I checked the other numbers on their contact page, but none of them match up, the closest being "(206) 709-3400."
While I wouldn't find it surprising for them to own the numbers in that block it's hardly the 'front desk' as the article implies when it's not the number of the front desk.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation PO Box 23350 Seattle, WA 98102 Phone: (206) 709-3140 For general questions or grant inquiries, please contact the foundation via email, info@gatesfoundation.org
From the Apple Store page:
106 Bellevue Square Bellevue, WA 98004 425-709-3100
Someone please tell me, am I missing something here?
Agreed on the space. I'm currently spread out across two desks here, so unless lots of space was added to the chair I'd be spending lots of time getting in and out of it, which leads to the last point you bring up.
Actually, looking at the design, I'm reminded of these chairs we have in one of the presentation rooms here, which have writing services attatched to the arm of the chair much like the keyboard in this design. All I can say is that if this is anything like that, it will be a pain in the ass to get in and out of.
As for the monitors, I'd hope they were designed to be incredibly stable. But stupider design decisions can (and do) happen.
How was Skylab launched 20 years ago, and reentered 25 years ago?
Simple. They put it in an orbit that was the opposite of the Earth's rotation, so that it was going backwards in time until it finally crashed ~4 years before it launched.
Either that or they shot it at the sun really fast and it slingshotted around back into the past. Take your pick.
Today's post brought to you be pseudo-science, stupid theories, and the number 3
Old World Macs have the actual boot rom chip. New World ones have it stored in software (this last bit is according to a friend with a New World Mac, I only have Old World ones.)
There, you've heard it again. And you know what, I don't know where the arcade is around here, I'm well below the average weight, I haven't seen xXx, and the Fast and the Furious provoked a 5 to 10 minute ranting about what a horrible excuse for a movie it was. Happy?
I'll explain my reasoning to you: Final Fantasy VII is overly long, tedious, the plot is nothing amazing, and the spells take forever (not as long as FF8 mind you, but I still don't want to sit through them). About all it had going for it was the graphics. Which is what they sold it on. (Think back, remember the commercials? Short fast cuts showing the best looking FMV shots? Nothing about story or gameplay in it, just selling it on eye-candy)
Call it elitism if you want, but when I think of the classic Final Fantasy games for the Super Nintendo I think of games with plot, not games that are going to make you spend hours wandering around doing useless crap that doesn't advance the story just so you won't get your ass handed to you by the boss. Now, when someone mentions Final Fantasy most people whose first exposure was to the games on the Playstation think of long gorgeous movies, with a bunch of fights stuck in between. If I wanted that I'd just rent a damn film./end_rant
Makes me wish there was a way to take back my previous post now. heh...
Or better yet, when I hit preview how about I get shown all the other current replies at the same level so it ensures that someone doesn't make a correction while I'm typing up my post thereby making me look like an ass when I do post it.
2,000+? Obviously a lot more games were released in Japan and Europe than I was aware of, or they're including things like the SNES emulator and many roms and counting each as a seperate game, as only 248 Dreamcast games were released in North America.
Even the SNES had far fewer than 2,000 games released for it if my memory serves me correctly.
If it works for you, then use it! No one's saying you can't.
I think the reason we concentrate on speed so much is that speed has become the main factor in measuring the superiority of various keyboards.
There's unfortunately no readily agreed upon method for measuring the amount of pain generated by a given keyboard layout short of a large scale user survey, and sadly no one has done that yet.
But yes, the question as to whether or not this is a provable matter is up in the air.
And my hands do dance like spiders using the QWERTY layout too... Someday I may try Dvorak, but I use so many different machines right now, some of them with non-customisable keyboard layouts (at least, I don't have the access required to change keyboard layouts) that I just can't be bothered.
But no, I don't think this is a provable matter either. You can point out theoretical and ancedotal expected rates for expert users using any keyboard, but the problem is that no one performs exactly as in theory or exactly as someone else, so it all comes down to what works best for different people.
Actually, alphabetical order doesn't work much better for PDAs than QWERTY, a 6x5 square provides only an 8% speed increase over the traditional QWERTY layout, although I don't think this is quite the same layout as you were talking about.
The current most theoretically efficient method discovered is what's known as the "Metropolis II" layout after the algorithm used to design it (I'd offer you a link to it, but you need to be an ACM subscriber to get at the paper, and as far as I know tyhe keyboard layout itself has never been made publically available for use)
However, as mentioned, people's familiarity with the QWERTY layout is why it keeps getting put on there even if it's no longer the optimal layout, which means that when a user sits down at a new device they get faster immediate interaction rates if the keyboard is QWERTY due to familiarity with the letters as opposed to learning a new interaction method. (Although this deals only with PDA keyboards, here's a paper that comes to this conclusion.)
Yes, I'm getting off topic now, but I need to find a way to spout off all this extraneous knowledge I've picked up over time.
"I also don't understand why people ignore what they call "anecdotal" evidence. I've never met a Dvorak user who didn't think they could type faster, more accurately, "smoother", and most of all with less wrist pain."
See, that's the thing. This anecdotal evidence (Yes, it is anecdotal evidence. With nothing to back it up it's anecdotal) is from people who use it and think they type faster. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
Just because you think you type faster doesn't mean you do. I've got a paper somewhere in the stacks that are piled on my desk where users were made to perform tests in multiple environments. The users thought they performed significantly better in one environment, but actually did not (approximately equal, worse, I can't remember).
If I can find it in all this mess I'll post the reference, until then you'll just have to take it anecdotal evidence.
(Note: I'm not saying you don't type faster, I don't know, I don't use Dvorak. I'm jsut saying anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything)
(On an unrelated note: I just noticed there's no "Post Anonymously" box anymore... Hey Taco? What gives?)
1. See the post above me (Everyone learns QWERTY) 2. Users don't like having to learn new input methods (partly the reason why soft (ie software) keyboards on PDAs are in the QWERTY layout, despite the fact that the skills related to tapping the keyboard with a stylus are completely different to those found in touch typing.)
I don't know much about MMX/SSE, or Altivec either. However, I do know something (granted not much) about the CPUs they run on, and that doesn't make it very likely for Altivec emulation if it follows the same trend.
Ever wonder why you can emulate an x86 on a Mac but why you can't emulate a Mac platform beyond the old M68k systems on an x86? Simple, it's much easier to emulate CISC processors on a RISC machines than it is to emulate RISC processors on CISC machines. Take a look in one of the previous posts somewhere, and someone's done a slightly better job of explaining why than I could ever hope to do.
I don't know for sure, but I'd assume this RISC emulation problem would provide a great deal of headaches (and yes, the translation would essentially be emulation) to the people developing the code to do the translations and would more than likely result in a signifcant performance loss that switching to a faster processor would be unlikely to offset.
(As I said, I'm really just making an inference here from what I know about other things. Feel free to prove me wrong.)
See, now you're taking it into parody, whether you realise it or not.
There's bad error messages with debugging info. I was setting up something and it kept crashing on setup. The only info? A hex code that meant nothing to me. I don't want to call tech support if I don't want to, but if I'm not given any indication as to what occurred other than that, I'm going to have to.
At the same time, there is such a thing as error messages that hide too much, such as having every error message be "A serious error has occurred" In fact, I'm sure most human interface people will tell you that this is a bad idea, because it makes everyone's life much more difficult.
IMO a decent compromise were the error messages you got back in Windows 95, it told you it crashed but didn't bombard you with extra info unless you clicked the little button for it. Could they have been made better? Sure, but they didn't completely and utterly scare a new user with incomprehensible garbage, and they didn't hide everything from those looking for more.
<rant> But at the same time: It shouldn't have crashed in the first place, and you know what, sometimes it is the programmers' fault. A game shouldn't crash while installing, it shouldn't crash to the desktop constantly, it shouldn't constantly lock, it shouldn't have had 5 patches (if they followed some sort of sane version numbering) released in less than two months. All this says that someone, somewhere, didn't test as much as they should have, or if they did they cared more about getting it out the door than making a decent release. </rant>
Slashdot Mirror
I checked the other numbers on their contact page, but none of them match up, the closest being "(206) 709-3400."
While I wouldn't find it surprising for them to own the numbers in that block it's hardly the 'front desk' as the article implies when it's not the number of the front desk.
From the Gates Foundation contact info page:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
PO Box 23350
Seattle, WA 98102
Phone: (206) 709-3140
For general questions or grant inquiries, please contact the foundation via email, info@gatesfoundation.org
From the Apple Store page:
106 Bellevue Square
Bellevue, WA 98004
425-709-3100
Someone please tell me, am I missing something here?
Agreed on the space.
I'm currently spread out across two desks here, so unless lots of space was added to the chair I'd be spending lots of time getting in and out of it, which leads to the last point you bring up.
Actually, looking at the design, I'm reminded of these chairs we have in one of the presentation rooms here, which have writing services attatched to the arm of the chair much like the keyboard in this design. All I can say is that if this is anything like that, it will be a pain in the ass to get in and out of.
As for the monitors, I'd hope they were designed to be incredibly stable. But stupider design decisions can (and do) happen.
Try some of these links, not mirrors but they have info and pictures, and may just stand up to the power of a slashdotting a bit better.
PC World
Space.Com (Nice big pic of the two chairs if you click on the smaller image)
I took one look at those chairs and the first thing I thought was "These look like the design of a dentist on a bad acid trip."
Comfortable? Maybe, I've never tried one, so I can't say.
Eye-searingly awful looking? You better believe it.
So did Sega.
(Who remember the black 'Sports Edition" Dreamcast?)
As well as Nintendo.
(Green Donkey Kong N64 anyone? Or how about the blue Pikachu one? Or the Pikachu gameboy? I thought not in all the cases.)
How was Skylab launched 20 years ago, and reentered 25 years ago?
Simple. They put it in an orbit that was the opposite of the Earth's rotation, so that it was going backwards in time until it finally crashed ~4 years before it launched.
Either that or they shot it at the sun really fast and it slingshotted around back into the past. Take your pick.
Today's post brought to you be pseudo-science, stupid theories, and the number 3
You're absolutely right, it's the 3rd sentence.
So it's official then. I can't read.
The very first line in the NY Times article says 30 years.
Either somebody can't read, or they can't do math.
Old World Macs have the actual boot rom chip.
New World ones have it stored in software (this last bit is according to a friend with a New World Mac, I only have Old World ones.)
FF7 was total crap.
/end_rant
There, you've heard it again. And you know what, I don't know where the arcade is around here, I'm well below the average weight, I haven't seen xXx, and the Fast and the Furious provoked a 5 to 10 minute ranting about what a horrible excuse for a movie it was. Happy?
I'll explain my reasoning to you: Final Fantasy VII is overly long, tedious, the plot is nothing amazing, and the spells take forever (not as long as FF8 mind you, but I still don't want to sit through them). About all it had going for it was the graphics. Which is what they sold it on. (Think back, remember the commercials? Short fast cuts showing the best looking FMV shots? Nothing about story or gameplay in it, just selling it on eye-candy)
Call it elitism if you want, but when I think of the classic Final Fantasy games for the Super Nintendo I think of games with plot, not games that are going to make you spend hours wandering around doing useless crap that doesn't advance the story just so you won't get your ass handed to you by the boss. Now, when someone mentions Final Fantasy most people whose first exposure was to the games on the Playstation think of long gorgeous movies, with a bunch of fights stuck in between. If I wanted that I'd just rent a damn film.
What? You mean you don't want one of the 50 (yes, I may be exagerrating here) different football games that all the stores seem to carry?
Makes me wish there was a way to take back my previous post now. heh...
Or better yet, when I hit preview how about I get shown all the other current replies at the same level so it ensures that someone doesn't make a correction while I'm typing up my post thereby making me look like an ass when I do post it.
Hmmmm.. Nah. Taco would never go for it.
(Wandering Mind Rant Over)
2,000+? Obviously a lot more games were released in Japan and Europe than I was aware of, or they're including things like the SNES emulator and many roms and counting each as a seperate game, as only 248 Dreamcast games were released in North America.
Even the SNES had far fewer than 2,000 games released for it if my memory serves me correctly.
If it works for you, then use it! No one's saying you can't.
I think the reason we concentrate on speed so much is that speed has become the main factor in measuring the superiority of various keyboards.
There's unfortunately no readily agreed upon method for measuring the amount of pain generated by a given keyboard layout short of a large scale user survey, and sadly no one has done that yet.
Yes! That's the paper! Thank you so very much.
But yes, the question as to whether or not this is a provable matter is up in the air.
And my hands do dance like spiders using the QWERTY layout too... Someday I may try Dvorak, but I use so many different machines right now, some of them with non-customisable keyboard layouts (at least, I don't have the access required to change keyboard layouts) that I just can't be bothered.
But no, I don't think this is a provable matter either. You can point out theoretical and ancedotal expected rates for expert users using any keyboard, but the problem is that no one performs exactly as in theory or exactly as someone else, so it all comes down to what works best for different people.
Actually, alphabetical order doesn't work much better for PDAs than QWERTY, a 6x5 square provides only an 8% speed increase over the traditional QWERTY layout, although I don't think this is quite the same layout as you were talking about.
The current most theoretically efficient method discovered is what's known as the "Metropolis II" layout after the algorithm used to design it (I'd offer you a link to it, but you need to be an ACM subscriber to get at the paper, and as far as I know tyhe keyboard layout itself has never been made publically available for use)
However, as mentioned, people's familiarity with the QWERTY layout is why it keeps getting put on there even if it's no longer the optimal layout, which means that when a user sits down at a new device they get faster immediate interaction rates if the keyboard is QWERTY due to familiarity with the letters as opposed to learning a new interaction method. (Although this deals only with PDA keyboards, here's a paper that comes to this conclusion.)
Yes, I'm getting off topic now, but I need to find a way to spout off all this extraneous knowledge I've picked up over time.
"I also don't understand why people ignore what they call "anecdotal" evidence. I've never met a Dvorak user who didn't think they could type faster, more accurately, "smoother", and most of all with less wrist pain."
See, that's the thing. This anecdotal evidence (Yes, it is anecdotal evidence. With nothing to back it up it's anecdotal) is from people who use it and think they type faster. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
Just because you think you type faster doesn't mean you do. I've got a paper somewhere in the stacks that are piled on my desk where users were made to perform tests in multiple environments. The users thought they performed significantly better in one environment, but actually did not (approximately equal, worse, I can't remember).
If I can find it in all this mess I'll post the reference, until then you'll just have to take it anecdotal evidence.
(Note: I'm not saying you don't type faster, I don't know, I don't use Dvorak. I'm jsut saying anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything)
(On an unrelated note: I just noticed there's no "Post Anonymously" box anymore... Hey Taco? What gives?)
1. See the post above me (Everyone learns QWERTY)
2. Users don't like having to learn new input methods (partly the reason why soft (ie software) keyboards on PDAs are in the QWERTY layout, despite the fact that the skills related to tapping the keyboard with a stylus are completely different to those found in touch typing.)
Much appreciated. Never heard of them to tell the truth.
Any ideas on performance?
I don't know much about MMX/SSE, or Altivec either. However, I do know something (granted not much) about the CPUs they run on, and that doesn't make it very likely for Altivec emulation if it follows the same trend.
Ever wonder why you can emulate an x86 on a Mac but why you can't emulate a Mac platform beyond the old M68k systems on an x86?
Simple, it's much easier to emulate CISC processors on a RISC machines than it is to emulate RISC processors on CISC machines.
Take a look in one of the previous posts somewhere, and someone's done a slightly better job of explaining why than I could ever hope to do.
I don't know for sure, but I'd assume this RISC emulation problem would provide a great deal of headaches (and yes, the translation would essentially be emulation) to the people developing the code to do the translations and would more than likely result in a signifcant performance loss that switching to a faster processor would be unlikely to offset.
(As I said, I'm really just making an inference here from what I know about other things. Feel free to prove me wrong.)
3 GHz = 3000 MHz.
3 GHz != 3096 MHz
Therefore
3000 Mhz / 1.023 MHz = 2932.551
MHz and GHz are base 10. Base 2 is for memory.
See, now you're taking it into parody, whether you realise it or not.
There's bad error messages with debugging info. I was setting up something and it kept crashing on setup. The only info? A hex code that meant nothing to me. I don't want to call tech support if I don't want to, but if I'm not given any indication as to what occurred other than that, I'm going to have to.
At the same time, there is such a thing as error messages that hide too much, such as having every error message be "A serious error has occurred"
In fact, I'm sure most human interface people will tell you that this is a bad idea, because it makes everyone's life much more difficult.
IMO a decent compromise were the error messages you got back in Windows 95, it told you it crashed but didn't bombard you with extra info unless you clicked the little button for it. Could they have been made better? Sure, but they didn't completely and utterly scare a new user with incomprehensible garbage, and they didn't hide everything from those looking for more.
<rant>
But at the same time: It shouldn't have crashed in the first place, and you know what, sometimes it is the programmers' fault.
A game shouldn't crash while installing, it shouldn't crash to the desktop constantly, it shouldn't constantly lock, it shouldn't have had 5 patches (if they followed some sort of sane version numbering) released in less than two months. All this says that someone, somewhere, didn't test as much as they should have, or if they did they cared more about getting it out the door than making a decent release.
</rant>
I used one of those, Presario sounds about right. It was a socket 5 Pentium motherboard in the thing anyways.
There actually was a way to get the image as I ended up replacing the drive in the thing, but it was mainly just a royal pain in the ass.
Thank you for explaining that, as it wasn't what the article stated.
It would appear that Mr. Langa needs to make sure he understands what he's talking about before writing about it.