This is why my husband won't leave the mail outside our house to be picked up. We have a mailbox as old as our house, the kind that's a vertical metal box stuck to the wall with thin metal prongs underneath to hold outgoing mail. Basically, anything we mail out is visible from the street, where plenty of people walk by.
I take all our bills with me to work and mail them from there instead.
Oh if you're cued well enough you can remember all sorts of things from way back, but they are so fragmentary that it's probably just the distributed nature of memory that saves them from complete loss most of the time. There will always be a few bits and pieces floating around in there. Several times, when visiting my hometown, I've run into people I went to school with back in middle school (almost 20 years ago, now), people I haven't seen or thought about since then. Upon seeing these people, I've blurted out "Hi, so-and-so!" because their names just leap unbidden to my mind and I'm so surprised I can remember exactly who they are that my brain/mouth filter breaks down.
Of course, they don't really seem to know who I am at first, or kind of pretend to remember me when I say that we went to such-and-such school together. But I've always found it odd that I suddenly remember first and last names of people I haven't thought of in years when I see their faces. (And I'm not one of those people who's good at remembering names at meetings or parties, either.) In the database of my mind, faces must be the keys I use to access certain stored info about people.
When our family grows to the size where we need a larger vehicle, it won't be an SUV, becuase we *never* go offroading, and frankly, a minivan gets better mileage.
That's what I thought, too. And then as our friends started having children, many of them ended up buying SUVs. Not because they particularly wanted SUVs, but because those were the least expensive vehicles with all the passenger and cargo space they needed.
Minivans just cost more. You can buy an SUV for well under $20K U.S., while minivans cost that much or more, and they aren't fuel efficient enough right now to make up the cost difference. So I'd recommend buying a used minivan if that's the kind of vehicle you need, or else you'll have to pay an extra few thou to avoid the stigma of driving an SUV. (Unless it's a hybrid SUV, which still sounds like an oxymoron in my head.)
And another, often overlooked option for a family vehicle is a station wagon. Costs about the same as an SUV, but gets better gas mileage and is less likely to tip over.
I find this story interesting because I worked on implementing a similar project 7 years ago. The idea was, the consulting firm I worked for would partner with CNN to select the "100 most influential people in the world." These people would be given special IBM laptops they'd use to log onto a web site every so often to answer brief surveys. CNN could then take that information and, I don't know, build a show around it or something.
I helped build the prototype web site (which looked pretty cool for '98, IMHO) and a presentation promoting the project. The project never got off the ground, though. I guess there wasn't enough incentive for those "thought leaders" to answer the surveys. But free schwag is a pretty good idea for soliciting feedback.
It's only those obsessed with status & material wealth who get wrapped up in the notion that every worthwhile waking hour should be spent working on advancing careers and whatnot.
Kind of off-topic, but these must be the same people who want to put a price tag on every minute of my day. For example, if I make $40/hr and I spend 30 minutes clipping coupons from the paper, unless the value of those coupons adds up to $20 I have wasted my time, according to those people. But usually I clip coupons while watching TV on Sunday afternoon. If I weren't clipping them, I'd just be watching TV, not working and making money.
Likewise with the people who say it's better to get take-out for dinner, hire a dog-walker, etc. instead of doing those things yourself because Time Is Money. Perhaps it is for workaholics who bill $200/hr. But even though I enjoy my work, I do not want to spend every waking hour working.
Any of them interested in coming down to South Carolina? It's nice and warm here, the food is good and housing is cheap. We also have a dearth of Java programmers, experienced or not.
When the trains were bombed in Spain last year, some people on the news commented that March 11, 2004 was exactly 911 days after September 11, 2001. When we heard that, we decided to see what 311 days after March 11, 2004 was. Turns out to be January 26, 2005.
Of course, in Spain, March 11 would be 11/3, not 3/11. But 113 days after March 11 was sometime at the beginning of July, and I don't recall any significant terror attacks happening then.
So, just to be on the safe side, get in your bunker on Jan 24 and don't come out until the 27th.
The purpose of private accounts is to bankrupt a successful social insurance program in order to demonstrate the "failure of the welfare state" which "places undue burden on the wealthy."
I thought the purpose of private SS accounts was to give U.S. citizens more paperwork (I don't care if I'm checking boxes on a web page instead of a sheet of paper, it's still "paperwork"). The government will then need to hire more bureaucrats to deal with all this paperwork, thus reducing unemployment and increasing the number of people paying into the SS system. Problem solved!
Our Mac User Group has plans to get together and eat pizza while watching the webcast (we're EST so it's right at lunchtime for us). I suppose we could refresh a blog page every couple of minutes, but that's not nearly as fun as watching and commenting on the speech itself and the audience's reaction, MST3K style.
And if we wait until later to watch it, the pizza will get cold.
I particularly like Seth Lloyd's response, quoted here in full:
I believe in science. Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would not believe them.
I cannot prove that electrons exist, but I believe fervently in their existence. And if you don't believe in them, I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf. Electrons speak for themselves.
When I was learning Japanese, I found watching Japanese TV shows a fun way to learn new vocabulary words in context, much better than listening to fusty old language lab tapes. Plus, it made me feel a little more connected to the culture.
Perhaps you can set up a video server for the school, or even just start with a DVD collection.
Gene Simmons of KISS once said in an interview that he employed this method. Though, all things considered, he was probably more likely to get a yes sooner rather than later.
But Dahl's Wonka was creepy in an appealing way. He was having fun, even if his idea of fun was sometimes unusual. Wilder's Wonka just seemed bored and disgusted for most of the movie, like he just couldn't wait for it to be over.
I think most Hollywood types would agree with you, thus there is rarely anyone in a movie who is rewarded for following the rules. Heroes break the rules and thumb their noses at authority, at least in the movies. I think it's something they think people want to experience vicariously, and often they're right. It can make a hero more complex and interesting when he's not 100% good. However, "the renegade who breaks all the rules" has also become a tired formula.
But the problem I have with the movie Charlie is, the movie Wonka didn't care a fig about any of the kids. He picked them off one by one as soon as they disobeyed the rules. Why would he not do the same to Charlie? I know he kind of tried to at the end, and Charlie talked him out of it, but I never found that convincing. Gene Wilder's Wonka was a sociopath and I found it hard to believe that he'd let a little kid's plea get to him emotionally. It would have been more in character to unceremoniously boot out Charlie and Grandpa.
The book Wonka seemed to have a special affinity for Charlie, for whatever reason. Yes, he was creepy and weird but in an appealing way. He was magnetic, the crazy guy you want to be around even if he does seem a little dangerous.
Actually, I'm glad somebody's remaking Willy Wonka. I never liked the first movie, even as a kid. There was something too sterile and depressing about it, something reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange and The Wall.
Perhaps what bothered me most is that, reading the book, I really wanted to go to Willy Wonka's factory. It sounded like a wonderful place with its chocolate river and candy wallpaper and never-ending gobstoppers. In the movie, it was just a funhouse designed run by a detatched, bored, sadistic man. I also can't quite forgive the original movie's screenwriters for adding the Fizzy Lifting Water scene that showed Charlie was just as bad as any of the other kids. The whole pointof his being the only one left at the end was that he was the *only* one who followed instructions.
To do it in Photoshop would probably require them to grab a single frame and move it into Photoshop, breaking the flow of what they're doing.
Not to mention that vector drawing in Photoshop is still awkward. Even in the latest version, the vector tools still don't blend very well with the rest of the app. If you draw a squiggle with the Freeform Pen tool, for example, you get a Shape layer that uses the squiggle as a mask over a solid color. If you want to get a natural media-looking line, you have to draw the squiggle in a Path layer (separate from the rest of the image) and then stroke the line you've drawn with the appropriate brush.
Basically, it takes several steps. Contrast with Macromedia Fireworks, where you can draw vector lines with any kind of crazy brush you want and then immediately draw a raster line merely by selecting a different tool, not switching to a different mode.
But I'm getting off-topic. As the parent post says, Photoshop is not well-suited for what Review Sketch does. Review Sketch was designed to create a seamless experience for the director while critiquing the film, and apparently it does that well. Just goes to show how an application designed for a specific purpose can be more efficient than a bloated, general-purpose app.
It's also a slang term I've seen used here in the U.S. I used it myself talking to friends when I was about 8 years old. Online, I've seen it used primarily on forums. It seems to be an accepted shorthand when the poster is being glib. I haven't noticed it being frowned upon the same way that "u" and "ur" are.
If you have a full, active life, as you said: ``... something's going to get you.''
In Alistair Reynold's Chasm City, the "immortals" are people who have access to the sort of preventive and restorative techniques at the cellular level described by Dr. de Grey in the first article. They partake in all kinds of risky extreme sports with high fatality rates because they get bored.
I agree completely. As far as non-Apple laptops go, I've always known that I could trust IBM Thinkpads to be of excellent quality. Yes, they're more expensive, but IMO, absolutely worth it to know you have a computer that will last a long time and not break down.
Admittedly, other companies have improved their laptop offerings to nearly the same level. The Dell Latitude is solid, without too many problems, and Toshiba laptops have progressed leaps and bounds in the last four years. Perhaps the performance gap is small enough now that IBM can't justify charging more.
I know he's primarily talking about MacOS, but since he also seems to be considering OS's in general there's another spot where he didn't get it quite right.
Bug Name: ASCII Sort Proposed Fix: Add intelligent Alpha-numeric sorts to lists throughout the world of computing.
Actually, this seems to have been quietly implemented in Windows XP. I have a list of several files named picture[number] and once I got into 3-digit numbers I noticed that XP was still listing them in order, i.e. picture121 is not listed after picture10, but after picture96.
Also many states are required by their own laws to balance their budgets.
South Carolina, where I live now, is one of those states. For a while, we had a governor who didn't care and the state had a huge financial crisis. So we elected a governor with a reputation for being a penny pincher and, two years later, it looks like the budget is getting back on solid ground.
I'm originally from California, so I have some sympathy for the state, especially since most of my family lives there. We'll be done with our governor in 2010, and if things are still bad out there maybe you can borrow him for a few years. Just make sure you keep him well-supplied with grits and cheap khakis. Oh, and he may need a couple of live pigs if the state legislature gets out of hand.
I mean, its not like you are looking at anything useful while you are fastforwarding
Actually, I am paying attention while I fast forward, watching for my show to start so I know when to take my finger off the button. And if I see an ad that looks particularly interesting or a promo for a show I missed (the curse of TiVo, always cutting off the promos for next week's show), I will stop and watch it. Banner ads will get in the way and actually result in my viewing fewer regular TV ads.
C'mon Disney, is mining existing properties all that you have left in you?
But that's what they've been doing for years: repurpose existing works. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, The Jungle Books, Beauty and the Beast, etc. - Disney didn't write those stories.
I just pay them per graphic or layout/design instead of 125/hr.
125/hr. for graphic design? Are you living in San Francisco or NYC or someplace with a really high cost of living? If not, I seriously need to up my rates!
Except that, in the original LJ post, the spouse points out that most of the people at EA who are working these ridiculous hours don't earn enough to be considered "exempt."
The relevant paragraph:
The interesting thing about this is an assumption that most of the employees seem to be operating under. Whenever the subject of hours come up, inevitably, it seems, someone mentions 'exemption'. They refer to a California law that supposedly exempts businesses from having to pay overtime to certain 'specialty' employees, including software programmers. This is Senate Bill 88. However, Senate Bill 88 specifically does not apply to the entertainment industry -- television, motion picture, and theater industries are specifically mentioned. Further, even in software, there is a pay minimum on the exemption: those exempt must be paid at least $90,000 annually. I can assure you that the majority of EA employees are in fact not in this pay bracket; ergo, these practices are not only unethical, they are illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why my husband won't leave the mail outside our house to be picked up. We have a mailbox as old as our house, the kind that's a vertical metal box stuck to the wall with thin metal prongs underneath to hold outgoing mail. Basically, anything we mail out is visible from the street, where plenty of people walk by.
I take all our bills with me to work and mail them from there instead.
Oh if you're cued well enough you can remember all sorts of things from way back, but they are so fragmentary that it's probably just the distributed nature of memory that saves them from complete loss most of the time. There will always be a few bits and pieces floating around in there.
Several times, when visiting my hometown, I've run into people I went to school with back in middle school (almost 20 years ago, now), people I haven't seen or thought about since then. Upon seeing these people, I've blurted out "Hi, so-and-so!" because their names just leap unbidden to my mind and I'm so surprised I can remember exactly who they are that my brain/mouth filter breaks down.
Of course, they don't really seem to know who I am at first, or kind of pretend to remember me when I say that we went to such-and-such school together. But I've always found it odd that I suddenly remember first and last names of people I haven't thought of in years when I see their faces. (And I'm not one of those people who's good at remembering names at meetings or parties, either.) In the database of my mind, faces must be the keys I use to access certain stored info about people.
When our family grows to the size where we need a larger vehicle, it won't be an SUV, becuase we *never* go offroading, and frankly, a minivan gets better mileage.
That's what I thought, too. And then as our friends started having children, many of them ended up buying SUVs. Not because they particularly wanted SUVs, but because those were the least expensive vehicles with all the passenger and cargo space they needed.
Minivans just cost more. You can buy an SUV for well under $20K U.S., while minivans cost that much or more, and they aren't fuel efficient enough right now to make up the cost difference. So I'd recommend buying a used minivan if that's the kind of vehicle you need, or else you'll have to pay an extra few thou to avoid the stigma of driving an SUV. (Unless it's a hybrid SUV, which still sounds like an oxymoron in my head.)
And another, often overlooked option for a family vehicle is a station wagon. Costs about the same as an SUV, but gets better gas mileage and is less likely to tip over.
I find this story interesting because I worked on implementing a similar project 7 years ago. The idea was, the consulting firm I worked for would partner with CNN to select the "100 most influential people in the world." These people would be given special IBM laptops they'd use to log onto a web site every so often to answer brief surveys. CNN could then take that information and, I don't know, build a show around it or something.
I helped build the prototype web site (which looked pretty cool for '98, IMHO) and a presentation promoting the project. The project never got off the ground, though. I guess there wasn't enough incentive for those "thought leaders" to answer the surveys. But free schwag is a pretty good idea for soliciting feedback.
It's only those obsessed with status & material wealth who get wrapped up in the notion that every worthwhile waking hour should be spent working on advancing careers and whatnot.
Kind of off-topic, but these must be the same people who want to put a price tag on every minute of my day. For example, if I make $40/hr and I spend 30 minutes clipping coupons from the paper, unless the value of those coupons adds up to $20 I have wasted my time, according to those people. But usually I clip coupons while watching TV on Sunday afternoon. If I weren't clipping them, I'd just be watching TV, not working and making money.
Likewise with the people who say it's better to get take-out for dinner, hire a dog-walker, etc. instead of doing those things yourself because Time Is Money. Perhaps it is for workaholics who bill $200/hr. But even though I enjoy my work, I do not want to spend every waking hour working.
Most of my peers (experienced J2EE developers)
Any of them interested in coming down to South Carolina? It's nice and warm here, the food is good and housing is cheap. We also have a dearth of Java programmers, experienced or not.
When the trains were bombed in Spain last year, some people on the news commented that March 11, 2004 was exactly 911 days after September 11, 2001. When we heard that, we decided to see what 311 days after March 11, 2004 was. Turns out to be January 26, 2005.
Of course, in Spain, March 11 would be 11/3, not 3/11. But 113 days after March 11 was sometime at the beginning of July, and I don't recall any significant terror attacks happening then.
So, just to be on the safe side, get in your bunker on Jan 24 and don't come out until the 27th.
The purpose of private accounts is to bankrupt a successful social insurance program in order to demonstrate the "failure of the welfare state" which "places undue burden on the wealthy."
I thought the purpose of private SS accounts was to give U.S. citizens more paperwork (I don't care if I'm checking boxes on a web page instead of a sheet of paper, it's still "paperwork"). The government will then need to hire more bureaucrats to deal with all this paperwork, thus reducing unemployment and increasing the number of people paying into the SS system. Problem solved!
Our Mac User Group has plans to get together and eat pizza while watching the webcast (we're EST so it's right at lunchtime for us). I suppose we could refresh a blog page every couple of minutes, but that's not nearly as fun as watching and commenting on the speech itself and the audience's reaction, MST3K style.
And if we wait until later to watch it, the pizza will get cold.
When I was learning Japanese, I found watching Japanese TV shows a fun way to learn new vocabulary words in context, much better than listening to fusty old language lab tapes. Plus, it made me feel a little more connected to the culture.
Perhaps you can set up a video server for the school, or even just start with a DVD collection.
Gene Simmons of KISS once said in an interview that he employed this method. Though, all things considered, he was probably more likely to get a yes sooner rather than later.
But Dahl's Wonka was creepy in an appealing way. He was having fun, even if his idea of fun was sometimes unusual. Wilder's Wonka just seemed bored and disgusted for most of the movie, like he just couldn't wait for it to be over.
I think most Hollywood types would agree with you, thus there is rarely anyone in a movie who is rewarded for following the rules. Heroes break the rules and thumb their noses at authority, at least in the movies. I think it's something they think people want to experience vicariously, and often they're right. It can make a hero more complex and interesting when he's not 100% good. However, "the renegade who breaks all the rules" has also become a tired formula.
But the problem I have with the movie Charlie is, the movie Wonka didn't care a fig about any of the kids. He picked them off one by one as soon as they disobeyed the rules. Why would he not do the same to Charlie? I know he kind of tried to at the end, and Charlie talked him out of it, but I never found that convincing. Gene Wilder's Wonka was a sociopath and I found it hard to believe that he'd let a little kid's plea get to him emotionally. It would have been more in character to unceremoniously boot out Charlie and Grandpa.
The book Wonka seemed to have a special affinity for Charlie, for whatever reason. Yes, he was creepy and weird but in an appealing way. He was magnetic, the crazy guy you want to be around even if he does seem a little dangerous.
Actually, I'm glad somebody's remaking Willy Wonka. I never liked the first movie, even as a kid. There was something too sterile and depressing about it, something reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange and The Wall.
Perhaps what bothered me most is that, reading the book, I really wanted to go to Willy Wonka's factory. It sounded like a wonderful place with its chocolate river and candy wallpaper and never-ending gobstoppers. In the movie, it was just a funhouse designed run by a detatched, bored, sadistic man. I also can't quite forgive the original movie's screenwriters for adding the Fizzy Lifting Water scene that showed Charlie was just as bad as any of the other kids. The whole pointof his being the only one left at the end was that he was the *only* one who followed instructions.
To do it in Photoshop would probably require them to grab a single frame and move it into Photoshop, breaking the flow of what they're doing.
Not to mention that vector drawing in Photoshop is still awkward. Even in the latest version, the vector tools still don't blend very well with the rest of the app. If you draw a squiggle with the Freeform Pen tool, for example, you get a Shape layer that uses the squiggle as a mask over a solid color. If you want to get a natural media-looking line, you have to draw the squiggle in a Path layer (separate from the rest of the image) and then stroke the line you've drawn with the appropriate brush.
Basically, it takes several steps. Contrast with Macromedia Fireworks, where you can draw vector lines with any kind of crazy brush you want and then immediately draw a raster line merely by selecting a different tool, not switching to a different mode.
But I'm getting off-topic. As the parent post says, Photoshop is not well-suited for what Review Sketch does. Review Sketch was designed to create a seamless experience for the director while critiquing the film, and apparently it does that well. Just goes to show how an application designed for a specific purpose can be more efficient than a bloated, general-purpose app.
It's also a slang term I've seen used here in the U.S. I used it myself talking to friends when I was about 8 years old. Online, I've seen it used primarily on forums. It seems to be an accepted shorthand when the poster is being glib. I haven't noticed it being frowned upon the same way that "u" and "ur" are.
If you have a full, active life, as you said: ``... something's going to get you.''
In Alistair Reynold's Chasm City, the "immortals" are people who have access to the sort of preventive and restorative techniques at the cellular level described by Dr. de Grey in the first article. They partake in all kinds of risky extreme sports with high fatality rates because they get bored.
I agree completely. As far as non-Apple laptops go, I've always known that I could trust IBM Thinkpads to be of excellent quality. Yes, they're more expensive, but IMO, absolutely worth it to know you have a computer that will last a long time and not break down.
Admittedly, other companies have improved their laptop offerings to nearly the same level. The Dell Latitude is solid, without too many problems, and Toshiba laptops have progressed leaps and bounds in the last four years. Perhaps the performance gap is small enough now that IBM can't justify charging more.
I know he's primarily talking about MacOS, but since he also seems to be considering OS's in general there's another spot where he didn't get it quite right.
Bug Name: ASCII Sort
Proposed Fix: Add intelligent Alpha-numeric sorts to lists throughout the world of computing.
Actually, this seems to have been quietly implemented in Windows XP. I have a list of several files named picture[number] and once I got into 3-digit numbers I noticed that XP was still listing them in order, i.e. picture121 is not listed after picture10, but after picture96.
Also many states are required by their own laws to balance their budgets.
South Carolina, where I live now, is one of those states. For a while, we had a governor who didn't care and the state had a huge financial crisis. So we elected a governor with a reputation for being a penny pincher and, two years later, it looks like the budget is getting back on solid ground.
I'm originally from California, so I have some sympathy for the state, especially since most of my family lives there. We'll be done with our governor in 2010, and if things are still bad out there maybe you can borrow him for a few years. Just make sure you keep him well-supplied with grits and cheap khakis. Oh, and he may need a couple of live pigs if the state legislature gets out of hand.
I mean, its not like you are looking at anything useful while you are fastforwarding
Actually, I am paying attention while I fast forward, watching for my show to start so I know when to take my finger off the button. And if I see an ad that looks particularly interesting or a promo for a show I missed (the curse of TiVo, always cutting off the promos for next week's show), I will stop and watch it. Banner ads will get in the way and actually result in my viewing fewer regular TV ads.
C'mon Disney, is mining existing properties all that you have left in you?
But that's what they've been doing for years: repurpose existing works. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, The Jungle Books, Beauty and the Beast, etc. - Disney didn't write those stories.
I just pay them per graphic or layout/design instead of 125/hr.
125/hr. for graphic design? Are you living in San Francisco or NYC or someplace with a really high cost of living? If not, I seriously need to up my rates!
The relevant paragraph: