Who cares about the speakers? They're platform neutral. If you must have high quality sound, you get the bet digital audio speakers you can afford and a sound card with a fiber digital out.
Of course, if you don't have the money, then you get the 10$ pair of speakers from Compusa and be perfectly content.
I see your logic for admiring who made the startup sound. But it doesn't neccicarily follow that "If they pay that much attention to the starting beep, imagine what they do with the rest of the system."
Art is easily outsourced to proven designers. All you have to do is throw money at them. Good tech takes a lot of work and research to do right.
And I'm still trying to sell my Mac mini, which is 1 month old, for more than 2/3rds of what I paid for it.
"I'm imagining. And then I'm remembering that almost no class of users remembers more than a small handful of icons on a toolbar, even when they're displayed all the time a particular application is in use, so I figure the chances of that actually helping many people on the keyboard are pretty slim..."
I think the only way to really tell would be to have a few prototypes made and tested by user groups.
bah. You kids and your bandwidth hogging HTML pages. I actually visited the Mosaic offices when they were working on the first internet browser. "Pictures? You know how long it takes to download pictures over a modem? And look how much space those markups are taking up."
Yeah, if only we could go back and live in 1993 forever man.
Wow, what a great link! I've always wanted to work with my hands. Gunsmithing looks interesting too. I wonder how hard it is to build a gun from scratch?
"That's exactly the opposite of what I'm suggesting. That's what happens right now, because of the system we have which promotes only long work hours, and not productivity."
Productivity is hard to measure. Other metrics will tend be used simply because they're easier to use. Even if they are useless.
Fortunately, in the US it's easy to start a business. If you can use your employees more efectively, then you'll probably thrive.
Unlike France.
Actually the average life expectancy of the kalahari bushmen is about 70 years, higher than many civizilized nations.
It's also higher than the vast majority of pre-ag cultures. Do you honestly believe that the life expectancy for hunter-gatherers is 70 years?
"Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
"Apple's success in OS development is in no small amount tied to their control of the hardware it runs on; don't expect that to go away anytime soon."
How do you know this? How do you know they wouldn't become wildly successful by implementing a strategy like WinNT, where there was an approved hardware list?
Even if a study were to exist, you have to take into context the nature of the study. For example, to which end is the productivity rated? Is this the productivity of individual workers on a scale of work done per time unit, or is it some ratio esitimator of productivity per dollar spent, because they're quite different.
The studies I've seen have been "How many mistakes do you make because you're tired"
More mistakes bad.
France has enacted a law dicatating that 35 hours is the maximum time one should spend working in a week.
While they intended the law to promote hiring new employees, they found that companies resisted and instead demanded higher time unit production quotas. Indeed an interesting result.
Due to the socialist nature of France and Europe in general, it's very difficult and expensive to fire someone. So the rule is "Don't hire anyone if you don't absolutely have to."
Note that our average work week has been shortening since the 13th century.
Really? When people used to work 9 to 5, they used to be paid a salary. Now you work 8 to 5, with an hour off for lunch. Looks like they squeezed an hour of work out of everyone.
This is definitely a good thing, although I still don't think it's enough. USA and Canada are still pretty high on the list of time spent at work.
I have never seen a comprehensive listing of work hours sorted by country that included the US and Canada. Link please.
Paul Lafargue's Right to be Lazy (1883) suggests an optimal workday of 2 to 3 hours per day.
Nearly all pre-modernized tribes peoples live with a considerably shorter work week. The Kalahari Bushmen, for example, work on average 12-20 hours per week.
Life is simple when you just have forage for food. Of course, when food becomes scarce, your "Hours per week" will go up a bit.
Now the Bushment also don't have TV, computers, cars, planes, etc. But then again they don't have Guns, or Heroine either. And I suspect if a study were done on their happiness or contentment in life, it would probably rate _much_ higher than the average North American.
Yes. Ignorance IS bliss. You know what else they don't have? Dentists. Doctors that will keep your wife from dying in labor. Birth control. Peniclin (Boy that wound looks infected. Sucks to be you.) Alchohol. And that's just the medical stuff. How about protection from the elements? Weatherproofing your house. Or just enough protection so you don't look like you're 50 by the time you're 30.
How about a freakin book. Do they like to crack open a Steven King novel with all that free time they're not working?
I'm not saying we should trade it all in for the life of a Bushman, but there has to be a balance. We've got the highest rates of mental disease in the world, we lock up more of our people and spend more money on incarceration per person than a lot of the countries in the world combined.
That's because the US can afford to. Do you really think the US has a higher incarceration rate because of the amount of work they do? As opposed to someplace like Japan?
If we were really getting paid for the service of being available at work, even while we're not being productive, then we wouldn't feel guilty when we get caught reading slashdot. We wouldn't immediately switch away from minesweeper when we see the boss walking down the hall.
The workplace makes us feel like we should be productive even though there are many times when productivity is simply not going to happen.
Heh. Do you realize you're suggesting that people get paid no matter how productive they are?
We're tied to this 40 hour work week (which is often much hi
Slashdot Mirror
Speakers?
Who cares about the speakers? They're platform neutral. If you must have high quality sound, you get the bet digital audio speakers you can afford and a sound card with a fiber digital out.
Of course, if you don't have the money, then you get the 10$ pair of speakers from Compusa and be perfectly content.
I see your logic for admiring who made the startup sound. But it doesn't neccicarily follow that "If they pay that much attention to the starting beep, imagine what they do with the rest of the system."
Art is easily outsourced to proven designers. All you have to do is throw money at them. Good tech takes a lot of work and research to do right.
And I'm still trying to sell my Mac mini, which is 1 month old, for more than 2/3rds of what I paid for it.
"I'm imagining. And then I'm remembering that almost no class of users remembers more than a small handful of icons on a toolbar, even when they're displayed all the time a particular application is in use, so I figure the chances of that actually helping many people on the keyboard are pretty slim..."
I think the only way to really tell would be to have a few prototypes made and tested by user groups.
Beacon-corrected?
Doesn't that mean there's a local antenna who's position is known *exactly* and the GPS is using that as a reference?
Not too useful in undeveloped countries.
Are you kidding?
Imagine that every program would have it's commands displayed by icons on the keyboard. Right now the keyboard has a bunch of "Variable" keys.
Specific function keys would be awesome.
I don't see a price anywhere for the keyboard though. And it looks cool, but ergonomics is not just a buzzword.
Happy ending?! Man, what kind of crappy life do you lead to have that be the happy ending?
Spoiler:
Did you just not notice the extinction of the human race. Or that the one person he loved only lived for a day?
Geez!
bah. You kids and your bandwidth hogging HTML pages. I actually visited the Mosaic offices when they were working on the first internet browser. "Pictures? You know how long it takes to download pictures over a modem? And look how much space those markups are taking up."
Yeah, if only we could go back and live in 1993 forever man.
So have it heated.
If you can afford a pure gold toilet, you can afford to have it heated 24/7
Flash memory cards are flat and cheap. I'll have to look up the word ubiquitous before saying they're that.
You don't need that much space if you're keeping everything on a floppy. You can get 64MB solid state flash memory cards for 12$ each.
I believe solid state memory is more hardy than floppies.
Can't you embed a zip file in the .doc file?
.zip to .doc work?
Does renaming the
Wow, what a great link! I've always wanted to work with my hands. Gunsmithing looks interesting too. I wonder how hard it is to build a gun from scratch?
"I don't know, get a Japanese manga artist to draw it."
I suppose a Penguin being violated by a tenticle monster would do the trick.
You would hear about any problems really, really quickly. Unless the user enjoys that kind of thing.
Productivity is hard to measure. Other metrics will tend be used simply because they're easier to use. Even if they are useless.
Fortunately, in the US it's easy to start a business. If you can use your employees more efectively, then you'll probably thrive.
Unlike France.
It's also higher than the vast majority of pre-ag cultures. Do you honestly believe that the life expectancy for hunter-gatherers is 70 years?
"Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
http://www.haveyoursay.org/post-8723.html
And this is not for Africa, this is for America.
And I'm not crazy, I'm in IT. You take work where you can get it.
"Apple's success in OS development is in no small amount tied to their control of the hardware it runs on; don't expect that to go away anytime soon."
How do you know this? How do you know they wouldn't become wildly successful by implementing a strategy like WinNT, where there was an approved hardware list?
The studies I've seen have been "How many mistakes do you make because you're tired"
More mistakes bad.
Due to the socialist nature of France and Europe in general, it's very difficult and expensive to fire someone. So the rule is "Don't hire anyone if you don't absolutely have to."
Really? When people used to work 9 to 5, they used to be paid a salary. Now you work 8 to 5, with an hour off for lunch. Looks like they squeezed an hour of work out of everyone.
I have never seen a comprehensive listing of work hours sorted by country that included the US and Canada. Link please.
Life is simple when you just have forage for food. Of course, when food becomes scarce, your "Hours per week" will go up a bit.
Yes. Ignorance IS bliss. You know what else they don't have? Dentists. Doctors that will keep your wife from dying in labor. Birth control. Peniclin (Boy that wound looks infected. Sucks to be you.) Alchohol. And that's just the medical stuff. How about protection from the elements? Weatherproofing your house. Or just enough protection so you don't look like you're 50 by the time you're 30.
How about a freakin book. Do they like to crack open a Steven King novel with all that free time they're not working?
That's because the US can afford to. Do you really think the US has a higher incarceration rate because of the amount of work they do? As opposed to someplace like Japan?
Heh. Do you realize you're suggesting that people get paid no matter how productive they are?
What do you mean "We don't know..."
It's hard. It takes an enormous amount of energy to produce, a nuclear accelerator, and a storage method that is a non-trivial problem.
Last time I checked, the efficiences of making antimatter are very, very low. Even if you design the equipment to be dedicated to making the stuff.
And it's a physics problem. I don't have any links, but the theoretical max yield for producing antimatter is very low.
Put down an array of space based solar panels. Use it to drive the nuclear accelerator, to make antimatter.
For the fingerprint scanner here at work, they have us do two fingers. One on each hand.
I'll assume that a good iris scanner will be done on both eyes. I'm not sure how laser eye surgery would effect this though.
I haven't checked, but I'd be shocked if it didn't. The mini is just a G4.
If they're a "Hardware company" why do they charge so much for OS/X?
You would think they would almost give it away to promote all that great hardware.
Uh, then why did I get a copy of OS 9 with my new Mac Mini? You are using the term "Legacy Support" in a way I'm not familiar with.
That's funny. I bought a Mac and its seriously underwhelmed me.
Maybe you mean buy the 2000$ Mac? I'm already trying to sell my Mini and no one wants it unless I knock off 1/3 of it's buying price.
Does inventing problems count?
Ahem, some of us can't afford to blow 20$ just to see a movie. (I like to bring a date when I can)
What market do you think netflix is aimed at anyway?
I've heard, back when people had ice delivered to them, they would store it by covering it in sawdust.