But if you are like me and like to use it like a book, to carry it with one hand with no bag when you walk short distances, to being sit comfortably on a couch with the laptop laid on ONE lap (because it's so small), etc, then 5 lbs vs. 2 lbs makes a lot of differences.
Regardless, speaking as a biologist, by placing anything that's warm on your lap for large portions of a day you're reducing your reproductive potential.
I've wondered about this. My laptop (12" G4 iBook) doesn't normally get hotter than 45C or so. Wouldn't taking a hot bath for an hour be just as bad? What about living in hot weather, like places where the temperature is above 45C? Wouldn't that mean that people who are exposing themselves to air that hot 24/7 would have to be infertile?
Just wondering. I sometimes like to stay in hot climates for months at a time. Should I be worried?;-)
In addition to the other very valid points that others replied with, your last example uses about 50% of my CPU time (on a new laptop I bought last year) for certain Flash operations. I have dozens of sites open. Who the hell are you to not only force a specific font on me using Flash (I have my browser use specific fonts for a reason) but to also think there is a valid reason to use a good portion of CPU time for navigation and banners? That's simply horrible design. And it's the reason why I have Flash disabled most of the time.
There are very good applications for Flash -- games and Flash video for example. Design isn't one of them.
Yes, here it's called "Plastilin" and it is the dominant brand here, or at least it was when I was a child. It always came in bricks or sticks rather than cans. The colors were darker than Play-Doh IIRC. Play Doh is very much a niche product here. And it was invented in 1880. Not sure why the creation of Play-Doh is so important.
One day every year the city receives problem waste from the inhabitants free of charge.
WTF? Are you saying that's not possible every single working day all day long for free?
There's the problem that many places in the U.S. have. Make it as or more convenient for people to dispose of 'problem waste' and there's no incentive to clog up your regular trash cans with it. It works here.
After this, people will chuck their cell phones into the nearest river, even more directly polluting the environment they tried to protect.
No idea where you live, but here (a big city in the EU) we don't (and I think are not allowed to) throw batteries in the trash. Instead we take them back to the store (they have boxes for that) or take them to 'hazardous waste' collection centers (many of them around, about a five-minute walk for me). Electronics and bigger stuff goes to garbage collection centers which are at most 5 km away from you; there are seperate containers for different kinds of trash, so recycling is easy for them (the one I go to is about 4 km away, takes me about ten minutes to get there with my bicycle and a trailer full of trash). And there's no incentive not to do it since it's free.
It's not hard. No need to hypothesize. Just travel.
There are many great examples of abuse in the civil courts, but I don't think the McDonalds coffee lawsuit is one of them.
It's still a good example of the absurdities of the American court system, and in fact I believe that many comments about this case come from non-American observers. I know more about the case than most people and it's still ridiculous. In many places coffee is meant to be served as hot as possible, and yes, it's your own fault if you scald yourself with it (you can drink very hot coffee, you just do it slowly).
I guess it all comes down to local standards; here we live with hot coffee and without the ubiquitous warning labels and we still manage to survive without suing each other for everything under the sun. I'd probably send the coffee back if it were as cold as McDonald's coffee.
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Which strange dialect are you talking about? Or are you just making stuff up? I would pronounce it "emm-err-deux".
I can say almost noone in Germany will be able to pronounce "Wii" correctly.
As a native German speaker living in a German-speaking country I'm pleased to say that this is utter nonsense. By all means, say "many people" or "most old people" if you have to but don't exaggerate like that. It's just not true anymore.
No, you detect when Opera uses an IE user agent string with "Opera" appended at the end. Just like the default IE user agent is Mozilla with a mention of IE, for similar reasons. When I "fake Opera as IE," i.e. I use an IE user agent string without "Opera," you tell me to use Firefox.
User agent strings simply shouldn't be used for anything important. They were designed for statistics, and that's the most they are good for.
Your users will have a reason why they use a particular browser, and often it's not because they're too lazy/dumb to install a "better" one.
Exactly. Apart from people who have to use IE at work, those of us who travel to countries where using your own computer is not an option (for lack of Wi-Fi access) are often forced to use internet cafes (where IE is almost always the only option).
This campaign is about as intelligent as the Spread Firefox campaign was in the beginning, with websites often telling me to stop using my insecure browser and use Firefox (I'm using Opera, which has been more secure than Firefox over the last couple of years).
Seems like some people are really considering recreating those icons. Why don't you let multiple users work on a couple of icons each and coordinate that or, if one person is really bored and actually does it all by himself, make him send them to you and share them so there aren't 5,000 people doing essentially the same thing independently.
Over here, where energy costs money and pollution is seen as something undesirable, old houses are made of pretty massive layers of bricks or concrete. New walls consist of even more massive bricks plus some type of insulating fiber plus a kind of insulating layer containing air.
I live in a very old house and the wall is, I'd guess, about 40 cm thick.
Wow, game websites wanting to look 'cool' instead of focusing on being legible? Who would have thought?
There are many badly designed sites out there. Linking to them as some sort of 'proof' doesn't really accomplish anything. Next thing you'll say is probably that Flash is the pinnacle of website design because it's used so often...
May I quote what you originally said: "If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly."
Bright fonts and dark backgrounds may be eye-catching but they make for seriously poor reading. It was you who focused on 'legible.' You didn't say 'good-looking,' which may be a matter of taste as you said, you said 'legible.' Find me a good daily newspaper that's printed white on black or even has a website that's like that.
> Really, the 'bright text on dark background' format is becoming nearly as common as the more traditional 'dark on bright'.
Thankfully that's far from true, one possible exception being MySpace.
Depends on where you live. I live in a city of ~1.6 million people. Firstly, I've never heard of anyone getting mugged in the center of the city. And there are plenty of parks here, so that would cover your kids' sandbox needs.
And if you so desire you can live about 10 km from downtown in a house with an attached garden and your mentioned quiet streets, about a ten-minute subway ride from the center.
I'll give you iRiver. Sadly they have a rather poor presence here. I couldn't buy them right now, even from Amazon; I'd have to order from shady foreign companies and wait a couple of days.
I mostly buy locally or from vendors I know or Amazon; a bad or even malicious vendor can really delay warranty claims (warranty is at least one year here). We even have the right to return mail order stuff within two weeks for a full refund in the EU but again, too many scammers out there. They just go bankrupt, never to be seen again.
> I'm pretty sure the iRiver players do all that stuff.
No FM tuner. At least not in the sub EUR 200 range.
> The Samsung Yepp does that stuff.
Special software needed.
> It looks like the Creative MuVo2 FM does most of that
I have one of those. Extraordinarily poor quality; the headphone jack is a design failure (it has to break sooner or later), no recording to MP3, very poor radio and recording quality, terrible humming sound when the backlight is active.
> I'm sure there are others.
Doesn't look too good, at least in Europe. I looked around extensively when I had to replace that terrible Creative MuVo.
> I'm pretty sure the iRiver players do all that stuff.
No FM tuner. At least not in the sub EUR 200 range.
> The Samsung Yepp does that stuff.
Special software needed.
> It looks like the Creative MuVo2 FM does most of that
I have one of those. Extraordinarily poor quality; the headphone jack is a design failure (it has to break sooner or later), no recording to MP3, very poor radio and recording quality, terrible humming sound when the backlight is active.
> I'm sure there are others.
Doesn't look too good, at least in Europe. I looked around extensively when I had to replace that terrible Creative MuVo.
As far as I could tell, there was NOTHING fancy about the player.
The Trekstor iBeat Organix is nice and has a couple of features that the iPod doesn't have: FM tuner, OGG playback, built-in microphone, FM and line-in recording straight to MP3 with the bitrate of your choice and the line-in can be used for a second pair of headphones. And it has great battery life and doesn't need iTunes to work. Plus the OLED display looks nice IMO.
3) Bullshit. What you call "liberal" is an extremely disgusting bastardization of the word mostly used in American politics. And "moderate" by itself is devoid of any meaning. But, in your words: "perhaps your (sic!) too stupid to understand that."
Based on your comments here I sincerely hope English isn't your first language.
Americans. What can you expect. (Not an ad hominem, just summarizing an argument.)
So basically you are pissed that the politicians are acknowledging something that is understood by anyone with a basic understanding of government?
Great ad hominem. That really validates your statements, doesn't it? Note that you tried to explain my statement that you quoted but did not even try to refute it. Probably for good reasons.
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But if you are like me and like to use it like a book, to carry it with one hand with no bag when you walk short distances, to being sit comfortably on a couch with the laptop laid on ONE lap (because it's so small), etc, then 5 lbs vs. 2 lbs makes a lot of differences.
How many laps do you have? Just asking...Regardless, speaking as a biologist, by placing anything that's warm on your lap for large portions of a day you're reducing your reproductive potential.
I've wondered about this. My laptop (12" G4 iBook) doesn't normally get hotter than 45C or so. Wouldn't taking a hot bath for an hour be just as bad? What about living in hot weather, like places where the temperature is above 45C? Wouldn't that mean that people who are exposing themselves to air that hot 24/7 would have to be infertile?Just wondering. I sometimes like to stay in hot climates for months at a time. Should I be worried?
And why does Slashcode strip my degree signs?
In addition to the other very valid points that others replied with, your last example uses about 50% of my CPU time (on a new laptop I bought last year) for certain Flash operations. I have dozens of sites open. Who the hell are you to not only force a specific font on me using Flash (I have my browser use specific fonts for a reason) but to also think there is a valid reason to use a good portion of CPU time for navigation and banners? That's simply horrible design. And it's the reason why I have Flash disabled most of the time.
There are very good applications for Flash -- games and Flash video for example. Design isn't one of them.
Yes, here it's called "Plastilin" and it is the dominant brand here, or at least it was when I was a child. It always came in bricks or sticks rather than cans. The colors were darker than Play-Doh IIRC. Play Doh is very much a niche product here. And it was invented in 1880. Not sure why the creation of Play-Doh is so important.
How do you pluralize 'Lego'?
'Lego bricks.' They're discouraging people from saying 'Legos.'One day every year the city receives problem waste from the inhabitants free of charge.
WTF? Are you saying that's not possible every single working day all day long for free?There's the problem that many places in the U.S. have. Make it as or more convenient for people to dispose of 'problem waste' and there's no incentive to clog up your regular trash cans with it. It works here.
After this, people will chuck their cell phones into the nearest river, even more directly polluting the environment they tried to protect.
No idea where you live, but here (a big city in the EU) we don't (and I think are not allowed to) throw batteries in the trash. Instead we take them back to the store (they have boxes for that) or take them to 'hazardous waste' collection centers (many of them around, about a five-minute walk for me). Electronics and bigger stuff goes to garbage collection centers which are at most 5 km away from you; there are seperate containers for different kinds of trash, so recycling is easy for them (the one I go to is about 4 km away, takes me about ten minutes to get there with my bicycle and a trailer full of trash). And there's no incentive not to do it since it's free.It's not hard. No need to hypothesize. Just travel.
There are many great examples of abuse in the civil courts, but I don't think the McDonalds coffee lawsuit is one of them.
It's still a good example of the absurdities of the American court system, and in fact I believe that many comments about this case come from non-American observers. I know more about the case than most people and it's still ridiculous. In many places coffee is meant to be served as hot as possible, and yes, it's your own fault if you scald yourself with it (you can drink very hot coffee, you just do it slowly).I guess it all comes down to local standards; here we live with hot coffee and without the ubiquitous warning labels and we still manage to survive without suing each other for everything under the sun. I'd probably send the coffee back if it were as cold as McDonald's coffee.
Which strange dialect are you talking about? Or are you just making stuff up? I would pronounce it "emm-err-deux".
I can say almost noone in Germany will be able to pronounce "Wii" correctly.
As a native German speaker living in a German-speaking country I'm pleased to say that this is utter nonsense. By all means, say "many people" or "most old people" if you have to but don't exaggerate like that. It's just not true anymore.I also detect when Opera is faking itself as IE
No, you detect when Opera uses an IE user agent string with "Opera" appended at the end. Just like the default IE user agent is Mozilla with a mention of IE, for similar reasons. When I "fake Opera as IE," i.e. I use an IE user agent string without "Opera," you tell me to use Firefox.User agent strings simply shouldn't be used for anything important. They were designed for statistics, and that's the most they are good for.
Your users will have a reason why they use a particular browser, and often it's not because they're too lazy/dumb to install a "better" one.
Exactly. Apart from people who have to use IE at work, those of us who travel to countries where using your own computer is not an option (for lack of Wi-Fi access) are often forced to use internet cafes (where IE is almost always the only option).This campaign is about as intelligent as the Spread Firefox campaign was in the beginning, with websites often telling me to stop using my insecure browser and use Firefox (I'm using Opera, which has been more secure than Firefox over the last couple of years).
Well, I would hope that most people know that a firefox is a red panda and has absolutely nothing to do with foxes.
Horrible latency and CPU usage.
Seems like some people are really considering recreating those icons. Why don't you let multiple users work on a couple of icons each and coordinate that or, if one person is really bored and actually does it all by himself, make him send them to you and share them so there aren't 5,000 people doing essentially the same thing independently.
Over here, where energy costs money and pollution is seen as something undesirable, old houses are made of pretty massive layers of bricks or concrete. New walls consist of even more massive bricks plus some type of insulating fiber plus a kind of insulating layer containing air.
I live in a very old house and the wall is, I'd guess, about 40 cm thick.
> You mean like this?
Wow, game websites wanting to look 'cool' instead of focusing on being legible? Who would have thought?
There are many badly designed sites out there. Linking to them as some sort of 'proof' doesn't really accomplish anything. Next thing you'll say is probably that Flash is the pinnacle of website design because it's used so often...
May I quote what you originally said: "If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly."
Bright fonts and dark backgrounds may be eye-catching but they make for seriously poor reading. It was you who focused on 'legible.' You didn't say 'good-looking,' which may be a matter of taste as you said, you said 'legible.' Find me a good daily newspaper that's printed white on black or even has a website that's like that.
> Really, the 'bright text on dark background' format is becoming nearly as common as the more traditional 'dark on bright'.
Thankfully that's far from true, one possible exception being MySpace.
Depends on where you live. I live in a city of ~1.6 million people. Firstly, I've never heard of anyone getting mugged in the center of the city. And there are plenty of parks here, so that would cover your kids' sandbox needs.
And if you so desire you can live about 10 km from downtown in a house with an attached garden and your mentioned quiet streets, about a ten-minute subway ride from the center.
I'm not in the US, though.
Your website requires me to disable images or override your CSS to be remotely legible. Don't use dark backgrounds.
I'll give you iRiver. Sadly they have a rather poor presence here. I couldn't buy them right now, even from Amazon; I'd have to order from shady foreign companies and wait a couple of days.
I mostly buy locally or from vendors I know or Amazon; a bad or even malicious vendor can really delay warranty claims (warranty is at least one year here). We even have the right to return mail order stuff within two weeks for a full refund in the EU but again, too many scammers out there. They just go bankrupt, never to be seen again.
Thanks for your thoughts.
> I'm pretty sure the iRiver players do all that stuff.
No FM tuner. At least not in the sub EUR 200 range.
> The Samsung Yepp does that stuff.
Special software needed.
> It looks like the Creative MuVo2 FM does most of that
I have one of those. Extraordinarily poor quality; the headphone jack is a design failure (it has to break sooner or later), no recording to MP3, very poor radio and recording quality, terrible humming sound when the backlight is active.
> I'm sure there are others.
Doesn't look too good, at least in Europe. I looked around extensively when I had to replace that terrible Creative MuVo.
> I'm pretty sure the iRiver players do all that stuff. No FM tuner. At least not in the sub EUR 200 range. > The Samsung Yepp does that stuff. Special software needed. > It looks like the Creative MuVo2 FM does most of that I have one of those. Extraordinarily poor quality; the headphone jack is a design failure (it has to break sooner or later), no recording to MP3, very poor radio and recording quality, terrible humming sound when the backlight is active. > I'm sure there are others. Doesn't look too good, at least in Europe. I looked around extensively when I had to replace that terrible Creative MuVo.
As far as I could tell, there was NOTHING fancy about the player.
The Trekstor iBeat Organix is nice and has a couple of features that the iPod doesn't have: FM tuner, OGG playback, built-in microphone, FM and line-in recording straight to MP3 with the bitrate of your choice and the line-in can be used for a second pair of headphones. And it has great battery life and doesn't need iTunes to work. Plus the OLED display looks nice IMO.1) Not true, check what you quoted.
2) Not true, check what you wrote.
3) Bullshit. What you call "liberal" is an extremely disgusting bastardization of the word mostly used in American politics. And "moderate" by itself is devoid of any meaning. But, in your words: "perhaps your (sic!) too stupid to understand that."
Based on your comments here I sincerely hope English isn't your first language.
Americans. What can you expect. (Not an ad hominem, just summarizing an argument.)
So basically you are pissed that the politicians are acknowledging something that is understood by anyone with a basic understanding of government?
Great ad hominem. That really validates your statements, doesn't it? Note that you tried to explain my statement that you quoted but did not even try to refute it. Probably for good reasons.