Thanks for the link. I'm glad to see they're still using Alvin for this expedition. It's a fascinating little vehicle. I read a book a while back about some of Alvin's adventures around the volcanic vents called The Octopus' Garden. It's written by an Alvin pilot and has some great sketches the team made of what they found on their explorations.
Brightness. I like my workspace to be hella-dark, but no one else on the floor likes that, so the stinkin' lights are on all the time.
You've brought up one of the major issues I've faced with cubes and open plans in the past. It's really, really important to find out how much control individuals will have over their lighting.
In one office I worked in with built-in cubes, each cube had its own light switch and ceiling light. That was nice, but I've never seen it anywhere else. In another, we were unable to do anything about the lighting since it came from industrial lighting and windows in a really high ceiling. In that case, management bought glare-reduction filters for the screens of people who requested them. Other individuals used sombreros or cleverly bent pieces of cardboard to reduce glare.
In my current office, which has an open plan, I have removed the fluorescent tubes from the light above my desk, and everyone nearby is OK with that. If everyone in your division agrees, you could even leave the lights off all the time and just use desk lamps.
I created molds and copied some of the minis I had bought
I thought this was interesting and a creative solution to the overpricing problem. Just goes to show that "copying" doesn't have to involve digital items.
[(3)] tampers with, modifies, or maintains a modification to a communication device provided by or installed by the provider
The TimeWarner Cable guy didn't know how to install the cable modem on our Mac. So we did it ourselves. It seems to me this would be illegal according to the above wording.
The Fantastic Planet is a French animated sci-fi movie that my sister and I used to stay up late to watch on Night Flight (dubbed in English, of course). Beautiful, unusual animation and a compelling story of a planet where humans are treated as vermin by the planet's giant alpha-species.
You mean "commodity hardware" like the Dell you can buy in Adobe's online store? Customers embracing that machine will certainly enhance Adobe's bottom line.
My former roommate's boyfriend got that advice backwards. After three days without bathing, the other roommate and I agreed that if he didn't leave the premises we'd toss him in the shower ourselves.
I have heard many people say this, but never experienced it myself. My in-laws never ask for help with their (ancient) computers, and politely refuse our offers of upgrades or new software. My folks only ask for computer help once a year, at Christmas - ususally it involves cleaning up redundant files or updating drivers. When friends mention a computer problem and either I or my husband try to help them with it, their eyes glaze over and I realize it was a rhetorical complaint, they don't actually want the problem solved.
Perhaps I have extremely polite or self-reliant friends and family, but I can't remember the last time I was called on as free tech support.
Remember the "print on demand" book machines that Barnes & Noble were supposedly trying out a while back? Wouldn't it be great if the Software Machine were hooked up to one of those so you really could get the whole package? Heck, throw in a shrink-wrap machine if you want to get really fancy.
All said, though, how is this different and better than downloading software from the manufacturer over the Internet and burning a CD myself?
Actually, this sounds like the world of Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. People do a lot of communicating via wireless implants in their brain. Without one, it's difficult to hail a taxi or look up a phone number, for example.
I actually find BCC's useful for letting someone know I've taken care of that thing they're bugging me about.
Example: Husband asks, "Did you remember to put in your request for vacation time?" I email HR with the request and BCC my husband so that he knows I've taken care of it, and HR is not confused by seeing a CC to someone they've never heard of.
This is true. My sister-in-law took her TiBook to the Salt Flats a couple of years ago. She put it on the back seat of a car so it wouldn't be exposed to the elements, and some idiot left the car door open and let the computer get covered with salt and sand. It still worked after that, but not very well. The salt particularly damaged the case. She ended up getting the data backed up and the machine replaced.
Nine, this is kinda offtopic, but what brand of cellphone do you have that it works "for days on a charge"? Mine will barely run half a day on a single charge, and if I leave it turned off for a few days it seems to spontaneously discharge the battery. As a result, I can't use it unless I plan to spend half an hour charging it up enough to place a call. Sorta defeats the purpose of having a cell phone for convenience.
This isn't necessarily so. I believe that going to a private school increased my exposure to people who are different from me. In the public schools in my county, kids formed cliques based on race, nationality, income, and religion. At my small, private school we had a diverse group of people, but there weren't enough of us to make those kind of cliques. As a result, I got to know people as friends and classmates instead of stereotypes of their categories, while my friends in public school all socialized with people who were exactly like they were (white Presbyterian clique, upper-middle-class Asian clique, etc.).
My little high school world was not ideal. There were still popular and unpopular people, etc. But I don't think I was ill-prepared for the diversity of the real world because I went to a private high school. (Of course, college was another matter...)
"I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children."
This insightful paragraph explains why things can go so horribly wrong for kids growing up in the suburbs. Adults think they've created an ideal world for kids, and kids are bored and lost in it.
Everything has a name -- even if it's nothing more than "Hey! You!"
A friend of mine in Scotland had a guy on her university archery team called Yerman. It seems that early in his university career, someone was looking for him, and a helpful student pointed him out, saying "There's yer man!" The guy looking for him took that literally.
there is a huge industry online for consumer goods
Absolutely. Especially when you live someplace that doesn't have a lot of good shopping options, like I do. Buying clothes online saves me a 200 mile drive to Atlanta.
Especially since a lot more people can get internet access at work. I suspect folks who canceled the home connection may be checking their Yahoo email during lunch. Also, their work connection is probably faster than the home dialup ever was.
If the system were up, I'd make you my Friend for that statement.
Have you noticed how a lot of 3rd-party Windows software is guilty of gratuitous use of hideous gradients (GUHG)? The software will have a plain, gray interface with a big red-and-purple GUHG thrown in somewhere in a failed attempt to make their UI "snazzy".
By contrast, Mozilla's "modern" theme interface has subtle gradients to give a shadowed, 3-D appearance to the button bar.
Your idea sort of reminds me of a game we used to play in high school called "Assassin". The game master assigned each player a target whom they were supposed to "assassinate" (via disk gun, toilet-paper garrotte, sticky-tack contact poison, alarm-clock bomb, etc.). So everyone was both a target and an assassin, but you never knew who was out to get you. Once you eliminated your target, you inherited their target. Last one left alive wins. Each game generally lasted for 2-3 weeks, depending on the number of players.
(Naturally, this was several years ago. Any high schoolers caught doing something like this today would probably be locked up.)
A QuickTime-type tray might work, as long as I could open documents directly to the tray. That's how I use the tabs: to open tangential pages so that I don't lose my place in whatever I'm currently reading.
Peter Hamilton's Fallen Dragon
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 1
This reminds me of Peter Hamilton's novel Fallen Dragon, where in the future all food is lab-grown, and only back-to-nature fanatics eat plants and animals. In one scene, the main character gets physically ill when he discovers the roast beef sandwich he's eating came from an actual cow.
Hamilton's pretty good at extrapolating from the present to create the future world in his books. I don't think this scenario is unrealistic, a century or so from now.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link. I'm glad to see they're still using Alvin for this expedition. It's a fascinating little vehicle. I read a book a while back about some of Alvin's adventures around the volcanic vents called The Octopus' Garden . It's written by an Alvin pilot and has some great sketches the team made of what they found on their explorations.
Brightness. I like my workspace to be hella-dark, but no one else on the floor likes that, so the stinkin' lights are on all the time.
You've brought up one of the major issues I've faced with cubes and open plans in the past. It's really, really important to find out how much control individuals will have over their lighting.
In one office I worked in with built-in cubes, each cube had its own light switch and ceiling light. That was nice, but I've never seen it anywhere else. In another, we were unable to do anything about the lighting since it came from industrial lighting and windows in a really high ceiling. In that case, management bought glare-reduction filters for the screens of people who requested them. Other individuals used sombreros or cleverly bent pieces of cardboard to reduce glare.
In my current office, which has an open plan, I have removed the fluorescent tubes from the light above my desk, and everyone nearby is OK with that. If everyone in your division agrees, you could even leave the lights off all the time and just use desk lamps.
I created molds and copied some of the minis I had bought
I thought this was interesting and a creative solution to the overpricing problem. Just goes to show that "copying" doesn't have to involve digital items.
[(3)] tampers with, modifies, or maintains a
modification to a communication device provided by or installed by the provider
The TimeWarner Cable guy didn't know how to install the cable modem on our Mac. So we did it ourselves. It seems to me this would be illegal according to the above wording.
The Fantastic Planet is a French animated sci-fi movie that my sister and I used to stay up late to watch on Night Flight (dubbed in English, of course). Beautiful, unusual animation and a compelling story of a planet where humans are treated as vermin by the planet's giant alpha-species.
You mean "commodity hardware" like the Dell you can buy in Adobe's online store?
Customers embracing that machine will certainly enhance Adobe's bottom line.
Stop using deodorant, wash several times a day
My former roommate's boyfriend got that advice backwards. After three days without bathing, the other roommate and I agreed that if he didn't leave the premises we'd toss him in the shower ourselves.
I have heard many people say this, but never experienced it myself. My in-laws never ask for help with their (ancient) computers, and politely refuse our offers of upgrades or new software. My folks only ask for computer help once a year, at Christmas - ususally it involves cleaning up redundant files or updating drivers. When friends mention a computer problem and either I or my husband try to help them with it, their eyes glaze over and I realize it was a rhetorical complaint, they don't actually want the problem solved.
Perhaps I have extremely polite or self-reliant friends and family, but I can't remember the last time I was called on as free tech support.
Remember the "print on demand" book machines that Barnes & Noble were supposedly trying out a while back? Wouldn't it be great if the Software Machine were hooked up to one of those so you really could get the whole package? Heck, throw in a shrink-wrap machine if you want to get really fancy.
All said, though, how is this different and better than downloading software from the manufacturer over the Internet and burning a CD myself?
Actually, this sounds like the world of Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. People do a lot of communicating via wireless implants in their brain. Without one, it's difficult to hail a taxi or look up a phone number, for example.
I actually find BCC's useful for letting someone know I've taken care of that thing they're bugging me about.
Example: Husband asks, "Did you remember to put in your request for vacation time?" I email HR with the request and BCC my husband so that he knows I've taken care of it, and HR is not confused by seeing a CC to someone they've never heard of.
This is true. My sister-in-law took her TiBook to the Salt Flats a couple of years ago. She put it on the back seat of a car so it wouldn't be exposed to the elements, and some idiot left the car door open and let the computer get covered with salt and sand. It still worked after that, but not very well. The salt particularly damaged the case. She ended up getting the data backed up and the machine replaced.
Nine, this is kinda offtopic, but what brand of cellphone do you have that it works "for days on a charge"? Mine will barely run half a day on a single charge, and if I leave it turned off for a few days it seems to spontaneously discharge the battery. As a result, I can't use it unless I plan to spend half an hour charging it up enough to place a call. Sorta defeats the purpose of having a cell phone for convenience.
This isn't necessarily so. I believe that going to a private school increased my exposure to people who are different from me. In the public schools in my county, kids formed cliques based on race, nationality, income, and religion. At my small, private school we had a diverse group of people, but there weren't enough of us to make those kind of cliques. As a result, I got to know people as friends and classmates instead of stereotypes of their categories, while my friends in public school all socialized with people who were exactly like they were (white Presbyterian clique, upper-middle-class Asian clique, etc.).
My little high school world was not ideal. There were still popular and unpopular people, etc. But I don't think I was ill-prepared for the diversity of the real world because I went to a private high school. (Of course, college was another matter...)
"I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children."
This insightful paragraph explains why things can go so horribly wrong for kids growing up in the suburbs. Adults think they've created an ideal world for kids, and kids are bored and lost in it.
Everything has a name -- even if it's nothing more than "Hey! You!"
A friend of mine in Scotland had a guy on her university archery team called Yerman. It seems that early in his university career, someone was looking for him, and a helpful student pointed him out, saying "There's yer man!" The guy looking for him took that literally.
there is a huge industry online for consumer goods
Absolutely. Especially when you live someplace that doesn't have a lot of good shopping options, like I do. Buying clothes online saves me a 200 mile drive to Atlanta.
You can't stop the future, you can only simulate it by stopping progress
Great quote! Where did this come from, or did you make it up?
Especially since a lot more people can get internet access at work. I suspect folks who canceled the home connection may be checking their Yahoo email during lunch. Also, their work connection is probably faster than the home dialup ever was.
Gradients... are the bane of graphic designers.
If the system were up, I'd make you my Friend for that statement.
Have you noticed how a lot of 3rd-party Windows software is guilty of gratuitous use of hideous gradients (GUHG)? The software will have a plain, gray interface with a big red-and-purple GUHG thrown in somewhere in a failed attempt to make their UI "snazzy".
By contrast, Mozilla's "modern" theme interface has subtle gradients to give a shadowed, 3-D appearance to the button bar.
Let's all sing Happy Birthday! (copyright TimeWarner)
Ever wonder why nobody in TV shows or movies ever sings Happy Birthday? The license fees are too expensive.
Your idea sort of reminds me of a game we used to play in high school called "Assassin". The game master assigned each player a target whom they were supposed to "assassinate" (via disk gun, toilet-paper garrotte, sticky-tack contact poison, alarm-clock bomb, etc.). So everyone was both a target and an assassin, but you never knew who was out to get you. Once you eliminated your target, you inherited their target. Last one left alive wins. Each game generally lasted for 2-3 weeks, depending on the number of players.
(Naturally, this was several years ago. Any high schoolers caught doing something like this today would probably be locked up.)
Who were the 2 dissenting opinions? Some one ought to write and thank them. Also, I'm curious to know why they dissented.
As depressing as this ruling is, it's nice to know that at least there are two people on the Supreme Court who think that Eldred should have won.
A QuickTime-type tray might work, as long as I could open documents directly to the tray. That's how I use the tabs: to open tangential pages so that I don't lose my place in whatever I'm currently reading.
This reminds me of Peter Hamilton's novel Fallen Dragon , where in the future all food is lab-grown, and only back-to-nature fanatics eat plants and animals. In one scene, the main character gets physically ill when he discovers the roast beef sandwich he's eating came from an actual cow.
Hamilton's pretty good at extrapolating from the present to create the future world in his books. I don't think this scenario is unrealistic, a century or so from now.