This seems somewhat counterintuitive, especially since most of the retail establishments have handy lists of their prices on newsprint for you conveniently stacked by the door. In fact, I frequently call stores (mostly music stores, but Daddy's Junky Music and Guitar Center are certainly chain stores, sometimes furniture stores, sometimes BestBuy and CircuitCity - this only really works in places that have actual sales staff) and said "Hi, do you stock product X? How much? Thank you." I usually ask about their hours, as well. They are happy to give out this information.
The only establishments that suppress their pricing information are those which stand to lose by comparison shopping. College Bookstores have a long history of having a monopoly on book sales, which meant they could charge whatever price they wanted. The internet is eroding that monopoly, and this frustrates them, because they now have to charge reasonable prices for the books they stock, which eats into their margins quite a bit. (Note: Textbook publishers are not blameless in this, but that is a whole different issue.)
I find your proposal for fat-friendly parking spaces amusing, and I would like to see it implemented. I would also point out that such a parking situation would benefit not just those of us who happen to keep our personal dimensions smaller but also those who keep our automotive dimensions smaller. Of course, the people who can't fit between the two parked cars probably can't fit themselves into a Honda Civic, either.
As for your question about the freshman fifteen, I can describe several factors that influence such a weight gain. I personally gained about forty pounds my freshman year of college, though I have several friends who lost weight. 1.) All-you-can-eat dining halls: These make it really easy to overeat without thinking about it. If you're at home, and you cook one cup of rice and some chicken and veggies (or your mom cooks a similarly appropriate amount of food) and you are thinking about seconds but you see that you have about enough food left for lunch tomorrow, you put it in a tupperware in the fridge and forget about it. If you're in a dining hall, you just walk up and ask for another helping of deep-fried whatever. 2.) Activity cycle: You described a situation where you have a lot more walking to do than you used to, and that seems to have helped you out in terms of fitness. However, a) having spread-out classes only helps if you actually go to them and b) for many of us who were on sports teams in high school (I ran cross-country and track), we don't keep up with it in college, to the detriment of our physical fitness. Even a reduction in activity makes a big difference - in high school, I ran 40 miles a week, and it really didn't matter if I had extra helpings. In college, I probably made it out for 4-5 miles twice a week in the nice weather. Combine that with item 1.), and you have a recipe for a lot of unused calories. 3.) New Vices: College tends to be a time for experimentation, and a lot of people (myself not included, for this one anyway) decide that Beer is a good idea, which frequently leads to the proverbial Beer Gut.
That said, I really don't understand how people make it to obesity, or even "really fat." No one wakes up fifty pounds heavier than they were when they went to sleep. My "freshman forty" put me at the most I've ever weighed, and at that weight, I felt like crud most of the time, and knowing that feeling is enough to steer me away from an extra trip to the buffet line and keep my hand out of the candy-drawer.
This came up in a discussion I had with some friends in college, one of whom actually had a cassette that was taped from a "Top 40" radio station sometime in the early 70's. Most of the music was, in fact, crap; we just remember the good stuff because it survived that weeding-out process.
This is also a good place to quote another/. post I saw in a similar thread some time ago. "For those people who think that over-produced pop music is a new phenomenon, I have three words for you: Donnie and Marie."
While it is true that the "flyover states" have posted speed limits of 75 mph, they certainly don't have a monopoly on speed. In Massachusetts, for example, the median speed on the Mass Pike (I-90) during rush hour is about 80 mph. If you have a car whose top speed is seventy, you'll be stuck in the right lane - good luck making that left exit. I've driven trucks with speed governors on them that were capped at 70 mph, but a) in an eighteen foot box-truck, you can assert your right to change lanes, and even the jerks in their SUV's have to yield and b) speed is capped at 70 by a governor, not an engine that lacks the power to move the vehicle. Do we all need to drive cars that can go from 0-60 in five seconds? No. But they do need to be able to get from 20-50 in that span, or you'll get creamed trying to merge onto a highway.
SilverKeeper (a free-as-in-beer download from LaCie) is actually more flexible than you might think. If you look into the advanced options, you'll notice that you can set exclusions (such as ~/Library/Caches when you back up your home directory, or other individual files/folders). It's more of a file synchronization utility than a back-up solution, but it can be scheduled to run automatically, and it's much friendlier than, say, rsync.
You may have hit on something there. Maybe the zombie networks are controlled by the NSA? Perhaps they plan to use the frustration SPAM causes to push people to start using a more traceable system, which would simplify their attempts to track "terrorists."
I am generally inclined to agree with your comments about "people with inadequate training and lax handling..." and I would agree that there are some fundamental problems in the way that firearms allow any idiot to randomly kill people. However, my question for you has to do with your third line.
You mention that "[you] don't have even a fraction of the gun deaths per capita that [Americans] do." Do you know how many deaths there are, per capita? I haven't looked, but I'm curious. I will agree that a knife wound or blunt trauma is generally easier to heal than a gunshot wound, but they can be lethal, or cause serious complications.
My point here is, of course, that just because fewer guns were involved doesn't mean fewer crimes were committed.
This will be transparent for everyone who hasn't bought a Macintosh yet. Forward moves are quite simple. Apple has actually managed this quite cleanly before, when they ditched m68k chips for PowerPC.
The question is, what happens to my girlfriend who bought a powerbook last month? In two years, she won't be able to upgrade her software, because there the x86 binaries of the software she'll need won't run on her computer. I'm sure some companies will continue to build "FAT Binaries" (anyone else remember those, from 1993?) that take up 3/4 again as much space, but many will not.
This move makes Apple an unstable platform, and has already deterred three people I know from buying a Macintosh. "Why bother?" they said. "It's going to be the same. I'll buy a Windows computer."
1. MacOS X has been in the works for a fairly long time. It started development, at Apple, in 1997, as MacOS X Server. It was released around the same time as MacOS 9. It was certainly nothing like the classic MacOS available at the time. In fact, it very closely resembled NeXT, the OS from which it was derived. NeXT was started in 1985 by Steve Jobs, who came back to Apple in 1997 and brought his OS with him. Not even counting the BSD userland software in OS X, it's been twenty years for OS X to become what it is, now. That's six years longer than Linux has been even a grad-school project. If you're concerned with the GNU tools that comprise the userland of the various linux distributions, you might wish to consider that those very same tools are included in MacOS X, too.
2. The core of MacOS X, Darwin, is available for multiple hardware platforms. Apple is also known to maintain an alternative platform port of OS X, specifically to keep their code clean, and weed out obscure bugs.
Apple certainly doesn't have to cope with the difficulties of hardware variety that other OS maintainers do, but they make their code portable for the right reasons.
As far as "the title will probably be wrong" goes, dialog boxes prompting for administration passwords identify the calling application at the bottom, so long as the user clicks on an expansion arrow. Well informed and careful users can easily avoid such an attack as you describe.
You are correct that inattentive users will often simply enter the password without question. However, in the environment that I support (academic medical research) a majority of our users will avoid installing system updates because they are leery of anything that asks for a password.
iTMS will only deal with labels, not artists:
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This brings an interesting point to mind - when gathering tracks for use on the iTunes Music Store, Apple will only work with labels (it doesn't have to be an RIAA member, they work with "independent" labels as well) and not individual artists. Perhaps that policy is insulation against this very problem - if they were to work with artists directly, they could be considered a record label, but as long as they're working with established labels they are demonstrably just another reseller.
It occurs to me, as I read all of the posts here about Microsoft failing to release an update to Internet Explorer until Longhorn is released in 2006, that many people are missing a few key points.
One is that Windows XP Service Pack 2 is slated to add a few features to Internet Explorer (a pop-up blocker, for example).
Another is that 2006 is not quite "several" years away, anymore. In fact, it's only a year and seven months (and one week and two days) away.
My personal experience supporting Macintosh computers for a medical school suggests to me that your assertion that very little science related software runs on Macintosh computers may be a bit inaccurate.
That said, I wonder what I might do to encourage developers to write more science-related software that will run on Macintosh computers? This would appear to be a step toward that goal.
I'm a bit skeptical about your figure of four years for Microsoft to produce Windows NT. If I recall correctly, Microsoft hired a bunch of engineers away from DEC, who then created Windows NT from some IP and code that Microsoft had left over from their collaboration with IBM on OS/2.
I have a friend who started to use IRC a lot to acquire episodes of her favorite TV show(s) a few years ago, and she seemed confused/concerned when I described IRC as the "dimly-lit back-alley of the internet." I explained that IRC used to be where I went to chat with friends online, before all of these "Instant Messenger" clients became popular, but that now it seems to me that mostly what goes on there is trading of pirated software and TV episodes or movies.
In the end, she reluctantly agreed that my description was "somewhat accurate." I have nothing against IRC, but it is entertaining to see people who are unfamiliar with the landscape of the internet discover new places.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems somewhat counterintuitive, especially since most of the retail establishments have handy lists of their prices on newsprint for you conveniently stacked by the door. In fact, I frequently call stores (mostly music stores, but Daddy's Junky Music and Guitar Center are certainly chain stores, sometimes furniture stores, sometimes BestBuy and CircuitCity - this only really works in places that have actual sales staff) and said "Hi, do you stock product X? How much? Thank you." I usually ask about their hours, as well. They are happy to give out this information.
The only establishments that suppress their pricing information are those which stand to lose by comparison shopping. College Bookstores have a long history of having a monopoly on book sales, which meant they could charge whatever price they wanted. The internet is eroding that monopoly, and this frustrates them, because they now have to charge reasonable prices for the books they stock, which eats into their margins quite a bit. (Note: Textbook publishers are not blameless in this, but that is a whole different issue.)
Massive headaches are what caffeine does for me.
I find your proposal for fat-friendly parking spaces amusing, and I would like to see it implemented. I would also point out that such a parking situation would benefit not just those of us who happen to keep our personal dimensions smaller but also those who keep our automotive dimensions smaller. Of course, the people who can't fit between the two parked cars probably can't fit themselves into a Honda Civic, either.
As for your question about the freshman fifteen, I can describe several factors that influence such a weight gain. I personally gained about forty pounds my freshman year of college, though I have several friends who lost weight.
1.) All-you-can-eat dining halls: These make it really easy to overeat without thinking about it. If you're at home, and you cook one cup of rice and some chicken and veggies (or your mom cooks a similarly appropriate amount of food) and you are thinking about seconds but you see that you have about enough food left for lunch tomorrow, you put it in a tupperware in the fridge and forget about it. If you're in a dining hall, you just walk up and ask for another helping of deep-fried whatever.
2.) Activity cycle: You described a situation where you have a lot more walking to do than you used to, and that seems to have helped you out in terms of fitness. However, a) having spread-out classes only helps if you actually go to them and b) for many of us who were on sports teams in high school (I ran cross-country and track), we don't keep up with it in college, to the detriment of our physical fitness. Even a reduction in activity makes a big difference - in high school, I ran 40 miles a week, and it really didn't matter if I had extra helpings. In college, I probably made it out for 4-5 miles twice a week in the nice weather. Combine that with item 1.), and you have a recipe for a lot of unused calories.
3.) New Vices: College tends to be a time for experimentation, and a lot of people (myself not included, for this one anyway) decide that Beer is a good idea, which frequently leads to the proverbial Beer Gut.
That said, I really don't understand how people make it to obesity, or even "really fat." No one wakes up fifty pounds heavier than they were when they went to sleep. My "freshman forty" put me at the most I've ever weighed, and at that weight, I felt like crud most of the time, and knowing that feeling is enough to steer me away from an extra trip to the buffet line and keep my hand out of the candy-drawer.
This came up in a discussion I had with some friends in college, one of whom actually had a cassette that was taped from a "Top 40" radio station sometime in the early 70's. Most of the music was, in fact, crap; we just remember the good stuff because it survived that weeding-out process.
/. post I saw in a similar thread some time ago. "For those people who think that over-produced pop music is a new phenomenon, I have three words for you: Donnie and Marie."
This is also a good place to quote another
While it is true that the "flyover states" have posted speed limits of 75 mph, they certainly don't have a monopoly on speed. In Massachusetts, for example, the median speed on the Mass Pike (I-90) during rush hour is about 80 mph. If you have a car whose top speed is seventy, you'll be stuck in the right lane - good luck making that left exit.
I've driven trucks with speed governors on them that were capped at 70 mph, but a) in an eighteen foot box-truck, you can assert your right to change lanes, and even the jerks in their SUV's have to yield and b) speed is capped at 70 by a governor, not an engine that lacks the power to move the vehicle. Do we all need to drive cars that can go from 0-60 in five seconds? No. But they do need to be able to get from 20-50 in that span, or you'll get creamed trying to merge onto a highway.
SilverKeeper (a free-as-in-beer download from LaCie) is actually more flexible than you might think. If you look into the advanced options, you'll notice that you can set exclusions (such as ~/Library/Caches when you back up your home directory, or other individual files/folders). It's more of a file synchronization utility than a back-up solution, but it can be scheduled to run automatically, and it's much friendlier than, say, rsync.
He probably is. You did see those "Dalmatian" iMacs that came out around 2001, didn't you?
Not to mention the confusion it causes for users.
You may have hit on something there. Maybe the zombie networks are controlled by the NSA? Perhaps they plan to use the frustration SPAM causes to push people to start using a more traceable system, which would simplify their attempts to track "terrorists."
Almost everyone I know who watches "24" is female.
No, I think he was clearly talking about miracles. What's the tip off?
Somebody [...] releases Ubuntu prebundled on super cheap laptops,
Yep, clearly looking for a miracle. It's hard to tell, but I think Slashdot editing and UbuntuBooks might even be less likely than his last miracle:
Jesus comes back and smacks GWB in the face with a libel lawsuit.
Just sayin'.
I am generally inclined to agree with your comments about "people with inadequate training and lax handling..." and I would agree that there are some fundamental problems in the way that firearms allow any idiot to randomly kill people. However, my question for you has to do with your third line.
You mention that "[you] don't have even a fraction of the gun deaths per capita that [Americans] do." Do you know how many deaths there are, per capita? I haven't looked, but I'm curious. I will agree that a knife wound or blunt trauma is generally easier to heal than a gunshot wound, but they can be lethal, or cause serious complications.
My point here is, of course, that just because fewer guns were involved doesn't mean fewer crimes were committed.
I don't usually respond to sigs, but yours seems to fit quite well in this thread.
I'm sure in another couple weeks someone will port Linux to this mouse. I wonder if they'll be able to make alsa support the built-in speaker?
This will be transparent for everyone who hasn't bought a Macintosh yet. Forward moves are quite simple. Apple has actually managed this quite cleanly before, when they ditched m68k chips for PowerPC.
The question is, what happens to my girlfriend who bought a powerbook last month? In two years, she won't be able to upgrade her software, because there the x86 binaries of the software she'll need won't run on her computer. I'm sure some companies will continue to build "FAT Binaries" (anyone else remember those, from 1993?) that take up 3/4 again as much space, but many will not.
This move makes Apple an unstable platform, and has already deterred three people I know from buying a Macintosh. "Why bother?" they said. "It's going to be the same. I'll buy a Windows computer."
I must note a few errata in this post.
1. MacOS X has been in the works for a fairly long time. It started development, at Apple, in 1997, as MacOS X Server. It was released around the same time as MacOS 9. It was certainly nothing like the classic MacOS available at the time.
In fact, it very closely resembled NeXT, the OS from which it was derived. NeXT was started in 1985 by Steve Jobs, who came back to Apple in 1997 and brought his OS with him. Not even counting the BSD userland software in OS X, it's been twenty years for OS X to become what it is, now. That's six years longer than Linux has been even a grad-school project. If you're concerned with the GNU tools that comprise the userland of the various linux distributions, you might wish to consider that those very same tools are included in MacOS X, too.
2. The core of MacOS X, Darwin, is available for multiple hardware platforms. Apple is also known to maintain an alternative platform port of OS X, specifically to keep their code clean, and weed out obscure bugs.
Apple certainly doesn't have to cope with the difficulties of hardware variety that other OS maintainers do, but they make their code portable for the right reasons.
You are probably correct. The Governor of the state of California is personally responsible for the existence of the Hummer on US roads.
0 04/hummer.asp
A source: http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/auto/car-guide-2
As far as "the title will probably be wrong" goes, dialog boxes prompting for administration passwords identify the calling application at the bottom, so long as the user clicks on an expansion arrow. Well informed and careful users can easily avoid such an attack as you describe.
You are correct that inattentive users will often simply enter the password without question. However, in the environment that I support (academic medical research) a majority of our users will avoid installing system updates because they are leery of anything that asks for a password.
This brings an interesting point to mind - when gathering tracks for use on the iTunes Music Store, Apple will only work with labels (it doesn't have to be an RIAA member, they work with "independent" labels as well) and not individual artists.
Perhaps that policy is insulation against this very problem - if they were to work with artists directly, they could be considered a record label, but as long as they're working with established labels they are demonstrably just another reseller.
Obviously there aren't more Emacs users than notepad users - everyone knows that you should use vi instead of either of those.
"... made sue everyone ..."
That was a typo, right?
It occurs to me, as I read all of the posts here about Microsoft failing to release an update to Internet Explorer until Longhorn is released in 2006, that many people are missing a few key points.
One is that Windows XP Service Pack 2 is slated to add a few features to Internet Explorer (a pop-up blocker, for example).
Another is that 2006 is not quite "several" years away, anymore. In fact, it's only a year and seven months (and one week and two days) away.
My personal experience supporting Macintosh computers for a medical school suggests to me that your assertion that very little science related software runs on Macintosh computers may be a bit inaccurate.
That said, I wonder what I might do to encourage developers to write more science-related software that will run on Macintosh computers? This would appear to be a step toward that goal.
I'm a bit skeptical about your figure of four years for Microsoft to produce Windows NT. If I recall correctly, Microsoft hired a bunch of engineers away from DEC, who then created Windows NT from some IP and code that Microsoft had left over from their collaboration with IBM on OS/2.
I have a friend who started to use IRC a lot to acquire episodes of her favorite TV show(s) a few years ago, and she seemed confused/concerned when I described IRC as the "dimly-lit back-alley of the internet." I explained that IRC used to be where I went to chat with friends online, before all of these "Instant Messenger" clients became popular, but that now it seems to me that mostly what goes on there is trading of pirated software and TV episodes or movies.
In the end, she reluctantly agreed that my description was "somewhat accurate." I have nothing against IRC, but it is entertaining to see people who are unfamiliar with the landscape of the internet discover new places.