There will always be somebody that gets freaked out by something they don't understand. Humans can be herded very easily with fear. Just look at the US political system.
And gadgets have been around forever. How many accidents are caused by people messing with their radio? Touch screens are really, really a bad idea, and I'm always disappointed when there are so few, good head units that have physical knobs for adjusting playback and volume.
The article seems to be more focused on the even more general "distractions":
...distractions affect our driving performance and how drivers are typically distracted most of time. One thing that stood out of the report was the claim that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents
Duh. Passengers talking, kids doing practically everything kids do, Billboards, airports (I fear for my life when my former Air Force father-in-law passes a military airport), food, parcels shifting around, or just plain daydreaming. It doesn't have to be modern electronics causing the issues, they just add to the cacophony of distractions that exist.
Not really. They'll make what they need if the "real" musicians don't bow down. They can hire writers and studio techs. Computers can do most everything else. Find a pretty face, get 'em under contract, give him/her a couple of voice lessons and just autotune and over mix it.
If a "real" musician comes along - guaranteed hit - you can give them a better deal than the "standard" rich-and-famous you peddle to the riff raff that walks in the door.
They're dinosaurs and they're cocky as hell, but they aren't complete idiots. Cutting of one faucet will not deny them the flow of product they are selling.
Wait a minute. You're telling me that - just to make a living doing what I love to do - I have to work 3 or 4 nights a week...AND I might have to relocate? And that doesn't even count the admin time I spend setting up gigs, doing the books, writing/arranging/practicing new stuff?
Goddamnit, that sounds like I'm spending 40 hours doing a job, and it doesn't even count having to travel to and from gigs! Hell, if I'd known that, I could have moved to a bigger city, worked on TPS reports 40-45 hours a week, commuting another 3-6 hours a week. That is, if I'd stayed in school.
No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek.
You see, we currently pay people in return for their time. $40,000 (or $80k, or $120k) buys you a person for a year. Now, whether they do 40 hours of work a week to produce TPS reports, or you give them a computer so they can produce the equivalent of 80 hours worth of TPS reports in a week, the market is for a week of time. Business owners understand this, and their income is based on then number of TPS reports.
Let's say you've got 100 employees each making 10 TPS reports a week. Lets assume you are "right-sized" and there is only a market for 1000TPS reports in a week. Now you buy a Watson that can produce 100 TPS reports per person employed. Would you keep everybody on and let them work 4 hours a week, or would you fire 90 employees, keep the ten you need, pay the cost of Watson* with the savings in payroll, and pocket the extra?
That's exactly what has happened over the past 40 years. We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks - it's leading to higher unemployment, and higher unemployability. As things get more complex, fewer humans have the mental capacity to operate the machines of business efficiently.
The more machines do, the "expendable" end of the human capability bell curve moves further to the right.
*note: if at all possible, IBM will charge for Watson the annual sum of about 85 employees, including maintenance and upgrades, for licensing.
If not satellite, then what are they using that's faster over a multi-thousand square mile theater? They claim that the system often went offline unexpectedly on a frequent basis, so it's not a stand-alone system.
I remember talk of this in my section/branch at Goddard. Do you know which group actually designed/built it? I left in '97, but I remember grumbled comments about Gore's satellite with an HD feed, intended to sit at the L1 point. We built many small explorer satellites for expendable rockets and payload groups for shuttle flights.
If not, suck it up. It was a three-day weekend based on a national holiday. You should EXPECT services to be unavailable.
Perhaps, but in this case, you're paying for access to the material which is (a) created and distributed on said national holiday and (b) has a nominal 24 hour life span of relevance. You sure as hell should expect to be able to access your material.
As for complaints via Twitter, (FTFA) "The Times has kept readers up to date on mobile app problems thorugh its NYTimesMobile Twitter feed . In fact, an update also ruined the iPhone app last week, and the Times used its mobile Twitter feed to let readers know that a new version had been released to fix startup problems and to advise readers to remove and reinstall the app."
If you're getting official updates via twitter, it's a small leap of logic (even if false) to believe that the twitter feed might be one place to register a complaint.
Where are my mod points when I need them. I am an engineer, and quite honestly - 99% of the free interns aren't worth what you pay them. I've hired (and paid) college students in the past for summer internships. Sadly, they don't really know enough of anything to be useful. Except for menial tasks, it takes far longer to explain the problem to them and help them along than it does to actually do the work yourself. In many cases, that's true of recent graduates as well. Taking on an internet is often an act of charity, though it gives you the chance to "try out" a person free of guilt (for those employers who have a conscience). If they really do pick things up quickly and are smart, they're going to get the first job offer if the office needs a hire when they graduate or complete their internship.
I did buy an Alpine. The iPod interface was okay, but the CD player "dragged" and skipped intermittently. I had my installer verify the problem and send it back - twice - and both times Alpine couldn't find anything wrong. But instead of taking the installers word that the error was intermittent and replace unit, they sent it back without action. The bluetooth had such an echo that it was unusable. The installer also verified that problem, and worked with the Alpine reps for the better part of 4 hours - changing settings, modifying the microphone location. The result? Still didn't work, and Alpine's offical response was that my truck cab was "incompatible with their echo cancellation system" and there was nothing they could do to fix it.
Based on the support they gave their authorized installer, I will never buy another Alpine product.
One could argue that for a lot of society today - that you are the product, not the customer.
More importantly, "not piss you off enough to go away" gets a lot harder if there is a viable place to go. Right now, an alternative doesn't exist, but G+ has the potential to actually give people a place to jump to. Things could get interesting...
My expectation (no, of course I didn't RTFA) is that people hate the relatively rigid UI format of facebook which changes without notice on a fairly regular basis, with no attempt to transition or provide guidance. Whether it's the list friends online (list->pictures) or the "enter now submits your comment" features, or any of a dozen other annoyances, they all generate ill will, even if they may be useful in the long run.
People like the concept of facebook - the connectivity, the games (ugh), organizational advantages. They just don't like the implementation, or rather the infuriatingly frequent changes in the implementation. MySpace was visually busy, and appealed to a far more limited set of users.. Lots of people can stand facebooks UI, so the interaction makes the experience worthwhile. Now that the site has critical mass (your best friend, your grandma, and your long lost college buddies are all on it) any competitor has a large barrier to entry.
The danger for FB is that if someone were to create a social site that had most of your friends already, it could overcome that. Say, someone who already handles a huge number of emails and could offer to transition you nearly seamlessly into the community you already have via email. Google fits that. And that's why FB should be scared.
Re:Google was great because of the lack of Google+
on
Google's New Design
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure it's actually getting much worse. Yeah, it's got a bar instead of a line of regular text. It's still so way ahead of (behind?) the interfaces that make you search the whole freaking page for what you want. I'm willing to be patient - I doubt they really want to screw up what they've got.
Re:Looks like time to find a new search engine
on
Google's New Design
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· Score: 1
4. Has a maps that don't suck. What retard thought it was a good idea to make the scroll wheel zoom?
Well, as an occasional CAD user, the scroll wheel as a zoom is actually very useful. Actually, I prefer that clicking the scroll wheel allows the drag-pan option rather than a right click, but it's not the end of the world.
Actually, once you get the hang of it, you'll find that a quick scroll-zoom-out, recenter mouse on your target spot, scroll-zoom-in is faster than practically any pan option you'll use. It's a little disconcerting at first to finesse the zoom-about-the-cursor, but you'll never want to go back after you get used to it.
Ironically Hotz wasn't the first school-aged hacker to be rewarded for his cyber-crime rather than a prison sentence.
Yes, but this time is was done on the internet which, as the USPTO will tell you, makes it novel and original - worthy of praise as if it had never been done before!
Actually, all of the money goes back into the economy. You might say it's even creating money, since we're having to print more than we have just to fund the government.
Point is - every dollar that is spent in war, and everywhere, ends up in the economy in somebody else's pocket - and most of that money gets spent over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
There will always be somebody that gets freaked out by something they don't understand. Humans can be herded very easily with fear. Just look at the US political system.
Not if read by the robotic overload, but you probably shouldn't have posted while driving. ;-)
And gadgets have been around forever. How many accidents are caused by people messing with their radio? Touch screens are really, really a bad idea, and I'm always disappointed when there are so few, good head units that have physical knobs for adjusting playback and volume.
The article seems to be more focused on the even more general "distractions":
...distractions affect our driving performance and how drivers are typically distracted most of time. One thing that stood out of the report was the claim that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents
Duh. Passengers talking, kids doing practically everything kids do, Billboards, airports (I fear for my life when my former Air Force father-in-law passes a military airport), food, parcels shifting around, or just plain daydreaming. It doesn't have to be modern electronics causing the issues, they just add to the cacophony of distractions that exist.
Damn. I read that as the Torrent reactor.
Not really. They'll make what they need if the "real" musicians don't bow down. They can hire writers and studio techs. Computers can do most everything else. Find a pretty face, get 'em under contract, give him/her a couple of voice lessons and just autotune and over mix it.
If a "real" musician comes along - guaranteed hit - you can give them a better deal than the "standard" rich-and-famous you peddle to the riff raff that walks in the door.
They're dinosaurs and they're cocky as hell, but they aren't complete idiots. Cutting of one faucet will not deny them the flow of product they are selling.
Wait a minute. You're telling me that - just to make a living doing what I love to do - I have to work 3 or 4 nights a week...AND I might have to relocate? And that doesn't even count the admin time I spend setting up gigs, doing the books, writing/arranging/practicing new stuff?
Goddamnit, that sounds like I'm spending 40 hours doing a job, and it doesn't even count having to travel to and from gigs! Hell, if I'd known that, I could have moved to a bigger city, worked on TPS reports 40-45 hours a week, commuting another 3-6 hours a week. That is, if I'd stayed in school.
Why would you let them know you know Chinese?
In the current crazy theater of the Afghan mountains, line of sight is worth dick. Then again, maybe that's the problem?
No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek.
You see, we currently pay people in return for their time. $40,000 (or $80k, or $120k) buys you a person for a year. Now, whether they do 40 hours of work a week to produce TPS reports, or you give them a computer so they can produce the equivalent of 80 hours worth of TPS reports in a week, the market is for a week of time. Business owners understand this, and their income is based on then number of TPS reports.
Let's say you've got 100 employees each making 10 TPS reports a week. Lets assume you are "right-sized" and there is only a market for 1000TPS reports in a week. Now you buy a Watson that can produce 100 TPS reports per person employed. Would you keep everybody on and let them work 4 hours a week, or would you fire 90 employees, keep the ten you need, pay the cost of Watson* with the savings in payroll, and pocket the extra?
That's exactly what has happened over the past 40 years. We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks - it's leading to higher unemployment, and higher unemployability. As things get more complex, fewer humans have the mental capacity to operate the machines of business efficiently.
The more machines do, the "expendable" end of the human capability bell curve moves further to the right.
*note: if at all possible, IBM will charge for Watson the annual sum of about 85 employees, including maintenance and upgrades, for licensing.
No, no - they're lawyers in white* suits.
*the color of clothing has no bearing on their litigation motivations.
Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?
If not satellite, then what are they using that's faster over a multi-thousand square mile theater? They claim that the system often went offline unexpectedly on a frequent basis, so it's not a stand-alone system.
I remember talk of this in my section/branch at Goddard. Do you know which group actually designed/built it? I left in '97, but I remember grumbled comments about Gore's satellite with an HD feed, intended to sit at the L1 point. We built many small explorer satellites for expendable rockets and payload groups for shuttle flights.
If not, suck it up. It was a three-day weekend based on a national holiday. You should EXPECT services to be unavailable.
Perhaps, but in this case, you're paying for access to the material which is (a) created and distributed on said national holiday and (b) has a nominal 24 hour life span of relevance. You sure as hell should expect to be able to access your material.
As for complaints via Twitter, (FTFA) "The Times has kept readers up to date on mobile app problems thorugh its NYTimesMobile Twitter feed . In fact, an update also ruined the iPhone app last week, and the Times used its mobile Twitter feed to let readers know that a new version had been released to fix startup problems and to advise readers to remove and reinstall the app."
If you're getting official updates via twitter, it's a small leap of logic (even if false) to believe that the twitter feed might be one place to register a complaint.
Where are my mod points when I need them. I am an engineer, and quite honestly - 99% of the free interns aren't worth what you pay them. I've hired (and paid) college students in the past for summer internships. Sadly, they don't really know enough of anything to be useful. Except for menial tasks, it takes far longer to explain the problem to them and help them along than it does to actually do the work yourself. In many cases, that's true of recent graduates as well. Taking on an internet is often an act of charity, though it gives you the chance to "try out" a person free of guilt (for those employers who have a conscience). If they really do pick things up quickly and are smart, they're going to get the first job offer if the office needs a hire when they graduate or complete their internship.
The bubble was only bad for most people. If you cashed out at the top, it was awesome. Sadly, I was mostly in the former group.
I did buy an Alpine. The iPod interface was okay, but the CD player "dragged" and skipped intermittently. I had my installer verify the problem and send it back - twice - and both times Alpine couldn't find anything wrong. But instead of taking the installers word that the error was intermittent and replace unit, they sent it back without action. The bluetooth had such an echo that it was unusable. The installer also verified that problem, and worked with the Alpine reps for the better part of 4 hours - changing settings, modifying the microphone location. The result? Still didn't work, and Alpine's offical response was that my truck cab was "incompatible with their echo cancellation system" and there was nothing they could do to fix it.
Based on the support they gave their authorized installer, I will never buy another Alpine product.
One could argue that for a lot of society today - that you are the product, not the customer.
More importantly, "not piss you off enough to go away" gets a lot harder if there is a viable place to go. Right now, an alternative doesn't exist, but G+ has the potential to actually give people a place to jump to. Things could get interesting...
My expectation (no, of course I didn't RTFA) is that people hate the relatively rigid UI format of facebook which changes without notice on a fairly regular basis, with no attempt to transition or provide guidance. Whether it's the list friends online (list->pictures) or the "enter now submits your comment" features, or any of a dozen other annoyances, they all generate ill will, even if they may be useful in the long run.
People like the concept of facebook - the connectivity, the games (ugh), organizational advantages. They just don't like the implementation, or rather the infuriatingly frequent changes in the implementation. MySpace was visually busy, and appealed to a far more limited set of users.. Lots of people can stand facebooks UI, so the interaction makes the experience worthwhile. Now that the site has critical mass (your best friend, your grandma, and your long lost college buddies are all on it) any competitor has a large barrier to entry.
The danger for FB is that if someone were to create a social site that had most of your friends already, it could overcome that. Say, someone who already handles a huge number of emails and could offer to transition you nearly seamlessly into the community you already have via email. Google fits that. And that's why FB should be scared.
I'm not sure it's actually getting much worse. Yeah, it's got a bar instead of a line of regular text. It's still so way ahead of (behind?) the interfaces that make you search the whole freaking page for what you want. I'm willing to be patient - I doubt they really want to screw up what they've got.
4. Has a maps that don't suck. What retard thought it was a good idea to make the scroll wheel zoom?
Well, as an occasional CAD user, the scroll wheel as a zoom is actually very useful. Actually, I prefer that clicking the scroll wheel allows the drag-pan option rather than a right click, but it's not the end of the world.
Actually, once you get the hang of it, you'll find that a quick scroll-zoom-out, recenter mouse on your target spot, scroll-zoom-in is faster than practically any pan option you'll use. It's a little disconcerting at first to finesse the zoom-about-the-cursor, but you'll never want to go back after you get used to it.
Ironically Hotz wasn't the first school-aged hacker to be rewarded for his cyber-crime rather than a prison sentence.
Yes, but this time is was done on the internet which, as the USPTO will tell you, makes it novel and original - worthy of praise as if it had never been done before!
Congratulations. You earned it!
Exactly - it's the outside guys we evicted ten years ago that we don't want to come back.
Actually, all of the money goes back into the economy. You might say it's even creating money, since we're having to print more than we have just to fund the government.
Point is - every dollar that is spent in war, and everywhere, ends up in the economy in somebody else's pocket - and most of that money gets spent over and over again.