Why are fares $2.75? I don't know if it is fair to compare it to taxi rides and bottled water, though that would be a economics 101 approach. Saying a $0.25 increase is nothing is disregarding the historical cost increase.
I think the main issue is that there are a lot of people living in the 5 boroughs who have been there all their life and are not the transient population that moved there for their 20s or even 30s who most likely are on the wealthier end of the spectrum (i.e. they appear fine to spend ridiculous amounts of money on rent and it is only increasing). The "lifers" of NYC have observed the cost of a 30-day metrocard go from $65 (circa 1998) to nearly double at $121 today. When you live in NYC, most people don't drive and completely rely on the bus/subway system MTA provides and thus is a necessity to get to work or school (yes, your high school might not be within walking distance or even the same borough and there is no school bus like the suburbs).
Subway ridership has increased over 35% in the same time frame of 1998-2018. During this time the MTA has mostly refreshed its rolling stock while doing some infrastructure improvements, which is good and obviously expensive. However, they've also reignited the 2nd Ave line work which is a major cost to the city and I suspect is the main financial drain and somewhat why it hasn't been explored in many decades. I can only imagine that it was started up again because someone ran a spreadsheet which showed that if they build this, they'll increase property values on the east side which means they can increase property taxes which means more revenue for the city. But how much of that is going back to the MTA?
I don't know the answers to this but I get the sense that budgets are somewhat getting driven by greed and the desire to further gentrify the boroughs rather than provide the best service for the people who have lived their all their lives. Simply saying "keep increasing the fare" is ignoring the needs of the majority of people that live in the city and won't move away after their few years of their "city living" experience.
To pull two comments together, when Bloomberg was first mayor of NYC he was known to ride the subway at times. I don't know why though I can speculate two things:
Nobody is anybody in NYC; famous people can be just like everyone else as long as they avoid the tourist hotspots (e.g. Times Square).
During rush hours, the subway tends to be the fastest means of getting around town.
The Mac has no game community so no game developers to worry about.
I can't say that I know the whole community since there are games you can buy for the Mac outside of Steam, but the latest statistics on Steam report about 1.64% of their users are on Mac.
"Pretty small market"... which are you referring to? Perhaps in the personal consumer space it is a small market (I mean, if you bought the Mac to do email/browser/photos, why would you need Windows?), but in the professional workplace I would say easily 30-40% of the people I know with Macs have run a Windows VM at some point.
I'm not claiming to be a defining voice here or perhaps even a strong representative sample, but there are people who wouldn't have bought a Mac if it weren't for the fact that they can run Windows when necessary.
This is amazing. Are there instructions anywhere for how you did this?? I've been holding onto my last-gen iPod Classic forever for the same reasons, (why should I be limited to only cloud-based music when I'm within cell service?). I even went out and found a used one a couple years ago when someone broke into my car and stole my original one.
I did something similar to my 1G iPod Mini (4GB). It is rather easy actually, since the iPods use standard compact IDE interfaces to their hard drives. Sure, you need to get an adapter that fits, but they're available. Look on MacSales for the Tarkan iFlash Dual.
For my iPod Mini, the process is simply getting a CF-to-SD adapter and then sticking in an appropriate sized SD card. Personally, I went with a 64GB SD card and it has worked really well. Total cost was around $25-30. The only thing I will point out is that I suspect that sometimes the Mini's firmware might struggle with so many songs on the device, but it hasn't been a real problem... I suspect an iPod Classic would have less of an issue since its firmware is a few years newer.
The only other note I would make is that if you're going to go through the effort of opening the device up to do this, you might as well swap the battery out at the same time if you can. While I've opened my Mini 4 or 5 times, it does seem to me that I might start having some problems after another 5... they're not really made to be disassembled a dozen times:-)
The reality however, is much less so --- most people simply opt not to call now, because the service is so horrible and decidedly unhelpful....But the call volume metrics say "job well done!".
In banking, however, it isn't the same thing as a typical help desk when it come to compliance. It isn't optional like how someone might call to get a computer or physical product help and after being on hold for a bit decide to give up and just power cycle or otherwise "live with" or lose something (e.g. doing a reset would lose some pictures you just took), it is more having to log situations for legal compliance.
I imagine in this case it is a platform where someone in the organization can log a situation for audit trail and/or legal compliance checks and it results in gathering the right details and submits it to a queue of compliance officers to process. Probably many of these situations can be handled by intelligent menu systems and voice recognition much like how you call your bank and tell them you want to discuss a charge on your credit card and get to the right person to help you. In this case, it is probably filling in fields and if it is a certain type of situation, it can do 100% of the work without involving someone on the phone.
It does seem to significantly help, but the catch is that not only does it still let one ring go through, but perhaps people aren't super comfortable with having all their incoming calls hit a 3rd party as well.
For those who don't know how the service works, it relies on your phone provider supporting "simultaneous ring" which is having your incoming calls ring not only your phone but also another phone that you specify. The service detects where the call is coming from and if it believes it is spam, it will "pick up the phone" and ringing stops on your side. Great in theory, works well in practice, but they now know who calls your phone number.
I don't know much more about it or if they are doing this to build any data on people, but the potential is there I suppose. Probably nothing to worry about. Then again, Verizon/ATT/Comcast/etc. already have this information and probably are using it:-)
You make these statements like everyone is going to use cellular data exclusively at home. Sure, my landline at home is nothing but a means for telemarketers and scammers to harass me, but if I disconnect it? There is still going to be a wire to my house for internet at a minimum. Yes, you can make the same "wire cutting" statement for TV, but you still come back to the internet argument.
Unless cellular 5G can replace wired internet and be effectively "unlimited", there is still a place for a wired infrastructure.
I think the biggest casualty of the new design language is that the Calendar, Address Book and Reminders applications (on OSX and iOS) has gone into the toilet.
Tasks that were once obvious how to do such as adding a new reminder are now almost hidden. On older OSX / iOS versions, adding a new reminder had a prominent button on the top right of the screen; press it, enter your details, save it, done. Now? Scroll to the bottom (heaven forbid you have a hundred items) and tap in the blank gap below the last entry and THEN you get the ability to enter something. Gee, that was obvious? Fortunately, we've been at least granted a '+' in that blank gap now, but it is still ridiculous that we have to scroll down to add a task. Yes, you could probably do it faster with Siri but it isn't always appropriate to talk out loud when you're just trying to create a reminder to buy milk when you leave the office.
Take a look at the other personal management applications and you'll find similar oddities. Why one needs to battle with the Calendar to add or edit an item with some fields in there makes no sense unless you're of the school of "use as little real estate on the screen as possible" on our 4K displays >cough<.. it's OK, you can make the dialogs bigger; if we're typing in it, it is obviously the focus of our attention.. 'K?
I don't think this is a case of "you're holding it wrong", it seems to be more that some designer wanted to make an impact; a statement. Instead, you're making peoples' lives just a little bit harder for the sake of your "art". I'm not saying you need to design option monstrosities like you find on Windows and Linux platforms, but instead of finding the balance between design and usability it seems to be leaning far more heavily on unchallenged design.
Of course, we don't know what we're talking about because Apple knows what we want better than us, right?;-)
FWIW, I see absolutely zero performance issues on my Windows laptop. Diagnose the performance bottleneck on your machine before you blame the software.
I used to have a laptop that would take a 3x-5x performance hit when I enabled a high color display mode. The processor was still fast, but if you enabled 32-bit color performance of everything went to crap. If you downgraded your display to 16-bit color, fast as a rocket.
Sometimes your hardware may say that it supports some feature or another. Doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best thing to turn on...
People won't go working for recycling centers for free to make them more profitable.
Probably around 20 years ago, someone from Ohio mentioned to me that if you had to do "community service" (a.k.a. not quite jail, but not quite getting away with something illegal) then most likely they'd send you to a recycling center to sort the trash.
It would sound to me that we've got a work force that could do the job for free already? Or maybe the problem is that a good portion of the population isn't allowed to be anywhere near sharp glass and/or metal objects that might be coming down a conveyor belt...
Since pizza seems to be a common "geek food", here's something I've been doing for years that helps a lot with pizza: use a knife and fork.
Though people in NY give you strange looks, you'll probably eat 1 less slice this way since your stomach will indicate it is full before you've shoveled that 4th folded slice into your mouth.
Do provide links. Please. I failed to find them, and my black 2.04 books are buried in some box from my latest moving day (if I had not thrown them out).
If you want a 1.3 ROM Kernel Manual, you'll have to pull it out from under my kid's car seat. Just the right size and thickness to correct the seat angle:-)
Always wonder if someone will ever catch a glimpse of that and know what the heck it is...
I love how in the video showing the touch screen interface, somewhere around 23 seconds in the narrator states that "it is presented in the same way that you're used to [long pause] without distracting you from what is important".
The pause is long enough that you wonder if they're trying to say that "what is important" is the data on the screen or what you're doing?
Heck, I'd like to think that DRIVING IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT and these touch screens are only taking your eyes off the road so you can pinpoint where on a screen you're going to touch. I dig technology and progress but driver controls are one thing that should be left in the analog world of dials, buttons, levers, etc.!
You joke, but it's really incentive for future artists more than former. When they see people working a few years in their youth and then earning royalties into retirement, that's quite the incentive to get into music.
Just ask any musician. They'll tell you they got in it for the money.
I'm just curious why sticking with XP would be desirable. I know that Vista/7/8 have higher system resource requirements, but is perhaps the driver being that it is easier to pirate a copy of XP?
The basis for my statement there is simply because I know that XP only asks for a product key and I don't recall in recent history the activation mechanism being particularly strict. Vista/7 seems to start disabling itself after a while without a properly activated key and 8 seems to want an email address to tie your license to (from the one time I played with it out of curiosity). I'm figuring the Vista/7/8 mechanism is just tighter?
I know that this isn't quite the same as what Citrix does with its Xen Desktop and Receiver bits, but for those who do remote access to work with a Citrix product and do this with a Mac, I'm a bit frustrated that the Mac client is always a step behind.
Specifically, the Windows client now has USB routing and HDX features and this seems to be absent from their Mac client offerings. With a lot of organizations using IP conferencing (read: Lync), this is becoming a bit of a problem.
In my pre-caffienated state this morning and frankly not paying much attention to who is going to take over Microsoft, I couldn't help but to think Gill Bates when seeing that name.
If the guy is a suitable candidate to run the firm, it would almost be too perfect:-)
The Macintosh II line (and by this I assume we're talking II / IIfx-type, not the smaller ones like the IIci) were tanks.
While I won't really argue that the iMac line is necessarily good or bad quality (the 2005 iMac G5 a family member owns seems pretty good when I opened it for a RAM upgrade), the Mac Pro line (especially the aluminum ones; G5->Intel) seem very solid and well engineered.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the main issue is that there are a lot of people living in the 5 boroughs who have been there all their life and are not the transient population that moved there for their 20s or even 30s who most likely are on the wealthier end of the spectrum (i.e. they appear fine to spend ridiculous amounts of money on rent and it is only increasing). The "lifers" of NYC have observed the cost of a 30-day metrocard go from $65 (circa 1998) to nearly double at $121 today. When you live in NYC, most people don't drive and completely rely on the bus/subway system MTA provides and thus is a necessity to get to work or school (yes, your high school might not be within walking distance or even the same borough and there is no school bus like the suburbs).
Subway ridership has increased over 35% in the same time frame of 1998-2018. During this time the MTA has mostly refreshed its rolling stock while doing some infrastructure improvements, which is good and obviously expensive. However, they've also reignited the 2nd Ave line work which is a major cost to the city and I suspect is the main financial drain and somewhat why it hasn't been explored in many decades. I can only imagine that it was started up again because someone ran a spreadsheet which showed that if they build this, they'll increase property values on the east side which means they can increase property taxes which means more revenue for the city. But how much of that is going back to the MTA?
I don't know the answers to this but I get the sense that budgets are somewhat getting driven by greed and the desire to further gentrify the boroughs rather than provide the best service for the people who have lived their all their lives. Simply saying "keep increasing the fare" is ignoring the needs of the majority of people that live in the city and won't move away after their few years of their "city living" experience.
(rant finished)
I can't say that I know the whole community since there are games you can buy for the Mac outside of Steam, but the latest statistics on Steam report about 1.64% of their users are on Mac.
http://store.steampowered.com/...
if (passwdMatched() == false)
. . niftyUiShakeAndDeny();
else
. . niftyUiApprovedAnimation();
. . allowAccess = true;
if (allowAccess == true)
. . setSessionCredentials();
(of course, could also be due to too much time in a language like Python where indentation specifies blocks of code)
"Pretty small market" ... which are you referring to? Perhaps in the personal consumer space it is a small market (I mean, if you bought the Mac to do email/browser/photos, why would you need Windows?), but in the professional workplace I would say easily 30-40% of the people I know with Macs have run a Windows VM at some point.
I'm not claiming to be a defining voice here or perhaps even a strong representative sample, but there are people who wouldn't have bought a Mac if it weren't for the fact that they can run Windows when necessary.
I did something similar to my 1G iPod Mini (4GB). It is rather easy actually, since the iPods use standard compact IDE interfaces to their hard drives. Sure, you need to get an adapter that fits, but they're available. Look on MacSales for the Tarkan iFlash Dual.
For my iPod Mini, the process is simply getting a CF-to-SD adapter and then sticking in an appropriate sized SD card. Personally, I went with a 64GB SD card and it has worked really well. Total cost was around $25-30. The only thing I will point out is that I suspect that sometimes the Mini's firmware might struggle with so many songs on the device, but it hasn't been a real problem ... I suspect an iPod Classic would have less of an issue since its firmware is a few years newer.
The only other note I would make is that if you're going to go through the effort of opening the device up to do this, you might as well swap the battery out at the same time if you can. While I've opened my Mini 4 or 5 times, it does seem to me that I might start having some problems after another 5 ... they're not really made to be disassembled a dozen times :-)
In banking, however, it isn't the same thing as a typical help desk when it come to compliance. It isn't optional like how someone might call to get a computer or physical product help and after being on hold for a bit decide to give up and just power cycle or otherwise "live with" or lose something (e.g. doing a reset would lose some pictures you just took), it is more having to log situations for legal compliance.
I imagine in this case it is a platform where someone in the organization can log a situation for audit trail and/or legal compliance checks and it results in gathering the right details and submits it to a queue of compliance officers to process. Probably many of these situations can be handled by intelligent menu systems and voice recognition much like how you call your bank and tell them you want to discuss a charge on your credit card and get to the right person to help you. In this case, it is probably filling in fields and if it is a certain type of situation, it can do 100% of the work without involving someone on the phone.
For those who don't know how the service works, it relies on your phone provider supporting "simultaneous ring" which is having your incoming calls ring not only your phone but also another phone that you specify. The service detects where the call is coming from and if it believes it is spam, it will "pick up the phone" and ringing stops on your side. Great in theory, works well in practice, but they now know who calls your phone number.
I don't know much more about it or if they are doing this to build any data on people, but the potential is there I suppose. Probably nothing to worry about. Then again, Verizon/ATT/Comcast/etc. already have this information and probably are using it :-)
Tell you what... first make it that the lens doesn't stick out 1mm on the current generation and then we'll talk about making the phone thinner.
Unless cellular 5G can replace wired internet and be effectively "unlimited", there is still a place for a wired infrastructure.
Tasks that were once obvious how to do such as adding a new reminder are now almost hidden. On older OSX / iOS versions, adding a new reminder had a prominent button on the top right of the screen; press it, enter your details, save it, done. Now? Scroll to the bottom (heaven forbid you have a hundred items) and tap in the blank gap below the last entry and THEN you get the ability to enter something. Gee, that was obvious? Fortunately, we've been at least granted a '+' in that blank gap now, but it is still ridiculous that we have to scroll down to add a task. Yes, you could probably do it faster with Siri but it isn't always appropriate to talk out loud when you're just trying to create a reminder to buy milk when you leave the office.
Take a look at the other personal management applications and you'll find similar oddities. Why one needs to battle with the Calendar to add or edit an item with some fields in there makes no sense unless you're of the school of "use as little real estate on the screen as possible" on our 4K displays >cough< .. it's OK, you can make the dialogs bigger; if we're typing in it, it is obviously the focus of our attention.. 'K?
I don't think this is a case of "you're holding it wrong", it seems to be more that some designer wanted to make an impact; a statement. Instead, you're making peoples' lives just a little bit harder for the sake of your "art". I'm not saying you need to design option monstrosities like you find on Windows and Linux platforms, but instead of finding the balance between design and usability it seems to be leaning far more heavily on unchallenged design.
Of course, we don't know what we're talking about because Apple knows what we want better than us, right? ;-)
I used to have a laptop that would take a 3x-5x performance hit when I enabled a high color display mode. The processor was still fast, but if you enabled 32-bit color performance of everything went to crap. If you downgraded your display to 16-bit color, fast as a rocket.
Sometimes your hardware may say that it supports some feature or another. Doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best thing to turn on...
Probably around 20 years ago, someone from Ohio mentioned to me that if you had to do "community service" (a.k.a. not quite jail, but not quite getting away with something illegal) then most likely they'd send you to a recycling center to sort the trash.
It would sound to me that we've got a work force that could do the job for free already? Or maybe the problem is that a good portion of the population isn't allowed to be anywhere near sharp glass and/or metal objects that might be coming down a conveyor belt...
Since pizza seems to be a common "geek food", here's something I've been doing for years that helps a lot with pizza: use a knife and fork.
Though people in NY give you strange looks, you'll probably eat 1 less slice this way since your stomach will indicate it is full before you've shoveled that 4th folded slice into your mouth.
Unfortunately, it seems that if you're on a 10.6.8 machine, going to the App Store doesn't give you the opportunity to download 10.7 anymore.
If you want a 1.3 ROM Kernel Manual, you'll have to pull it out from under my kid's car seat. Just the right size and thickness to correct the seat angle :-)
Always wonder if someone will ever catch a glimpse of that and know what the heck it is...
The pause is long enough that you wonder if they're trying to say that "what is important" is the data on the screen or what you're doing?
Heck, I'd like to think that DRIVING IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT and these touch screens are only taking your eyes off the road so you can pinpoint where on a screen you're going to touch. I dig technology and progress but driver controls are one thing that should be left in the analog world of dials, buttons, levers, etc.!
Oh wait...
(almost obligatory, don't you think?)
Appropriate Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention link: We're Only In It for the Money
The basis for my statement there is simply because I know that XP only asks for a product key and I don't recall in recent history the activation mechanism being particularly strict. Vista/7 seems to start disabling itself after a while without a properly activated key and 8 seems to want an email address to tie your license to (from the one time I played with it out of curiosity). I'm figuring the Vista/7/8 mechanism is just tighter?
Specifically, the Windows client now has USB routing and HDX features and this seems to be absent from their Mac client offerings. With a lot of organizations using IP conferencing (read: Lync), this is becoming a bit of a problem.
If the guy is a suitable candidate to run the firm, it would almost be too perfect :-)
The Macintosh II line (and by this I assume we're talking II / IIfx-type, not the smaller ones like the IIci) were tanks. While I won't really argue that the iMac line is necessarily good or bad quality (the 2005 iMac G5 a family member owns seems pretty good when I opened it for a RAM upgrade), the Mac Pro line (especially the aluminum ones; G5->Intel) seem very solid and well engineered.
I'll take a 280ZX. With T-tops, preferably.
Oh, c'mon.. how difficult is it to remember http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com?