Yeah, I gotta quit wading around in the Twitter during meetings. Not can I now not find the original hoax-claim, I'm seeing the Kotaku article indicating that it's just so, so, so much better than a hoax -- yeah, really at a loss as to how this could get better. But I am willing to wait and see, yeah.
I'm enjoying the hell out of mine (right now, in fact), but I'm mystified by the lack of appropriate cases, of all things. Hope you got a chance to pick one up wherever you are. Seattle's fresh out.
That update was released in February and Microsoft released some numbers earlier this month on what happened after that. So...um...yeah. Probably the closest the world will come to hearing Redmond admit that Autorun was un chien méchant.
Don't discount that plump aftermarket battery -- I bought one for my Pre and love it. It adds about 4mm to the dept of the thing and actually gives it a really contour in the, uh, palm. Bonus feature: No more smudgy battery cover! (Yeah, also not Touchstone, but I wasn't in love with the inductive stuff...)
Everything the AC above said -- terrific interface, great notifications, multitasking, freedom of apps-catalog choice -- it's all true. I'll grant that I was already a big fan of Matias Duarte's interface work, but the Pre just...makes sense. Damn shame the Sprint marketing campaign didn't; I've seen the more recent ad with the cute girleen shoe-shopping and wondered if things would have gone differently for the Pre if the first brand "face" had been her and not that spooky ginger lady.
Nope, not gonna; if you don't understand the difference between article structures and weighted lists, son, I'm not giving you my card as a cheat sheet. Also not leaving my five-digit Slashdot ID at "the reception" (ooh, is there cake?!) either -- and you're lucky I didn't simply identify Schilling as a pitcher for a Boston-based Yankees farm team. Go Rockies.
(Love the rest of the suggestions, everyone else, and am genuinely embarrassed that I left off the entire Futurama crew; this page was after all sitting in my research stack for the duration. One more that no one seems to have noted here so far, BTW: Jenny McCarthy. She was on the list for the medical-inquiry section for her autism work; when the inevitable editing-down process began, she was alas cut.) Thanks for reading the piece!
Important to clarify the situation re Net radio's request to Congress -- they are in fact asking that rates be rolled back to previously agreed up per-station rates, rather then using this new per-track-per-listener formulation. They're certainly not asking for a "zero royalty rate," though it would in fact be fairer. (And over-the-air stations, frankly, should have been fighting for the Net radio stations' zero-royalty rates all along, since only an idiot didn't see this RIAA move coming -- the performers, or the performers' reps, have ben sulking for DECADES about the writers getting paid and not the performers. But that would require senses of both responsibility and history from the likes of Clear Channel, and, well...)
The bipartisan Net-radio proposal is BTW known as the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007; you can read the House version and the Senate version. You can follow the whole saga and tell your Congresscritter what you think at savenetradio.org.
If something's wrong, you call the toll-free number. They run remote diagnostics (some pretty spooky ones -- love the way they can just throw a vehicle into Valet Mode) and if they can't fix it, they send the repair crew. They'll also tell you where the nearest available vehicle is and reserve it for you if necessary.
Missing mirror or other major problems, please see my other post re reportage and repair.
Gas, oil, etc. -- Flexcar does a lot of remote monitoring (through the gas charge cards and through the satellite system itself), so presumably the computers are telling them which cars are due for the usual maintenance. Re gas, BTW, members are expected to fuel up when the needle goes below 1/4; there's a handy card and members are given the appropriate codes. I've never found a vehicle not to have sufficient fuel, but if you got into one and found it on fumes you could presumably call the support line and they'll handle it as they do other problems.
(Same goes for reservation overruns, BTW -- you call, they handle. Because sooner or later someone's got to ask the questin that actually *does* come up IRL with these services, right? Oh, wait, maybe not in the/.verse...)
I can speak to this as a Flexcar member (and as someone who's interviewed the ZipCar folks as well, though I'm not in a city for which that service is available). Cleaning is done fairly regularly -- cars leave their designated parking spots for a few hours, then they come back. (You can also get a little usage credit if you take the car through the wash and remember to turn in your receipt.) As for dents and such, each user is expected to check over the vehicle before the trip starts and make note of any damage, just as one does a rental car. If you screw things up mid-reservation, there's a number to call and a procedure to follow.
Nice bonus BTW: I had a reservation a few months back on a car that got into an accident about 30 minutes before my reservation was to start. (The previous user was parking and things didn't quite work out with his technique.) Flexcar phoned me to let me know that there was a problem, reserved the closest available vehicle for me, and gave me a nice credit "for my inconvenience." A really great customer service experience.
Flexcar and Zipcar -- two services, same deal -- are in fact each represented in multiple cities and appear to be scaling up at approximately the same rate, which would indicate that they're seeing similar business opportunities. You're really working hard to miss the point; this is a car-sharing service, not an Avis/Hertz manque. I've been a FlexCar member for quite some time now and frankly the availability of cars in other cities has nothing to do with my FlexCar use; as someone who treats it as a car-ownership substitute, I'm only concerned that the service scale sustainably in the city I'm in. If they can do that, building out to other communities becomes a secondary issue.
I'm *way* the hell past college and I still get that. (Oddly enough, though, if I'm on her computer *fixing* the wretched thing, that's work!) I'm a writer, so maybe what I need to do next time I'm home is whip out a pad and pencil... better yet, I'm gonna hook up some foolscap and a quill... yeah, that'll do it. Programmers, though, hmm -- maybe an abacus? Bunch of slips of papers with ONE and ZERO written on them? Large bucket marked "BITS"?
PJ's paleo-synchronous track record is starting to worry me -- at this rate someone's gonna dig up that evil skeleton dude from The Frighteners. (checks IMDB) Aw FSCK! His next film's The Lovely Bones! (runs away)
Excellent advice, though I'd lay off the bleach -- baking soda makes a good substitute and doesn't leave everything stinking of chlorine. If you live somewhere where you can hang your laundry out, as someone suggested, that's great too, but around here I'd just be tucking myself into auto exhaust -- and, with this research, I'd be wondering what other sort of biomass might be hitchhiking too.
All this pillow advice is, by the way, pertinent to those/.ers suffering from acne, particularly of the sort that's worst along your cheeks and chin. The fault may lie -- at least in part -- with the critters lurking in your pillows and/or pillowcases. Using a hypoallergenic pillow cover *and* a clean pillowcase (buy a few sets and swap every 2-3 days) cuts down on your exposure to dust/mites/spores/grime that may be messing you up; I adopted the practice for my asthma but after a few days realized that my skin was getting some serious benefits. Recommended.
If it weren't vaguely unfair-use to do so, I'd be forwarding this post to every other New Yorker I know. Amen, pal, and keep the blowtorch set to high.
A point I haven't seen anyone raise yet, BTW (though this thread's gaining terrain fast): The prospect of reduction in not only air but noise pollution. I'm not one of those bumpkins or yuppies that yelps about the noise near nightlife venues (if you don't like it, folks, go back to Connecticut and free up the decent apartments for the people who can hack it), but it'll be kind of cool to hear the results of less idling in front of aforementioned nightlife venues
"Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few and far between."
That's odd; neither I nor any of my friends assume that "a man who makes plenty of money" is coming along to support us -- and yet we've all made versions of the same choice the original poster has; specifically, choosing the fulfilling career and the financial burdens it often imposes.
In an era of prenuptial agreement and a divorce rate running right around 50 percent, no broad with any sense is betting on the Sugar Daddy career path. And looks have nothing to do with it; after all, looks don't last and anyone who trades on them to attract a mate may well find that the mate is all to willing to trade again down the road. (And suddenly you're back to square one on the career front, lucrative-vs-fulfilling, only now you're older and competing with everyone who stayed in the job market while you were off with the Ladies Who Lunch. Not good.)
I hope you don't think that you have to earn scads of money to have a fulfilling family life. Nothing could be more inaccurate. [entering personal anecdote] When my father fell ill and had to semi-retire years ago, suddenly our standard of living dropped precipitously. But suddenly, too, Dad got to do all the things he'd never done before: spend time talking to people (in a non-commercial context), learn to cook, read for pleasure, and so on. First he got healthier, because it turns out he was a far better cook than Mom. Then he started making friends; he became much less impatient with people and eventually discovered that he was a good advice-giver for others in his condition. Then he started patching things up with allllll the people he'd alienated in the family. None of those three things took anywhere near the kind of money he once brought in, but all of them made his life richer; made him, day-to-day, happier and more able to deal with the substantial strain his illness put on him (an illness BTW brought on by years of overwork and compensative behaviors thereof, such as smoking); and made us all a better, happier family... and, in the end, probably extended and enhanced the years he had left.[leaving personal anecdote; please click safely]
Moral: Not only can money not buy most kinds of happiness, all too often we use happiness to pay for money. Turn back.
Heh. Even better than the look on his face when they gave him the Lego set. Love that NASA TV, especially when it doesn't cut to interviews with Nicole Kidman.
It's a great day to be a geek, and open to joy. Now, anyone on the inside want to tell us about the petal mechanism and how that's expected to go? This is a first, right?
Almost as great as the look on his face when they gave him the Lego set. (I want that Lego set.) Love that NASA TV. And no cutaways to Nicole Kidman, unless she turns out to be an extraterrestial. Which is a thought.
Boy, is this thing gonna hate my work style -- the more important the message, the more likely I am to get up, pace around, or otherwise not mess with it 'til I can collect my thoughts. (Yeah, I telecommute most days. Yeah, my co-workers seem to prefer it. How'd you guess?) I'm a very fast reader with good retention, so the time I take to read brief-but-important stuff isn't so different from the scan-and-pan necessary to evaluate anything Spamnix doesn't chuck into the holding pen by itself.
The assumptions that seem to be built into the system just aren't accurate for me, and quite likely aren't accurate for many other creative folk (writers, programmers, etc) either. As for the rest of the world, aside from the folks who download Bonzi Buddy for Web-surfing company, I'm betting that folks will either become very uncomfortable with being "watched"... or will find a way to screw with the system, amen, selah.
What SpaceLifeForm said, and further still -- this applies to writers as well (nothing like an editor asking me when my copy's coming in to ensure that my copy comes in later) and presuambly to other folk who need to synthesize a lot of data to do their best work.
There's a nice passage in Timothy Ferris' Seeing In The Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space And Guarding Earth From Interplanetary Peril in which he describes inviting an architect up to his property to advise him on constructing a private observatory. I'm afraid I haven't the book handy for a direct quote, but he describes watching the man wandering around the area, playing with twigs and so forth, and notes that he recognizes this sort of behavior -- having observed it in such folk as Richard Feynman -- as a sign of the creative process at work. Sounds like most of the better writers and better programmers I know. (It also gives me a good excuse for all my desk tchotchkes when those editors I mentioned drop by to whine about desk clutter; it's that or watch me pace up and down the office, folks...)
If you're looking for good background material or for a book that's worthwhile although perhaps not primary, I thought John Van Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics To The Tehnologies Of Life And Death (Steve J. Heims, MIT Press) was an excellent jumping-off point when my prof assigned for our Science & The Social Order seminar frosh year...
Slashdot Mirror
As Stephen Elop to Nokia, so Google to Mozilla. We should have known. Actually, we knew and there wasn't a damned thing anyone could do about it.
Heh. No, less roid rage and more crap multitasking actually. Looks like Paul's excuses are far more elaborate in any case: http://gamerfront.net/2011/12/ocean-marketing-a-study-on-how-to-destroy-your-reputation-with-just-a-few-emails/15199 #goddammitishouldbeworkingbuticannotstopreadingthisstuff
Yeah, I gotta quit wading around in the Twitter during meetings. Not can I now not find the original hoax-claim, I'm seeing the Kotaku article indicating that it's just so, so, so much better than a hoax -- yeah, really at a loss as to how this could get better. But I am willing to wait and see, yeah.
I'm hearing now that it's a hoax. This takes away absolutely none of the funny.
I'm enjoying the hell out of mine (right now, in fact), but I'm mystified by the lack of appropriate cases, of all things. Hope you got a chance to pick one up wherever you are. Seattle's fresh out.
Actually, it's not; check out WebOS Internals for a good introduction to how the homebrew community works for WebOS.
That update was released in February and Microsoft released some numbers earlier this month on what happened after that. So...um...yeah. Probably the closest the world will come to hearing Redmond admit that Autorun was un chien méchant.
Don't discount that plump aftermarket battery -- I bought one for my Pre and love it. It adds about 4mm to the dept of the thing and actually gives it a really contour in the, uh, palm. Bonus feature: No more smudgy battery cover! (Yeah, also not Touchstone, but I wasn't in love with the inductive stuff...)
Everything the AC above said -- terrific interface, great notifications, multitasking, freedom of apps-catalog choice -- it's all true. I'll grant that I was already a big fan of Matias Duarte's interface work, but the Pre just...makes sense. Damn shame the Sprint marketing campaign didn't; I've seen the more recent ad with the cute girleen shoe-shopping and wondered if things would have gone differently for the Pre if the first brand "face" had been her and not that spooky ginger lady.
Nope, not gonna; if you don't understand the difference between article structures and weighted lists, son, I'm not giving you my card as a cheat sheet. Also not leaving my five-digit Slashdot ID at "the reception" (ooh, is there cake?!) either -- and you're lucky I didn't simply identify Schilling as a pitcher for a Boston-based Yankees farm team. Go Rockies.
(Love the rest of the suggestions, everyone else, and am genuinely embarrassed that I left off the entire Futurama crew; this page was after all sitting in my research stack for the duration. One more that no one seems to have noted here so far, BTW: Jenny McCarthy. She was on the list for the medical-inquiry section for her autism work; when the inevitable editing-down process began, she was alas cut.) Thanks for reading the piece!
Important to clarify the situation re Net radio's request to Congress -- they are in fact asking that rates be rolled back to previously agreed up per-station rates, rather then using this new per-track-per-listener formulation. They're certainly not asking for a "zero royalty rate," though it would in fact be fairer. (And over-the-air stations, frankly, should have been fighting for the Net radio stations' zero-royalty rates all along, since only an idiot didn't see this RIAA move coming -- the performers, or the performers' reps, have ben sulking for DECADES about the writers getting paid and not the performers. But that would require senses of both responsibility and history from the likes of Clear Channel, and, well...)
The bipartisan Net-radio proposal is BTW known as the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007; you can read the House version and the Senate version. You can follow the whole saga and tell your Congresscritter what you think at savenetradio.org.
Alas, they only grabbed the first page (so far, anyway). You'll get just the first few items on the list.
If something's wrong, you call the toll-free number. They run remote diagnostics (some pretty spooky ones -- love the way they can just throw a vehicle into Valet Mode) and if they can't fix it, they send the repair crew. They'll also tell you where the nearest available vehicle is and reserve it for you if necessary.
/.verse...)
Missing mirror or other major problems, please see my other post re reportage and repair.
Gas, oil, etc. -- Flexcar does a lot of remote monitoring (through the gas charge cards and through the satellite system itself), so presumably the computers are telling them which cars are due for the usual maintenance. Re gas, BTW, members are expected to fuel up when the needle goes below 1/4; there's a handy card and members are given the appropriate codes. I've never found a vehicle not to have sufficient fuel, but if you got into one and found it on fumes you could presumably call the support line and they'll handle it as they do other problems.
(Same goes for reservation overruns, BTW -- you call, they handle. Because sooner or later someone's got to ask the questin that actually *does* come up IRL with these services, right? Oh, wait, maybe not in the
I can speak to this as a Flexcar member (and as someone who's interviewed the ZipCar folks as well, though I'm not in a city for which that service is available). Cleaning is done fairly regularly -- cars leave their designated parking spots for a few hours, then they come back. (You can also get a little usage credit if you take the car through the wash and remember to turn in your receipt.) As for dents and such, each user is expected to check over the vehicle before the trip starts and make note of any damage, just as one does a rental car. If you screw things up mid-reservation, there's a number to call and a procedure to follow.
Nice bonus BTW: I had a reservation a few months back on a car that got into an accident about 30 minutes before my reservation was to start. (The previous user was parking and things didn't quite work out with his technique.) Flexcar phoned me to let me know that there was a problem, reserved the closest available vehicle for me, and gave me a nice credit "for my inconvenience." A really great customer service experience.
Flexcar and Zipcar -- two services, same deal -- are in fact each represented in multiple cities and appear to be scaling up at approximately the same rate, which would indicate that they're seeing similar business opportunities. You're really working hard to miss the point; this is a car-sharing service, not an Avis/Hertz manque. I've been a FlexCar member for quite some time now and frankly the availability of cars in other cities has nothing to do with my FlexCar use; as someone who treats it as a car-ownership substitute, I'm only concerned that the service scale sustainably in the city I'm in. If they can do that, building out to other communities becomes a secondary issue.
I'm *way* the hell past college and I still get that. (Oddly enough, though, if I'm on her computer *fixing* the wretched thing, that's work!) I'm a writer, so maybe what I need to do next time I'm home is whip out a pad and pencil... better yet, I'm gonna hook up some foolscap and a quill... yeah, that'll do it. Programmers, though, hmm -- maybe an abacus? Bunch of slips of papers with ONE and ZERO written on them? Large bucket marked "BITS"?
PJ's paleo-synchronous track record is starting to worry me -- at this rate someone's gonna dig up that evil skeleton dude from The Frighteners. (checks IMDB) Aw FSCK! His next film's The Lovely Bones! (runs away)
Excellent advice, though I'd lay off the bleach -- baking soda makes a good substitute and doesn't leave everything stinking of chlorine. If you live somewhere where you can hang your laundry out, as someone suggested, that's great too, but around here I'd just be tucking myself into auto exhaust -- and, with this research, I'd be wondering what other sort of biomass might be hitchhiking too.
/.ers suffering from acne, particularly of the sort that's worst along your cheeks and chin. The fault may lie -- at least in part -- with the critters lurking in your pillows and/or pillowcases. Using a hypoallergenic pillow cover *and* a clean pillowcase (buy a few sets and swap every 2-3 days) cuts down on your exposure to dust/mites/spores/grime that may be messing you up; I adopted the practice for my asthma but after a few days realized that my skin was getting some serious benefits. Recommended.
All this pillow advice is, by the way, pertinent to those
If it weren't vaguely unfair-use to do so, I'd be forwarding this post to every other New Yorker I know. Amen, pal, and keep the blowtorch set to high.
A point I haven't seen anyone raise yet, BTW (though this thread's gaining terrain fast): The prospect of reduction in not only air but noise pollution. I'm not one of those bumpkins or yuppies that yelps about the noise near nightlife venues (if you don't like it, folks, go back to Connecticut and free up the decent apartments for the people who can hack it), but it'll be kind of cool to hear the results of less idling in front of aforementioned nightlife venues
"Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few and far between."
That's odd; neither I nor any of my friends assume that "a man who makes plenty of money" is coming along to support us -- and yet we've all made versions of the same choice the original poster has; specifically, choosing the fulfilling career and the financial burdens it often imposes.
In an era of prenuptial agreement and a divorce rate running right around 50 percent, no broad with any sense is betting on the Sugar Daddy career path. And looks have nothing to do with it; after all, looks don't last and anyone who trades on them to attract a mate may well find that the mate is all to willing to trade again down the road. (And suddenly you're back to square one on the career front, lucrative-vs-fulfilling, only now you're older and competing with everyone who stayed in the job market while you were off with the Ladies Who Lunch. Not good.)
I hope you don't think that you have to earn scads of money to have a fulfilling family life. Nothing could be more inaccurate. [entering personal anecdote] When my father fell ill and had to semi-retire years ago, suddenly our standard of living dropped precipitously. But suddenly, too, Dad got to do all the things he'd never done before: spend time talking to people (in a non-commercial context), learn to cook, read for pleasure, and so on. First he got healthier, because it turns out he was a far better cook than Mom. Then he started making friends; he became much less impatient with people and eventually discovered that he was a good advice-giver for others in his condition. Then he started patching things up with allllll the people he'd alienated in the family. None of those three things took anywhere near the kind of money he once brought in, but all of them made his life richer; made him, day-to-day, happier and more able to deal with the substantial strain his illness put on him (an illness BTW brought on by years of overwork and compensative behaviors thereof, such as smoking); and made us all a better, happier family... and, in the end, probably extended and enhanced the years he had left.[leaving personal anecdote; please click safely]
Moral: Not only can money not buy most kinds of happiness, all too often we use happiness to pay for money. Turn back.
Heh. Even better than the look on his face when they gave him the Lego set. Love that NASA TV, especially when it doesn't cut to interviews with Nicole Kidman.
It's a great day to be a geek, and open to joy. Now, anyone on the inside want to tell us about the petal mechanism and how that's expected to go? This is a first, right?
Almost as great as the look on his face when they gave him the Lego set. (I want that Lego set.) Love that NASA TV. And no cutaways to Nicole Kidman, unless she turns out to be an extraterrestial. Which is a thought.
It's a great day to be a geek and open to joy.
And did we not need this on the anniversary of Columbia? Yeah, I think so. COngrats to all involved from the /. community.
The assumptions that seem to be built into the system just aren't accurate for me, and quite likely aren't accurate for many other creative folk (writers, programmers, etc) either. As for the rest of the world, aside from the folks who download Bonzi Buddy for Web-surfing company, I'm betting that folks will either become very uncomfortable with being "watched"... or will find a way to screw with the system, amen, selah.
There's a nice passage in Timothy Ferris' Seeing In The Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space And Guarding Earth From Interplanetary Peril in which he describes inviting an architect up to his property to advise him on constructing a private observatory. I'm afraid I haven't the book handy for a direct quote, but he describes watching the man wandering around the area, playing with twigs and so forth, and notes that he recognizes this sort of behavior -- having observed it in such folk as Richard Feynman -- as a sign of the creative process at work. Sounds like most of the better writers and better programmers I know. (It also gives me a good excuse for all my desk tchotchkes when those editors I mentioned drop by to whine about desk clutter; it's that or watch me pace up and down the office, folks...)
If you're looking for good background material or for a book that's worthwhile although perhaps not primary, I thought John Van Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics To The Tehnologies Of Life And Death (Steve J. Heims, MIT Press) was an excellent jumping-off point when my prof assigned for our Science & The Social Order seminar frosh year...