Maybe, but I'm telling you, I tried a multi-button mouse out on both my mother-in-law and my three-year-old son; it pissed off both of them.
Likewise my mother has a horrible time working out the whole left-button, right-button thing. She can never keep straight which one she is using, or should be using. I find the same confusion occurs to various degrees with many people who haven't grown up on computers. Apple really is onto something with the one-button mice.
And yes, I too use a multi-button mouse on my Mac. But that doesn't mean I think it's best for everyone.
Why? I own a handgun for the sole purpose of self defense.
It cannot hurt anyone unless I pick it up and use it. The guy who makes the gun has absolutely no influence over the events that would cause me to use (or not use) their product.
Sure they do. If they didn't make it, then you (or whatever kid finds it in the house) wouldn't have been able to pick it up and shoot someone with it.
No way, man. There was never a point when a smart shopper in the EU could get Wifi gear cheaper than a smart shopper in the US (unless you're talking about closeout-sale anomalies).
If the cheapest wifi router you can find without a rebate is $70 then you are shopping at some seriously crappy stores.
Furthermore, even now wifi is far less pervasive in Europe than in the USA, and it always has been.
I think your European friends are blowing smoke up your ass.
(Disclaimer: I live in neither Europe nor the USA but over the course of 6 trips so far this year I've been to 8 US states and about as many European countries ranging from north to south and east to west. I am an incurable gadget browser and price watcher and I am online via wifi whenever possible.)
I don't recall playing any games on the Apple II, or Trash80, er TRS 80 for that matter. What I did playing with them was using BASIC to write games and graphics.
Wow, you're awesome. Did you ever try your games out?
Flexi time was introduced to stagger start and finish times to help address peak hour traffic issues. The consequence of that is that peak hour traffic problems now start at 6am and run all day
That doesn't seem very logical.
If congestion is now lasting all day, it could not be helped by making everyone commute at the same time. The problem is that there are too many cars. A quantity of cars that is too great to fit on the roads between 6am and 10am could not possibly fit on the roads between 6am and 7am.
And no, the solution is not more or wider roads - that just makes congestion worse. The solution is more staggered hours, more telecommuting, and more non-blocking transport such as commuter trains.
Yeah, I've visited SLC now and then and wouldn't say it's exactly frontwater.
The requirement of a subway was interesting. Does Light-rail count?
I don't think I can let light rail count because of my general animosity towards it. It costs ten times as much as simply putting in dedicated bus lanes set off from general traffic lanes by raised curbs or other barriers, and offers no conceivable advantage except emissions displacement (which is substantially mitigated by CNG buses). Light rail seems like something that municipalities do when they wish they had a subway (so that I would stop calling them backwater) but don't want to spend the money to dig tunnels.
I'm not convinced that it will save energy when Phoenix air conditioning costs are factored in. In the summer my electric bill hovers around $300 because of air conditioning. I think they would save more energy by promoting compact fluorescent bulbs.
And how about a little solar power? I'm visiting Phoenix at the moment, being baked by the sun, and yet I haven't seen a single solar water heater or power panel on the roofs of any of the houses here. Even in the northereastern US where there's no sun by comparison, these things are all over the place. Here there's no excuse (apparently the homeowners associations make it difficult, because any sign of other than willfully profligate prosperity is unsightly).
But you will be happy to know that just last night I persuaded my host (who had never heard of them before) to buy a bunch of compact fluourescent bulbs while we were at Home Depot.
Anyway, in a few days I return home to where it is over 90 degrees every day of the year but my electric bill stands at around $5/month because the building is intelligently designed and stays comfortable without A/C.
People who want a 24-hour world can find some semblance thereof in places like New York City (where everything except express service on the A line is available 24 hours) and Walmart (where everything except prescriptions and beer is available 24 hours). Heck, you don't even have to get that extreme. I live in a city of about 3 million - which is neither NYC nor Walmart - and in my neighborhood a good third of the hundred or so restaurants are open 24 hours.
Sounds to me like you have lived in some very backwater places. One million people ain't squat these days; there are settlements of one million people that don't even have subway systems, which to my mind makes them villages at best.
But you already have an apartment, and it's so awesome that nobody else is even able to live in the building (you have "a lot" of friends who want to live in your building? Where on earth do you live?). It's not like you're going to be evicted if you get a line of credit from Apple, so why do you care?
But more importantly, I think you misunderstand the impact of multiple lines of credit. Applying for a line of credit from a merchant and then making a purchase from that merchant and then making payments on that purchase does not hurt your credit score. Getting a bunch of lines of credit that you never use, well, that can hurt.
Not necessarily (not that I have any knowledge on the veracity of the original claim). Piping out cloned video at 1024x768 is an awful lot less work than managing another screen at 1900x1200 (which I do with my iBook 12" when at home).
Yeah, and the mouse only has one button, and you can't get Visio for it. Doorstops if you ask me. Don't get me started on trying to copy a floppy on my 128K Mac.
Myself, I like another illustration: If you consider it stupid to do things for fun and not for money, you would never have children. If humans actually worked that way, our species would be extinct within a century.
For the very poor - particularly in places with limited rules about child labor and mandatory schooling - having children is profitable because they are able to gather additional resources for the family in excess of the cost of their individual upkeep.
And in traditional societies where children are expected to take care of their parents in old age, investing in children is a sort of self-funded pension plan.
As long as these conditions exist, then even in a world of perfect economic rationalists there will be children.
And of course, in the places where people are not having children, the economies will quickly collapse due to the shrinking labor pool, leading to a resurgence of the conditions outlined above.
Clearly you've never been to New York City and the Jersey/NYS/Connecticut suburbs. The contrast is stark.
I've lived in both for years each, but I agree with your conclusion. The contrast is stark, and the alienating misery of the suburbs is even harder to fathom for having experienced it at length firsthand.
Here is an anecdote about the Mac Plus: System 6 was fairly unstable. I used to attempt to write school reports on it, since it seemed like an advantage to be able to edit it without rewriting the thing on paper, and I could create and include diagrams. I can't remember what I used, but it was probably MacWrite and MacDraw, or some rip-off of those. The programs would crash every ten minutes or so, and corrupt the files on disk.
Sorry, this is just like the people who say "I use Windows XP at work and it crashes every 5 minutes."
If it's doing that then you're doing something wrong, have done something wrong, have had something wrong done to you, or have a hardware problem.
I used every Mac since the original 128K, did some pretty substantial medium-to-low-level development stuff under system 6, pushed the machine to its limits, and never experienced what you describe.
Rackspace is expensive but they've never let me down. And it's the only place I know where you can call their toll-free number at 3am and the first person who picks up the phone can have an intelligent conversation with you about FreeBSD kernel tuning.
In five years there's never been any unexpected downtime or network problems, and scheduled downtime has been measured in minutes per year. In the one case where one of the drives in one of our servers failed, they worked hard to get it taken care of ASAP.
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My mother uses Windows and always has.
Likewise my mother has a horrible time working out the whole left-button, right-button thing. She can never keep straight which one she is using, or should be using. I find the same confusion occurs to various degrees with many people who haven't grown up on computers. Apple really is onto something with the one-button mice.
And yes, I too use a multi-button mouse on my Mac. But that doesn't mean I think it's best for everyone.
Sure they do. If they didn't make it, then you (or whatever kid finds it in the house) wouldn't have been able to pick it up and shoot someone with it.
The VGA monitor dongle is included for free. The one you have to buy is for connecting to a TV.
No way, man. There was never a point when a smart shopper in the EU could get Wifi gear cheaper than a smart shopper in the US (unless you're talking about closeout-sale anomalies).
If the cheapest wifi router you can find without a rebate is $70 then you are shopping at some seriously crappy stores.
Furthermore, even now wifi is far less pervasive in Europe than in the USA, and it always has been.
I think your European friends are blowing smoke up your ass.
(Disclaimer: I live in neither Europe nor the USA but over the course of 6 trips so far this year I've been to 8 US states and about as many European countries ranging from north to south and east to west. I am an incurable gadget browser and price watcher and I am online via wifi whenever possible.)
That makes little sense. What does your ISP have to do with it?
Wow, you're awesome. Did you ever try your games out?
I'm afraid your website is incorrect. And equatorial countries are those that straddle the Equator.
Most tribes were pretty peaceful. There was enough land to go around. Don't get your history from John Wayne movies.
Really, "other equatorial countries"? Who else uses the whacked Ethiopian clock? And since when was Ethiopia equatorial, anyway?
That doesn't seem very logical.
If congestion is now lasting all day, it could not be helped by making everyone commute at the same time. The problem is that there are too many cars. A quantity of cars that is too great to fit on the roads between 6am and 10am could not possibly fit on the roads between 6am and 7am.
And no, the solution is not more or wider roads - that just makes congestion worse. The solution is more staggered hours, more telecommuting, and more non-blocking transport such as commuter trains.
Nevertheless you somehow still have their land.
Yeah, I've visited SLC now and then and wouldn't say it's exactly frontwater.
I don't think I can let light rail count because of my general animosity towards it. It costs ten times as much as simply putting in dedicated bus lanes set off from general traffic lanes by raised curbs or other barriers, and offers no conceivable advantage except emissions displacement (which is substantially mitigated by CNG buses). Light rail seems like something that municipalities do when they wish they had a subway (so that I would stop calling them backwater) but don't want to spend the money to dig tunnels.
And how about a little solar power? I'm visiting Phoenix at the moment, being baked by the sun, and yet I haven't seen a single solar water heater or power panel on the roofs of any of the houses here. Even in the northereastern US where there's no sun by comparison, these things are all over the place. Here there's no excuse (apparently the homeowners associations make it difficult, because any sign of other than willfully profligate prosperity is unsightly).
But you will be happy to know that just last night I persuaded my host (who had never heard of them before) to buy a bunch of compact fluourescent bulbs while we were at Home Depot.
Anyway, in a few days I return home to where it is over 90 degrees every day of the year but my electric bill stands at around $5/month because the building is intelligently designed and stays comfortable without A/C.
People who want a 24-hour world can find some semblance thereof in places like New York City (where everything except express service on the A line is available 24 hours) and Walmart (where everything except prescriptions and beer is available 24 hours). Heck, you don't even have to get that extreme. I live in a city of about 3 million - which is neither NYC nor Walmart - and in my neighborhood a good third of the hundred or so restaurants are open 24 hours.
Sounds to me like you have lived in some very backwater places. One million people ain't squat these days; there are settlements of one million people that don't even have subway systems, which to my mind makes them villages at best.
But you already have an apartment, and it's so awesome that nobody else is even able to live in the building (you have "a lot" of friends who want to live in your building? Where on earth do you live?). It's not like you're going to be evicted if you get a line of credit from Apple, so why do you care?
But more importantly, I think you misunderstand the impact of multiple lines of credit. Applying for a line of credit from a merchant and then making a purchase from that merchant and then making payments on that purchase does not hurt your credit score. Getting a bunch of lines of credit that you never use, well, that can hurt.
Not necessarily (not that I have any knowledge on the veracity of the original claim). Piping out cloned video at 1024x768 is an awful lot less work than managing another screen at 1900x1200 (which I do with my iBook 12" when at home).
You are honestly making your computer purchasing decision based on some potential marginal temporary impact on your credit score?
Yeah, and the mouse only has one button, and you can't get Visio for it. Doorstops if you ask me. Don't get me started on trying to copy a floppy on my 128K Mac.
The "most complete" baseball player of all time? His number of arms more closely approached 2 than that of any other player?
For the very poor - particularly in places with limited rules about child labor and mandatory schooling - having children is profitable because they are able to gather additional resources for the family in excess of the cost of their individual upkeep.
And in traditional societies where children are expected to take care of their parents in old age, investing in children is a sort of self-funded pension plan.
As long as these conditions exist, then even in a world of perfect economic rationalists there will be children.
And of course, in the places where people are not having children, the economies will quickly collapse due to the shrinking labor pool, leading to a resurgence of the conditions outlined above.
I've lived in both for years each, but I agree with your conclusion. The contrast is stark, and the alienating misery of the suburbs is even harder to fathom for having experienced it at length firsthand.
But we'll never reach the point where they aren't infinitely more pleasant places to live than suburban hellholes.
Sorry, this is just like the people who say "I use Windows XP at work and it crashes every 5 minutes."
If it's doing that then you're doing something wrong, have done something wrong, have had something wrong done to you, or have a hardware problem.
I used every Mac since the original 128K, did some pretty substantial medium-to-low-level development stuff under system 6, pushed the machine to its limits, and never experienced what you describe.
Rackspace is expensive but they've never let me down. And it's the only place I know where you can call their toll-free number at 3am and the first person who picks up the phone can have an intelligent conversation with you about FreeBSD kernel tuning.
In five years there's never been any unexpected downtime or network problems, and scheduled downtime has been measured in minutes per year. In the one case where one of the drives in one of our servers failed, they worked hard to get it taken care of ASAP.