I think that last line was the best thing I've read in this thread. A clear simple design will work better and say more about the quality of what you produce than something like...http://www.shadow-net.com, say...I mean, there's a lot crummier corporate sites out there, believe you me!
It is a problem. Your freedom is being constantly chipped away at by laws. The US is a nation of jailers. Soon everyone will be ID'd for everything, I'd bet you in 30 yrs it'll be illegal for under 18 to drink coffee or something.
We should all be on guard for our liberties and freedoms. What the people don't know right now is amazing. Just take GM foods. Monsanto thinks that a lack of public interest means that they don't have to label their killer corn (yup, the pollen from the corn kills butterflies).
Bravo! A beautiful statement. I agree with you wholeheartedly. As far as I know, this sort of harassment doesn't happen at Cdn theatres. There were five year olds going into Austin Powers when I went to see it.
BTW, a Christian movie guide branded South Park as evil - that's right, it got an evil rating. I think it was Crosswalk or something. The review had me in stitches.
I think Americans like to see themselves as being pure on a large scale, but in reality they like smut. I think that's where the warpedness comes from, this inability to rationalize or equate between the two. Our laws say one thing, society says another. The two will never agree.
Lots of stores do. I don't know if they do it in the US, but at the nearest Wal-Mart, they'll tape your other shopping bags, purses even, with their green Wal-Mart stickers. I'm surprised people haven't stood up to this - I mean, god, treat me like a F*n criminal or what? I haven't been there in a year. I'm not that desperate to save a few cents. My dad worked there once as a dock loader. It was the most hellish job he ever had.
Everyone should read Jonathon Kozol's book Illiterate America. It was published in 1985 when 1 out of ever 3 American adults could not read. I think the situation is pretty much the same...it's a vicious cycle - parent who can't read produces a child who can't read, unlike parent who can't compute will not produce a child who cannot compute, literacy desperately needs to be worked on.
I didn't learn computer literacy till I was...gee...13...I didn't get onto the net until I was...18. I'm 21 now. I sincerely doubt that I would be disadvantaged as a child if I didn't have net access (I do agree we shouldn't be so overmoralistic towards it tho)
If a kid can't read, no job period. All the net training in the world would not make a difference if a child cannot read.
Totally. I was totally unfazed when they started selling toys. They are out to get ahold of everything, want to compete with everyone else. Katz has a point tho, Amazon stock may be high, but it hasn't really turned a huge profit in its existance. I mean, what if you buy a toy and your kid hates it? It's not like you can take it back right away. The only thing it would solve is Boxing Day returns, but man, by the time you exchange/return it...it seems too mind boggling. I won't shop there. The feeling I get is that I'm trapped in a psychographers dream, target target target.
Really? That is so funny:-) Newfoundland is bad for names like that too. There's lots of sexual sounding names down there...oh yeah, the Greek word for flashlight sounds like f too...I thought sh*t was allowed because of Japanese words, like sh*ttake.
I was a very sheltered child. But I pretty much knew all those words (and more, and in different languages too) by the time I was 9. Didn't know what a hooker was tho for the longest time:-)
You would be pretty naive not to know what these words are. And not just from the media - I learned the old fashioned way, from adults!
On a funnier note, my mom bought a bunch of white erasers and gave me some. "Mom," I said, "Why'd you give me this f*8cking eraser?" She was appalled. "But Mom," I said, "That's what it says right here on the side "Fuh King". It's a Fuh King Eraser. LOL made in Hong Kong, you wonder how the company would think that there was nothing wrong with that name!
...as part of the union thing, whenever I was required to work overtime or on a holiday I had to fill out a big yellow form that my supervisor had to sign. And this was for everyone. I used to check in the books and shelve and sort.
How true. A 5 yr old wandered away from a daycare and almost got hit in heavy traffic. But get this: there were FOUR ADULTS and only 13 CHILDREN!!! Come on, that's a better ratio than most daycares and no one noticed! (and I used to look after kids myself, I know what it's like to be around them...you never let them out of your sight)
I think it's fairly high. These researchers at the UofC were trying to find out what height a keyboard should be at and what level was the least stressful on hands and wrists (turns out it is if you put your keyboard in your laptop). They tested everyone from kids to adults and had them tap away. They measured for energy and stress. I type at 75wpm on a keyboard (50wpm on an old fashioned manual), but my fingers are always cold!
That's funny, I can sit here and tag away all day and not feel hungry. Before I used to have a bag of pretzels, nuts, whatever, and I noticed a real gain in weight...then I moved out of my parents:-) and suddenly, I'm not hungry anymore. There's barely anything in my fridge. I still make nutritious meals, it's just that w/o a mom around, I don't have an inclination to cook anything more elaborate than grill cheese:-)
:-) I loved the article. I always peek in ebay now and then - some domains only had bids of $10 or $12 - things like the above. I registered gonzo.org (gonzo.com is a porn site). Couple weeks later I get this spam from some guy trying to push www.gonzojournalism.com on me. It only had two bids and was like, $450, reserve not met. Tsk tsk! Now who's going to look that up? In one of the spams, he cited the same thing about domains being valuable but man, no one's going to go after gonzojournalism. Gonzo is the golden word:-)
Funny thing happened last year, I exploded at a clerk at Smithbooks. My mom was standing somewhere by the entrance and broke out laughing. He was trying to get me to sign up for an Avid Reader card and I told him why I didn't want it. He kept persisting and I kept getting angrier. The last thing he tried to say was "Look," he said, "we're not the FBI." "Look," I replied, "I am not a target market." And I grabbed my book before things got really ugly. I swear I could have socked him! Last week I was in Smithbooks again, and lo and behold, there's the clerk. He kept staring at me as if I was a total nut:-) and I thot, pls, I don't want him, I don't want him.
I got the other clerk. She asked me if I wanted a card (it's $15 to join, no less!) and I said "Yeah, I know all about your f*king card". I'm a person that normally doesn't swear, just that the bile came to the forefront...I told her that you can't treat customers as commodity and that's something Smithbooks should learn. If I could have gotten the book anywhere else at the moment, I would have...but I think after this I won't go there ever again!
We have four couches, 1 men's washroom, 3 ladies:-) (gals are preferred here!) and a kitchen, two fridges, but no beer...cake on birthdays, wine and cake when we accomplish a feat:-) and no one is allowed to log more than 55 hours a week. Take out meals are paid when a deadline is due.
The only thing I can think of is that a)the company doesn't have enough staff or b)they take on more work than they can handle.
Hey, thanks for the link. I've seen the Netscape open directory at Netcenter, but it never seems to come to the forefront - I guess that's what branding is all about. When I need an answer, I think Hotbot:-)
Yes, humans do do it better! I use NetMechanic's link checker to keep my links pages up to date - the only problem is, it seems to cache the pages somehow - links that have been removed from the page physically still show up in the report.
I should also mention the Mining Co, now About.com. I had given up hope on looking for decent 3D graphics sites, and to my amazement, I found a whole section devoted to it and VRML there!
I would be so happy if search engines kept their links current. There's nothing worse than searching Yahoo and finding something you need, but half the links listed are dead...a good example is the category for color picker tools. I was looking for a Director page...and came up with a page apologizing to people who came from Yahoo. It read something like "This link has been dead since Dec. 16, 1997, if you're wondering how long Yahoo keeps old URLs".
Yeah, when I need something in-depth, Google, Hotbot and Ask Jeeves do the job pretty good!
I've been with my current ISP for almost two years. Before it, I tried a more heavily advertised one and it turned out to be heavily oversubscribed! Never had a problem to date, like with the other one, it kept dropping my connection.
Prior to the oversubscribed one, I was with Compuserve - dropped that after it became two $ and my brother ran up a $90 bill - he rang up a bunch of outside hours looking at naked people! (then tried to deny it and said someone was using my computer as a porn repository...yeesh!) Prior to that experience, I had free access thru my college.
>"Bloat is the American dream: bigger, better, and everywhere all at once. Supersize it!"
>Sadly enough, this is quite true, and quite disgusting.
Couldn't agree more. If you look at almost every aspect of American culture, that's what you see. Las Vegas is the epitany of it, I think:-)that's why Hunter Thompson subtitled FLLV "A savage journey to the heart of the American Dream".
Funny tho, that supersize it attitude can have very negative effects. The quest for "more" and "faster" in the world of agriculture provided the factory farm, which killed family farms, forces animals to live in an unnatural and stressed out way, introduced hormone and antibiotic abuse, not to mention a rampant spread in bacteria (pig farmers interestingly enuf have a higher level of e. coli in their intestines than average people).
Bigger is certainly not better, esp when you're running a slow computer like mine at home. It cranks along and pauses like a faithful old dog! But if something is perceived to be bigger and shinier, than it certainly "must" be better!
I think the only program I've seen that kept old versions for sale was Corel, with CorelDraw. When CorelDraw7 came out, you could still buy 5 and 6, and 5 was bundled with Lexmark printers (at least here in Canada). Why not check out a college or university computer store? By the time Netscape Communicator came out, the UofC Microstore still had 2 versions on the shelf.
I would like to see a graphics program that can do it all. I have PhotoShop5, CorelDraw7 with Kai's Power Tools, LViewPro, MS Paint (natch), and NetSketch (which is awesome for lettering). My home computer is now low end - 133 MHz, 1.6GB HD.
I have all these programs, and not one does it all (and I'm by no means a newbie at these programs). LViewPro eats jpegs for breakfast, and loads very fast. I use it primarily for compression, converting and cropping. PhotoShop5 handles layers beautifully - it's how I made plates for a Shockwave movie - while in CorelDraw, the object and layers is more complex and even mystifying. Neither PS or CD lay lettering down cleaner than NetSketch, and MS Paint is what I use to put pictures inside the hollowed out letters from Netsketch. If I could have all these things rolled into one graphics package, I would be so happy! But then, it would probably take forever to load - filters, plug-ins, preferences...so there you have it...
I also tried PSP and found it disappointing...but it was a trim little program nonetheless!
I agree with this part: Unions are not worth the time and trouble.
I came from a traditional union, CUPE, since I used to work for the public library. It was $2 to join, and there was free meetings at pizza. The only good thing I can say about it is that the union DID get the city to give us a raise, and retrospective wages as well. I went two years w/o a raise!
OTOH, I had no health benefits and received 12% back in lieu of this. When they considered giving part timers benefits, only the full-timers could vote on the issue.
I think a union is a good idea...but only if it was something like the International Workers party or whatever it is. Something that's global, but not necessarily interfering.
Ever since I downloaded a 2600 emulator (our 2600 shorted out sometime around...gee...1993! Not bad, it outlasted a toaster or two!) I've been in heaven. I never thought I would get to play these old games again, esp Joust and Swordquest. What memories, late nights, popcorn, endless fights for the good joystick (the original broke too about a year before the console, we took the top off and punched the contacts...I've never found any other game/system to be so interesting nor FUN! Forget the blood and guts, just let me kill my brother's purple bird in Joust once more...!
>I've heard it said that "democracy is a terrible >way to run a government; its only redeeming quality is that it's about eight times better than anything else we've got." I suspect that Pipis might agree with the first part, and we could delightful discuss the merits of the second observation.
I think people forget that there have been possibly hundreds of different ways to govern a group of people. Canada is a democracy, but has a mixed economy. The US is a constitutionual republic (I think - izzat right?). Commonwealth countries are constitutional monarchies with the Queen as a figurehead. Democracy has different connotations for people in China, say. The thing is, whether it be democracy or communism, political systems don't come in a can and you can paint every country with it.
An enlightened despot back in the middle ages was the greatest thing for Europeans back then. Sure, there was no upward mobility, but the state and church were closely tied. People believed that their reward for all their toil would heavenly redemption and so forth.
Yeah...Brin's response was too sarcastic. Frankly, I don't know why people don't let Star Wars and Star Trek be. Don't ruin whatever meaning these shows have for people. I like *both*, tho I prefer Classic Trek...it's freakin apples and oranges, apples and oranges.
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I think that last line was the best thing I've read in this thread. A clear simple design will work better and say more about the quality of what you produce than something like...http://www.shadow-net.com, say...I mean, there's a lot crummier corporate sites out there, believe you me!
We should all be on guard for our liberties and
freedoms. What the people don't know right now is amazing. Just take GM foods. Monsanto thinks that a lack of public interest means that they don't have to label their killer corn (yup, the pollen from the corn kills butterflies).
Bravo! A beautiful statement. I agree with you wholeheartedly. As far as I know, this sort of harassment doesn't happen at Cdn theatres. There were five year olds going into Austin Powers when I went to see it.
BTW, a Christian movie guide branded South Park as
evil - that's right, it got an evil rating. I think it was Crosswalk or something. The review had me in stitches.
I think Americans like to see themselves as being pure on a large scale, but in reality they like smut. I think that's where the warpedness comes from, this inability to rationalize or equate between the two. Our laws say one thing, society says another. The two will never agree.
Lots of stores do. I don't know if they do it in the US, but at the nearest Wal-Mart, they'll tape your other shopping bags, purses even, with their green Wal-Mart stickers. I'm surprised people haven't stood up to this - I mean, god, treat me like a F*n criminal or what? I haven't been there in a year. I'm not that desperate to save a few cents. My dad worked there once as a dock loader. It was the most hellish job he ever had.
I didn't learn computer literacy till I was...gee...13...I didn't get onto the net until I was...18. I'm 21 now. I sincerely doubt that I would be disadvantaged as a child if I didn't have net access (I do agree we shouldn't be so overmoralistic towards it tho)
If a kid can't read, no job period. All the net training in the world would not make a difference if a child cannot read.
Totally. I was totally unfazed when they started selling toys. They are out to get ahold of everything, want to compete with everyone else. Katz has a point tho, Amazon stock may be high, but it hasn't really turned a huge profit in its existance. I mean, what if you buy a toy and your kid hates it? It's not like you can take it back right away. The only thing it would solve is Boxing Day returns, but man, by the time you exchange/return it...it seems too mind boggling.
I won't shop there. The feeling I get is that I'm trapped in a psychographers dream, target target target.
Really? That is so funny :-) Newfoundland is bad for names like that too. There's lots of sexual sounding names down there...oh yeah, the Greek word for flashlight sounds like f too...I thought sh*t was allowed because of Japanese words, like sh*ttake.
You would be pretty naive not to know what these words are. And not just from the media - I learned the old fashioned way, from adults!
On a funnier note, my mom bought a bunch of white erasers and gave me some. "Mom," I said, "Why'd you give me this f*8cking eraser?" She was appalled. "But Mom," I said, "That's what it says right here on the side "Fuh King". It's a Fuh King
Eraser. LOL made in Hong Kong, you wonder how the company would think that there was nothing wrong with that name!
...as part of the union thing, whenever I was required to work overtime or on a holiday I had to fill out a big yellow form that my supervisor had to sign. And this was for everyone. I used to check in the books and shelve and sort.
How true. A 5 yr old wandered away from a daycare and almost got hit in heavy traffic. But get this: there were FOUR ADULTS and only 13 CHILDREN!!!
Come on, that's a better ratio than most daycares and no one noticed! (and I used to look after kids myself, I know what it's like to be around them...you never let them out of your sight)
I think it's fairly high. These researchers at the UofC were trying to find out what height a keyboard should be at and what level was the least stressful on hands and wrists (turns out it is if you put your keyboard in your laptop). They tested everyone from kids to adults and had them tap away. They measured for energy and stress.
I type at 75wpm on a keyboard (50wpm on an old fashioned manual), but my fingers are always cold!
That's funny, I can sit here and tag away all day and not feel hungry. Before I used to have a bag of pretzels, nuts, whatever, and I noticed a real gain in weight...then I moved out of my parents :-) and suddenly, I'm not hungry anymore. There's barely anything in my fridge. I still make nutritious meals, it's just that w/o a mom around, I don't have an inclination to cook anything more elaborate than grill cheese :-)
:-) I loved the article. I always peek in ebay now and then - some domains only had bids of $10 or $12 - things like the above. I registered gonzo.org (gonzo.com is a porn site). Couple weeks later I get this spam from some guy trying to push www.gonzojournalism.com on me. It only had two bids and was like, $450, reserve not met. Tsk tsk! Now who's going to look that up? In one of the spams, he cited the same thing about domains being valuable but man, no one's going to go after gonzojournalism. Gonzo is the golden word :-)
"Look," he said, "we're not the FBI."
"Look," I replied, "I am not a target market."
And I grabbed my book before things got really ugly. I swear I could have socked him! Last week I was in Smithbooks again, and lo and behold, there's the clerk. He kept staring at me as if I was a total nut
I got the other clerk. She asked me if I wanted a card (it's $15 to join, no less!) and I said "Yeah, I know all about your f*king card". I'm a person that normally doesn't swear, just that the bile came to the forefront...I told her that you can't treat customers as commodity and that's something Smithbooks should learn. If I could have gotten the book anywhere else at the moment, I would have...but I think after this I won't go there ever again!
The only thing I can think of is that a)the company doesn't have enough staff or b)they take on more work than they can handle.
Yes, humans do do it better! I use NetMechanic's link checker to keep my links pages up to date - the only problem is, it seems to cache the pages somehow - links that have been removed from the page physically still show up in the report.
I should also mention the Mining Co, now About.com. I had given up hope on looking for decent 3D graphics sites, and to my amazement, I found a whole section devoted to it and VRML there!
I was looking for a Director page...and came up with a page apologizing to people who came from Yahoo. It read something like "This link has been dead since Dec. 16, 1997, if you're wondering how long Yahoo keeps old URLs".
Yeah, when I need something in-depth, Google, Hotbot and Ask Jeeves do the job pretty good!
Prior to the oversubscribed one, I was with Compuserve - dropped that after it became two $ and my brother ran up a $90 bill - he rang up a bunch of outside hours looking at naked people!
(then tried to deny it and said someone was using my computer as a porn repository...yeesh!)
Prior to that experience, I had free access thru my college.
>Sadly enough, this is quite true, and quite disgusting.
Couldn't agree more. If you look at almost every aspect of American culture, that's what you see.
Las Vegas is the epitany of it, I think
Funny tho, that supersize it attitude can have very negative effects. The quest for "more" and "faster" in the world of agriculture provided the factory farm, which killed family farms, forces animals to live in an unnatural and stressed out way, introduced hormone and antibiotic abuse, not to mention a rampant spread in bacteria (pig farmers interestingly enuf have a higher level of e. coli in their intestines than average people).
Bigger is certainly not better, esp when you're running a slow computer like mine at home. It cranks along and pauses like a faithful old dog! But if something is perceived to be bigger and shinier, than it certainly "must" be better!
I think the only program I've seen that kept old versions for sale was Corel, with CorelDraw. When CorelDraw7 came out, you could still buy 5 and 6, and 5 was bundled with Lexmark printers (at least here in Canada). Why not check out a college or university computer store? By the time Netscape Communicator came out, the UofC Microstore still had 2 versions on the shelf.
I have all these programs, and not one does it all
(and I'm by no means a newbie at these programs).
LViewPro eats jpegs for breakfast, and loads very fast. I use it primarily for compression, converting and cropping. PhotoShop5 handles layers beautifully - it's how I made plates for a Shockwave movie - while in CorelDraw, the object and layers is more complex and even mystifying.
Neither PS or CD lay lettering down cleaner than
NetSketch, and MS Paint is what I use to put pictures inside the hollowed out letters from Netsketch. If I could have all these things rolled into one graphics package, I would be so happy! But then, it would probably take forever to load - filters, plug-ins, preferences...so there you have it...
I also tried PSP and found it disappointing...but it was a trim little program nonetheless!
Unions are not worth the time and trouble.
I came from a traditional union, CUPE, since I used to work for the public library. It was $2 to join, and there was free meetings at pizza. The only good thing I can say about it is that the union DID get the city to give us a raise, and retrospective wages as well. I went two years w/o a raise!
OTOH, I had no health benefits and received 12% back in lieu of this. When they considered giving part timers benefits, only the full-timers could vote on the issue.
I think a union is a good idea...but only if it was something like the International Workers party or whatever it is. Something that's global, but not necessarily interfering.
Ever since I downloaded a 2600 emulator (our 2600 shorted out sometime around...gee...1993! Not bad, it outlasted a toaster or two!) I've been in heaven. I never thought I would get to play these old games again, esp Joust and Swordquest. What memories, late nights, popcorn, endless fights for the good joystick (the original broke too about a year before the console, we took the top off and punched the contacts...I've never found any other game/system to be so interesting nor FUN! Forget the blood and guts, just let me kill my brother's purple bird in Joust once more...!
I think people forget that there have been possibly hundreds of different ways to govern a group of people. Canada is a democracy, but has a
mixed economy. The US is a constitutionual republic (I think - izzat right?). Commonwealth countries are constitutional monarchies with the Queen as a figurehead. Democracy has different connotations for people in China, say. The thing is, whether it be democracy or communism, political systems don't come in a can and you can paint every country with it.
An enlightened despot back in the middle ages was the greatest thing for Europeans back then. Sure, there was no upward mobility, but the state and church were closely tied. People believed that their reward for all their toil would heavenly redemption and so forth.
Yeah...Brin's response was too sarcastic. Frankly, I don't know why people don't let Star Wars and Star Trek be. Don't ruin whatever meaning these shows have for people. I like *both*, tho I prefer Classic Trek...it's freakin apples and oranges, apples and oranges.
Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are dead. It was an awesome play, a Shakespearian version of Waiting for Godot (R&G are the two friends in Hamlet).