Designers and trade show people don't need their production rigs; they just need demo rigs. A small laptop (or real desktop for the game demos) with a big external display is better suited for these situations than a laptop with a big(ish) display. If you need a big display and you're using a laptop, requiring the audience to look over your shoulder... you're doing it wrong.:)
That itinerant programmer and CAD user presumably don't change offices daily (i.e. carrying it around all the time), and could leave a desktop and display in place for the duration of an assignment. Sure, a close-and-carry unit is more convenient for the move, but having a better rig for the much greater time spent using it seems like it should be more important.
"In fact if they made a 21" macbook pro artists and video editing people would be all over it."
Some. Not me. It'd be neither fish nor fowl: too big to be portable, too laptoppy to be something I'd want to spend a lot of time using. I want my display(s) "up here" in my line of sight, not "down there" attached to the keyboard. I like to be able to nudge my keyboard to a more comfortable angle as I shift in my chair without the display having to go along with it. The fundamental design of a laptop is just bad ergonomics: a compromise to allow you to work away from your office or studio. I don't understand why people buy such a device when they intend to leave it on a desk most of the time.
Instead of waiting for a 21" MacBoook (which I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would veto on the grounds that it looks silly, if for no other reason), why not buy a 21" monitor today, and a 13" MacBook? It's not as if a 21" laptop will be easy to carry around in the first place, so the fact that it's a two-part system is hardly a great disadvantage.
A thin client is not "a very small desktop computer". It's a 21st century dumb terminal that you use to connect to a server which acts as a real computer.
A laptop + tablet would be a much better solution for me. Use each of them independently when you want something lighter, or pair them for dual screens.
But frankly, anything less than a couple of 19-inch monitors is too small for my office/studio uses, and there's no way I'm going to carry even one physical display that size around, no matter how elegantly they package it. At a desk: I use a desktop. A laptop is for using in places that aren't your office; I don't expect it to match those capabilities. A netbook or tablet is for keeping with you so you have something all the time, size/functionality be damned. Each has different uses, and a dual-screen laptop is like a motorcycle with a roof: kinda missing the point. The whole idea of trying to carry your office around with you all the time has never really made sense to me. What profession actually requires that?
"Growing the economy" doesn't mean "doing new things". It means creating more jobs, more goods produced, more money circulated, etc. You only need that if a) there's a current shortage of jobs/goods/etc, or b) the population is growing.
The pre-requisite to sending girls to school in most of these societies is giving the family the financial security that they can risk losing that girl as either a worker (e.g. on the family farm) or as a future source of dowry income.
"It's likely that, in 100 years, we will be wringing our hands over how to continue to grow the economy in the face of a shrinking global population."
Why? The only reason we need to continually "grow the economy" is because the population is growing. If we had a stable population, we could have a stable economy and relax a bit.
There's nothing immoral about saying people should stop having so many babies. Not even Catholics are opposed to it in principle (though they seem intent on making it difficult). The question is how to accomplish it.
I think we've seen that China's approach (a heavy-handed "one child" policy) has serious problems. I'm not a big fan of forced sterilization, either. The standard Western approach to discouraging things we don't want to ban (tax large families) is something that the Religious Right the Fiscal Right and the Social Welfare Left would unite in opposition to.
But for this problem, it isn't even the US and Europe that are to blame; their current population growth is ecologically sustainable for the foreseeable future. The problem lies in the "developing world", where people over-reproduce for economic (and to a lesser extent, cultural) reasons. There's a lot of things that go into it, but put simply: it's because they are poor. So the way to fix (most of ) the over-reproduction problem is to fix that. Easy peasy.
Not related to the main topic, but spinning off on a tangent:
My grandfather was, at various times in his career, a teacher and a professor of Education. As such, he was a member of the state teacher's union, an affiliation which continued into his retirement, because that's part of what being a union member is about. When he died (as grandfathers have a tendency to do), my father continued to receive his mail, because he'd asked the USPS to do that. For some of he union mailings, my father (not having any interest in dealing a union which no longer had anything to offer his late father) took the unopened mailings and gave them the return-to-sender treatment, writing "DECEASED" on the envelope. It didn't take long before we started receiving mailings from the union, addressed with the same street number and zip code, but the name of the city change to "Deceased".
Unlike my father, I'm a supporter of the right to collective bargaining, and appreciate the things that a union can do for the individual worker. But sometimes... ya gotta wonder if there are any lights on at the office.
I spend a whole-number-percentage of my work week advising users to select passwords that fall into the kinda-weak range, ones that meet the letter - but not the spirit - of our complexity requirements. For example, our company policy requires a combination of caps, lower, and something else. Rather than encouraging users to use a "strong" password such as d3K4jmS, I encourage them to pick the name of a city at random from a map, capitalize it, and put a digit on the end. Even though Munich7 is objectively lousier the earlier example, there is at least a 1-in-10 chance that they will not be calling me back within the next week asking me to reset their password because they've forgotten it. If I actually encouraged these people to come up with a password that is difficult to guess or unlikely to survive a dictionary attack, they will a) forget ir, or b) put it on a post-it note.
P.S. Never allow your users to use a password manager or check the "remember my password for me" box. It only ensures that they'll forget the password and waste the time of your support staff resetting it. Make them type the password every time they access the system, or they will forget it. Even the few with a functioning hippocampus.
According to the clerk at a convenience store near my house, there is someone who looks just like me and comes in all the time to buy cases of Bud Light. He commented on it because I was purchasing a six-pack of a local craft brew, instead of "the usual". Granted, the consequences aren't quite as harsh as being misidentified as a chronic traffic violator, but being mistaken for a Budweiser fan is almost as offensive.
Netflix is showing signs of not-quite-competence all over the place. Not-so-bright UI design on the new web site, bad usability testing on the new design, and inept PR spin "all our testers liked it, what's wrong with you?" in response to the complaints. Now there's this huge price hike that they're trying to spin as "lowest prices ever" (as if we wouldn't notice that only applies to much less service), and this "let them stop drinking latte" nonsense. If I'm ever in a position again to review job applicants, and I see a significant stint at Netflix on someone's job history, I'm going to have assume that they didn't know how to do their job, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, the license number on my car is "visible from space" if you use the right satellite. Can we retire this phrase now?
You again? I don't normally pay much attention to usernames here, but you're a real dork, aren't you?
Those are... sorry: were already paid for.
"Gyros and batteries wear out"
That certainly explains the discomfort I felt last night after eating a week-old Greek pita sandwich and a couple of AAs I found in my desk drawer.
It's a bit like the tides, Mister O'Reilly.
The Mac Mini is essentially a laptop with the display and keyboard removed, then refolded into a different shape (thicker, smaller footprint).
Designers and trade show people don't need their production rigs; they just need demo rigs. A small laptop (or real desktop for the game demos) with a big external display is better suited for these situations than a laptop with a big(ish) display. If you need a big display and you're using a laptop, requiring the audience to look over your shoulder... you're doing it wrong. :)
That itinerant programmer and CAD user presumably don't change offices daily (i.e. carrying it around all the time), and could leave a desktop and display in place for the duration of an assignment. Sure, a close-and-carry unit is more convenient for the move, but having a better rig for the much greater time spent using it seems like it should be more important.
"In fact if they made a 21" macbook pro artists and video editing people would be all over it."
Some. Not me. It'd be neither fish nor fowl: too big to be portable, too laptoppy to be something I'd want to spend a lot of time using. I want my display(s) "up here" in my line of sight, not "down there" attached to the keyboard. I like to be able to nudge my keyboard to a more comfortable angle as I shift in my chair without the display having to go along with it. The fundamental design of a laptop is just bad ergonomics: a compromise to allow you to work away from your office or studio. I don't understand why people buy such a device when they intend to leave it on a desk most of the time.
Instead of waiting for a 21" MacBoook (which I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would veto on the grounds that it looks silly, if for no other reason), why not buy a 21" monitor today, and a 13" MacBook? It's not as if a 21" laptop will be easy to carry around in the first place, so the fact that it's a two-part system is hardly a great disadvantage.
A thin client is not "a very small desktop computer". It's a 21st century dumb terminal that you use to connect to a server which acts as a real computer.
They've worked all of this out on Gallifrey.
A laptop + tablet would be a much better solution for me. Use each of them independently when you want something lighter, or pair them for dual screens.
But frankly, anything less than a couple of 19-inch monitors is too small for my office/studio uses, and there's no way I'm going to carry even one physical display that size around, no matter how elegantly they package it. At a desk: I use a desktop. A laptop is for using in places that aren't your office; I don't expect it to match those capabilities. A netbook or tablet is for keeping with you so you have something all the time, size/functionality be damned. Each has different uses, and a dual-screen laptop is like a motorcycle with a roof: kinda missing the point. The whole idea of trying to carry your office around with you all the time has never really made sense to me. What profession actually requires that?
"Growing the economy" doesn't mean "doing new things". It means creating more jobs, more goods produced, more money circulated, etc. You only need that if a) there's a current shortage of jobs/goods/etc, or b) the population is growing.
"I don't accept your premise that it's a widely-held assumption"
Then you're not just out of touch with the general public, you're out of touch with reality. Thanks for stopping in.
And here we have an example of the pot calling the kettle psychotic.
I was challenging a widely-held assumption, not asking for someone to give a tired rant about the banking system.
"Not everyone finds it to be worrying per se."
Note: It isn't necessary to provide equal time to ideology-driven-"scientists". They have their own web sites and news channels.
The pre-requisite to sending girls to school in most of these societies is giving the family the financial security that they can risk losing that girl as either a worker (e.g. on the family farm) or as a future source of dowry income.
"It's likely that, in 100 years, we will be wringing our hands over how to continue to grow the economy in the face of a shrinking global population."
Why? The only reason we need to continually "grow the economy" is because the population is growing. If we had a stable population, we could have a stable economy and relax a bit.
No need for that; I'll die of natural causes with no offspring before we rich critical population levels. :p
There's nothing immoral about saying people should stop having so many babies. Not even Catholics are opposed to it in principle (though they seem intent on making it difficult). The question is how to accomplish it.
I think we've seen that China's approach (a heavy-handed "one child" policy) has serious problems. I'm not a big fan of forced sterilization, either. The standard Western approach to discouraging things we don't want to ban (tax large families) is something that the Religious Right the Fiscal Right and the Social Welfare Left would unite in opposition to.
But for this problem, it isn't even the US and Europe that are to blame; their current population growth is ecologically sustainable for the foreseeable future. The problem lies in the "developing world", where people over-reproduce for economic (and to a lesser extent, cultural) reasons. There's a lot of things that go into it, but put simply: it's because they are poor. So the way to fix (most of ) the over-reproduction problem is to fix that. Easy peasy.
Not related to the main topic, but spinning off on a tangent:
My grandfather was, at various times in his career, a teacher and a professor of Education. As such, he was a member of the state teacher's union, an affiliation which continued into his retirement, because that's part of what being a union member is about. When he died (as grandfathers have a tendency to do), my father continued to receive his mail, because he'd asked the USPS to do that. For some of he union mailings, my father (not having any interest in dealing a union which no longer had anything to offer his late father) took the unopened mailings and gave them the return-to-sender treatment, writing "DECEASED" on the envelope. It didn't take long before we started receiving mailings from the union, addressed with the same street number and zip code, but the name of the city change to "Deceased".
Unlike my father, I'm a supporter of the right to collective bargaining, and appreciate the things that a union can do for the individual worker. But sometimes... ya gotta wonder if there are any lights on at the office.
I spend a whole-number-percentage of my work week advising users to select passwords that fall into the kinda-weak range, ones that meet the letter - but not the spirit - of our complexity requirements. For example, our company policy requires a combination of caps, lower, and something else. Rather than encouraging users to use a "strong" password such as d3K4jmS, I encourage them to pick the name of a city at random from a map, capitalize it, and put a digit on the end. Even though Munich7 is objectively lousier the earlier example, there is at least a 1-in-10 chance that they will not be calling me back within the next week asking me to reset their password because they've forgotten it. If I actually encouraged these people to come up with a password that is difficult to guess or unlikely to survive a dictionary attack, they will a) forget ir, or b) put it on a post-it note.
P.S. Never allow your users to use a password manager or check the "remember my password for me" box. It only ensures that they'll forget the password and waste the time of your support staff resetting it. Make them type the password every time they access the system, or they will forget it. Even the few with a functioning hippocampus.
According to the clerk at a convenience store near my house, there is someone who looks just like me and comes in all the time to buy cases of Bud Light. He commented on it because I was purchasing a six-pack of a local craft brew, instead of "the usual". Granted, the consequences aren't quite as harsh as being misidentified as a chronic traffic violator, but being mistaken for a Budweiser fan is almost as offensive.
I've suspected this since Gary Coleman and Emmanuel Lewis were first detected in the 1980s.
They all post as Anonymous Coward, all the time. It's like a blindfolded sex party.
Netflix is showing signs of not-quite-competence all over the place. Not-so-bright UI design on the new web site, bad usability testing on the new design, and inept PR spin "all our testers liked it, what's wrong with you?" in response to the complaints. Now there's this huge price hike that they're trying to spin as "lowest prices ever" (as if we wouldn't notice that only applies to much less service), and this "let them stop drinking latte" nonsense. If I'm ever in a position again to review job applicants, and I see a significant stint at Netflix on someone's job history, I'm going to have assume that they didn't know how to do their job, either.