful customer service and poor quality control. That's why they're so cheap. In the UK they don't deliver, they won't put items aside for you, and they won't tell you if something's in stock. You just have to visit every now and again and gradually collect all the pieces you need for your shelf system.
The classic book on the subject is "The Mac Is Not A Typewriter". I believe there's also a version "The PC Is Not A Typewriter", though the former isn't exactly Mac-specific.
There's a pretty good web-specific article at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/emen/.
If you think American customer service is awful, you should try England.
Also, bear in mind that customer service in the US varies enormously from state to state. Compare Texas or Minnesota with Massachusetts or New York and there's a world of difference.
Unless the contract you signed gave them the right to change the terms and conditions unilaterally, they're on very shaky legal grounds there.
In fact, *even if* the contract you signed gives them the right to change the terms and conditions unilaterally, they're on very shaky grounds.
If I were looking at eating the cost of a $1500 laptop, I'd definitely at least drag them through small claims court.
I've had great customer service from American Express.
I moved to the US. Called AmEx, next day there was a brand new US-issued AmEx card waiting on my desk.
Amtrak tried to double-charge me for one train journey. I called AmEx, told them the problem and the date of the transaction, they said they'd deal with it. They called Amtrak and dealt with it, the charge was refunded on my next bill. No paperwork, even.
Actually, electronic music is the most difficult to encode, because triangle and square waves require an infinite series of fourier terms to represent exactly. Try feeding some analog electronica to LAME --alt-preset standard and watch the bit rate shoot up to 300+, then feed it some orchestral stuff and see the comparison.
You don't want to hook the headphone socket of your iPod up to your headphones, either. Get a headphone amp and you'll head an incredible improvement in sound quality.
Well, imagine how I feel when a site is too wide for my browser window, and I have to scroll sideways or make the browser window bigger. I usually avoid sites like that.
It's not so much painful to use as just plain ugly. I mean, would it kill him to learn basic typography? I'm just asking for some proper dashes and quotes, and maybe to have the names of the publications on the front page be the same size as the article titles.
It doesn't take a graphic design genius to learn that cyan and yellow isn't a good color combination, or that HTML actually supports bulleted lists, or that indentation can make things easier to read.
Hell, maybe one day his site will even validate as legitimate HTML.