It's perfectly possible to have hated Gates for what he did with Microsoft without having to twist the world so his charity isn't really a charity but an organ of evil.
There's no movement of goalposts. I've always told people exactly what brands are and what premium is, they haven't changed. And it's not because I say so, but because that's what is.
Considering that he has more money than anyone could spend in ten lifetimes, Gates' philanthropy is like you buying a hamburger for a homeless man. I'm just not impressed. I'm far more impressed with the hungry man who shares half that hamburger with another homeless man.
You do realise that no-one is doing anything to try and impress you. Your attempts to judge the worthiness of other people's charity is not only unseemly, it's irrelevant.
Gates knows quite well that emulating compassion and humanity for the media is a savvy move;
To what end? There's the flaw in the logic of your cynicism. When you're one of the richest people in the world, and you've retired young. You do whatever makes you happy, without needing to care less about the media or anyone else thinks.
So why do an interview? I haven't seen this one, but they are generally to push some charitable enterprise.
Did someone ask you to care? The fact that rather than skip over it, you took time to point out how much you don't care says something about you though.
And that is why Linux never took off on the desktop. Linux was only successful when it's UI followed the first option - in Android.
Linux geeks are ignorant when it comes to design considerations. This is why, without the help of commercial outfits, who have designers on the payroll, Linux never gets anywhere. Linux geeks don't even realize what they don't know.
I can resize my browser from full screen width to half width with one key shortcut (in KDE, not sure if OSX can do this, but it should if it can't); isn't that enough to get "close enough"?
No. Arbitrarily halving the browser window, with the possibility that it might come within range of a decent column width is not "close enough". It's barely a hack. What's close enough is to let someone who knows what they are doing design it.
The UN aren't suggesting anyone goes bug hunting. Even if it wasn't for all the health issues, it's be a highly inefficient way of getting protein.
This is about farming insects. The insects for human consumption would never have been outside in the open air. Everything they touch and everything they eat would be controlled.
I suspect your idea of permaculture is similarly whack.
Unless you're going to covertly introduce ground insects to food, people will know. And if they know, they'll be grossed out.
Red food dye. Cochineal. Made from ground up cochineals. Insects. Plenty know, plenty don't know. Pretty much nobody cares, because they were brought up with it.
Same goes for black pudding, tripe and haggis. People that were brought up on it don't care. So the trick is to get people when they are young.
That's not exactly stunning proof, unless you used the guy for oil changes and it always needed more than just the filter and oil. I generally don't take my car to the mechanic when it's working just fine.
I don't know what it's like where you are, but here, in addition to regular services (filter and oil changes etc.) we have an annual MOT test, which checks for roadworthiness.
And if you read carefully I didn't say or imply it was proof. I said: "And I realised I hadn't a leg to stand on. He may have been gouging me, and I wouldn't know." I didn't say "I then knew he had been gouging me".
The point being made is that if you have a supplier of services that you always use and like, you probably don't know whether you are actually getting good service. That you need to actually try other service suppliers sometimes.
And to take it back from the analogy to the topic, that guy has a lot of faith in the opinion of a neurologist that's been treating him for 10 years. How does he know that another practitioner, perhaps one that his neurologist has been speaking ill of, wouldn't have alleviated his symptoms 5 years ago. He doesn't.
That doesn't mean that his neurologist is no good. Only that she might be no good. This possibility is why asking for a second opinion is accepted practice.
Right, so we're already 1 click away from the front page, so this is not their primary marketing. Cut out the hyperbolic adjectives, and the 2nd and third paragraphs just reveal it's a 4 cyclinder, 2 litre turbo, 4 wheel drive car. These are expected features I spoke about. Nothing cutting edge, nothing novel, nothing unexpected, nothing hard to understand.
It's not until paragraph 4 that it starts feature listing proper.
Are you seriously saying that apple is being all apple can be at the moment? that your little phone is at the top of what current hardware and software can put together? Because if you are, i think you have to hand in your geek card.
I'm saying what I'm saying, and I'm very clear. That formulation follows from what you are saying, not me.
I'm saying Apple's products are better quality than Samsung, and that makes it a more premium brand than Samsung. And as I've spelled out, neither has much to do with a list of features.
You know, when I was a kid, watches were all wind-up. Then along came the latest features of Quartz crystals, LED displays. And the people that like features bought them. They had to press a button to tell the time. But it was digital! And they could see it in the dark. Then along came LCD. They didn't have to press a button anymore! Unless they were indoors, in which case they needed to press the button for a light to illuminate the LCD. Then they started adding calculator functionality to the digital watches. Though the buttons were too small to operate. And they started putting digital watch capability in pens! None of these features made for premium products. They made for cheap products that ended up in thrift stores. Meanwhile most premium watches remained analogue, and incorporated just the technologies that made their products better. They got the accuracy of quartz, without LCD becoming their primary display. They used new technology to deliver the features thir customers expected, without delivering features for novelty or feature lists.
A Rolex has features it's customers expect. But people don't buy a Rolex because of it's features, or because a feature checklist can't locate a cheaper watch with the same or more ticks.
Premium products are premium because of quality (and qualities), not because it beats other products feature lists, nor because it follows every novelty feature that appears elsewhere in the industry, nor because it invents novelty features.
If none of this makes sense to you, read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's once of the themes covered, and it's what made me first aware of it 30 years ago. And it's a great read anyway.
I never said that they spent more on marketing than anyone else. I said they had a better marketing department. There is a huge difference.
So Samsung is sinking money into a substandard outcome. Hmmm. 10 times as much money for a worse result than Apple.
(you made the same mistake that you made in your first line, assuming that more money means better)
There's no mistake. I know exactly how good Apple's products are because I use them every day. Clearly you don't, so what makes you the expert? Nothing. You're just being ignorant.
Not only don't you know what Apple's products are like, you don't understand how brands work. Brands are a promise of quality, and they only work if the brand actually delivers the promised quality year in, year out. Failing on the quality on occasion, lowers the value of the brand. Doing it regularly destroys the brand.
Your focus on cost, says more about you than of Apple or their customers. That you're buying on a budget, and resent those who's budget is bigger than yours.
There is such a right. The specific right to search with a warrant is an exception to, not a removal of, the general right to privacy. You have a general right to secure what is yours (e.g. your phone). The police have, with a duly processed warrant, a specific right to pierce that security in a specific manner.
You're saying exactly the same thing I did in different words. When I said there was no such right, I clearly spelled out that the non-existant right was the right to privacy of possessions and information stored on those possessions when the police have a warrant.
I have all that space for a reason - why does the website designer think their idea of a readable layout is better than mine? I'm the one who's actually reading it.
And you are no different from anyone else. Your eyes and the visual part of your brain is not unique. A very short or a very long line will slow down your reading. Too short and and your eye is spending more of it's time jumping from line end to line beginning. Too long and your brain will find it difficult to follow all the way back to the start of the line, such that you accurately land on the beginnig of the next line each time.
Optimal is somewhere in the area of 10-15 words. The actual column width in pixels will vary depending on the font.
The designer should know this, and you have demonstrated you don't. Add on the fact that the font will determine what a good column width will be and the right place to make the decision is with the page designer. Not the reader.
Heck even if the reader were best person to chose, surfing the web would be a fucking pain in the ass if you had to resize the window to make the column width optimal for each different page you visit.
Now, as to wasting the space on your huge monitor, HTML5 and responsive design are going to make that better for you in future. They allow the designer to vary the number of columns depending on the viewport width. So you'll get more READABLE columns on your maximised window on your large monitor in the next wave of web designs.
My neurologist(who's been treating me for chronic headache, cluster headaches, and chronic migraines for a decade)
I used to have a car mechanic that I thought was great. Always very pleasant, always explained what needed doing and why. Car was always good when I got it back. Used him for years. Recommended him to my brother. My brother used him once, but didn't go back. I asked him why. He said he replaces parts that don't need replacing. I didn't believe it. Then my brother said, OK, when did you have the car in when it didn't need some parts. And I realised I hadn't a leg to stand on. He may have been gouging me, and I wouldn't know. It never occurred to me that other people were getting their cars serviced elsewhere without always needing these extra repairs.
How do you know you've been getting the best treatment from this neurologist you respect? How do you know you wouldn't have got better results elsewhere. And why is the opinion of the neurologist you happen to have superior to that of some other professionals she despises?
Of course she might be a great neurologist. But are you in a position to know? Or is it really just a "Love the one you're with" situation? Like my old mechanic.
An interesting point. However I wonder about this part:
While we are certainly still in the dark ages of neuroscience and psychiatry, there is a reason why we can control a ton of psychiatric illnesses with medications.
Now here's the thing. We can alter the behaviour and mood of ANYONE with drugs. Give them more can-do spirit with caffeine, coke or speed. Relax them with cannabinoids. Make them stupid and overconfident with alcohol. Friendly/loving/empathic with Ecstasy etc.
So of course with drugs we can change the behaviour of people diagnosed with a mental illness to better suit societies expectations, or to lift their mood. But that doesn't mean that their problem was biomedical. There's no theoretical reason why a person whose mental problem has an experiential cause, such as childhood abuse, wouldn't benefit from treatment with drugs.
My own layman's opinion, for the nothing it is worth, is that there's a mixed bag of biomedical and experiential causes, together with a bunch of people that just don't buy into societies current norms, and are wrongly diagnosed as ill. And that you can change anyone, ill or not, temporarily or permanently, with both drugs and experiences.
Display a mini VU meter in any tab who's web page is producing noise. As most web-pages don't produce noise, it wouldn't clutter the UI. And if there's 2 sources, you could probably tell which is which from the flickering of the VU compared to what you hear.
Slashdot Mirror
That bitterness is making you twisted.
It's perfectly possible to have hated Gates for what he did with Microsoft without having to twist the world so his charity isn't really a charity but an organ of evil.
There's no movement of goalposts. I've always told people exactly what brands are and what premium is, they haven't changed. And it's not because I say so, but because that's what is.
Considering that he has more money than anyone could spend in ten lifetimes, Gates' philanthropy is like you buying a hamburger for a homeless man. I'm just not impressed. I'm far more impressed with the hungry man who shares half that hamburger with another homeless man.
You do realise that no-one is doing anything to try and impress you. Your attempts to judge the worthiness of other people's charity is not only unseemly, it's irrelevant.
Gates knows quite well that emulating compassion and humanity for the media is a savvy move;
To what end? There's the flaw in the logic of your cynicism. When you're one of the richest people in the world, and you've retired young. You do whatever makes you happy, without needing to care less about the media or anyone else thinks.
So why do an interview? I haven't seen this one, but they are generally to push some charitable enterprise.
Did someone ask you to care? The fact that rather than skip over it, you took time to point out how much you don't care says something about you though.
This is the mentality behind Linux.
And that is why Linux never took off on the desktop. Linux was only successful when it's UI followed the first option - in Android.
Linux geeks are ignorant when it comes to design considerations. This is why, without the help of commercial outfits, who have designers on the payroll, Linux never gets anywhere. Linux geeks don't even realize what they don't know.
I can resize my browser from full screen width to half width with one key shortcut (in KDE, not sure if OSX can do this, but it should if it can't); isn't that enough to get "close enough"?
No. Arbitrarily halving the browser window, with the possibility that it might come within range of a decent column width is not "close enough". It's barely a hack. What's close enough is to let someone who knows what they are doing design it.
What exactly is it you're trying to sell to the third world? Religion? Biotech? Pharma? Or just The Good Ole American Way?
That's more of a purple colour though. Cochineal is proper red.
Cochineal used to be the standard red food dye until fairly recently. Pretty much anything with a strong red colour had it.
That there are cheaper synthetic dyes now is irrelevant. The change hasn't come about because anyone objected to eating insects.
The UN aren't suggesting anyone goes bug hunting. Even if it wasn't for all the health issues, it's be a highly inefficient way of getting protein.
This is about farming insects. The insects for human consumption would never have been outside in the open air. Everything they touch and everything they eat would be controlled.
I suspect your idea of permaculture is similarly whack.
Unless you're going to covertly introduce ground insects to food, people will know. And if they know, they'll be grossed out.
Red food dye. Cochineal. Made from ground up cochineals. Insects. Plenty know, plenty don't know. Pretty much nobody cares, because they were brought up with it.
Same goes for black pudding, tripe and haggis. People that were brought up on it don't care. So the trick is to get people when they are young.
To be tried just the once, along with deep fried mars bars, and deep fried pizza. Along with salt'n'sos of course.
It isn't a cloak, it's a frisbee with some badly made holes in it.
That's not exactly stunning proof, unless you used the guy for oil changes and it always needed more than just the filter and oil. I generally don't take my car to the mechanic when it's working just fine.
I don't know what it's like where you are, but here, in addition to regular services (filter and oil changes etc.) we have an annual MOT test, which checks for roadworthiness.
And if you read carefully I didn't say or imply it was proof. I said:
"And I realised I hadn't a leg to stand on. He may have been gouging me, and I wouldn't know."
I didn't say "I then knew he had been gouging me".
The point being made is that if you have a supplier of services that you always use and like, you probably don't know whether you are actually getting good service. That you need to actually try other service suppliers sometimes.
And to take it back from the analogy to the topic, that guy has a lot of faith in the opinion of a neurologist that's been treating him for 10 years. How does he know that another practitioner, perhaps one that his neurologist has been speaking ill of, wouldn't have alleviated his symptoms 5 years ago. He doesn't.
That doesn't mean that his neurologist is no good. Only that she might be no good. This possibility is why asking for a second opinion is accepted practice.
The Association with f1 just means they have cutting edge technology
So where's the feature list?
along with all their testing systems.
So where's the feature list?
Golf is just about knowing the target audience.
So where's the feature list?
Then if you open a tab about a production car (not a concept car that isn't being sold) http://news.mercedes-benz.co.uk/products/the-a-45-amg-the-new-star-from-mercedes-amg.html you will see they dive straight into juicy details (full to the brim from the 2nd to 6th paragraph).
Right, so we're already 1 click away from the front page, so this is not their primary marketing. Cut out the hyperbolic adjectives, and the 2nd and third paragraphs just reveal it's a 4 cyclinder, 2 litre turbo, 4 wheel drive car. These are expected features I spoke about. Nothing cutting edge, nothing novel, nothing unexpected, nothing hard to understand.
It's not until paragraph 4 that it starts feature listing proper.
Are you seriously saying that apple is being all apple can be at the moment? that your little phone is at the top of what current hardware and software can put together? Because if you are, i think you have to hand in your geek card.
I'm saying what I'm saying, and I'm very clear. That formulation follows from what you are saying, not me.
I'm saying Apple's products are better quality than Samsung, and that makes it a more premium brand than Samsung. And as I've spelled out, neither has much to do with a list of features.
You know, when I was a kid, watches were all wind-up. Then along came the latest features of Quartz crystals, LED displays. And the people that like features bought them. They had to press a button to tell the time. But it was digital! And they could see it in the dark. Then along came LCD. They didn't have to press a button anymore! Unless they were indoors, in which case they needed to press the button for a light to illuminate the LCD. Then they started adding calculator functionality to the digital watches. Though the buttons were too small to operate. And they started putting digital watch capability in pens! None of these features made for premium products. They made for cheap products that ended up in thrift stores. Meanwhile most premium watches remained analogue, and incorporated just the technologies that made their products better. They got the accuracy of quartz, without LCD becoming their primary display. They used new technology to deliver the features thir customers expected, without delivering features for novelty or feature lists.
A Rolex has features it's customers expect. But people don't buy a Rolex because of it's features, or because a feature checklist can't locate a cheaper watch with the same or more ticks.
Premium products are premium because of quality (and qualities), not because it beats other products feature lists, nor because it follows every novelty feature that appears elsewhere in the industry, nor because it invents novelty features.
If none of this makes sense to you, read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's once of the themes covered, and it's what made me first aware of it 30 years ago. And it's a great read anyway.
I never said that they spent more on marketing than anyone else. I said they had a better marketing department. There is a huge difference.
So Samsung is sinking money into a substandard outcome. Hmmm. 10 times as much money for a worse result than Apple.
(you made the same mistake that you made in your first line, assuming that more money means better)
There's no mistake. I know exactly how good Apple's products are because I use them every day. Clearly you don't, so what makes you the expert? Nothing. You're just being ignorant.
Not only don't you know what Apple's products are like, you don't understand how brands work. Brands are a promise of quality, and they only work if the brand actually delivers the promised quality year in, year out. Failing on the quality on occasion, lowers the value of the brand. Doing it regularly destroys the brand.
Your focus on cost, says more about you than of Apple or their customers. That you're buying on a budget, and resent those who's budget is bigger than yours.
There is such a right. The specific right to search with a warrant is an exception to, not a removal of, the general right to privacy. You have a general right to secure what is yours (e.g. your phone). The police have, with a duly processed warrant, a specific right to pierce that security in a specific manner.
You're saying exactly the same thing I did in different words. When I said there was no such right, I clearly spelled out that the non-existant right was the right to privacy of possessions and information stored on those possessions when the police have a warrant.
My own concern is: how will I know for sure it's fake beef and not fake horse?
I have all that space for a reason - why does the website designer think their idea of a readable layout is better than mine? I'm the one who's actually reading it.
And you are no different from anyone else. Your eyes and the visual part of your brain is not unique. A very short or a very long line will slow down your reading. Too short and and your eye is spending more of it's time jumping from line end to line beginning. Too long and your brain will find it difficult to follow all the way back to the start of the line, such that you accurately land on the beginnig of the next line each time.
Optimal is somewhere in the area of 10-15 words. The actual column width in pixels will vary depending on the font.
The designer should know this, and you have demonstrated you don't. Add on the fact that the font will determine what a good column width will be and the right place to make the decision is with the page designer. Not the reader.
Heck even if the reader were best person to chose, surfing the web would be a fucking pain in the ass if you had to resize the window to make the column width optimal for each different page you visit.
Now, as to wasting the space on your huge monitor, HTML5 and responsive design are going to make that better for you in future. They allow the designer to vary the number of columns depending on the viewport width. So you'll get more READABLE columns on your maximised window on your large monitor in the next wave of web designs.
My neurologist(who's been treating me for chronic headache, cluster headaches, and chronic migraines for a decade)
I used to have a car mechanic that I thought was great. Always very pleasant, always explained what needed doing and why. Car was always good when I got it back. Used him for years. Recommended him to my brother. My brother used him once, but didn't go back. I asked him why. He said he replaces parts that don't need replacing. I didn't believe it. Then my brother said, OK, when did you have the car in when it didn't need some parts. And I realised I hadn't a leg to stand on. He may have been gouging me, and I wouldn't know. It never occurred to me that other people were getting their cars serviced elsewhere without always needing these extra repairs.
How do you know you've been getting the best treatment from this neurologist you respect? How do you know you wouldn't have got better results elsewhere. And why is the opinion of the neurologist you happen to have superior to that of some other professionals she despises?
Of course she might be a great neurologist. But are you in a position to know? Or is it really just a "Love the one you're with" situation? Like my old mechanic.
An interesting point. However I wonder about this part:
While we are certainly still in the dark ages of neuroscience and psychiatry, there is a reason why we can control a ton of psychiatric illnesses with medications.
Now here's the thing. We can alter the behaviour and mood of ANYONE with drugs. Give them more can-do spirit with caffeine, coke or speed. Relax them with cannabinoids. Make them stupid and overconfident with alcohol. Friendly/loving/empathic with Ecstasy etc.
So of course with drugs we can change the behaviour of people diagnosed with a mental illness to better suit societies expectations, or to lift their mood. But that doesn't mean that their problem was biomedical. There's no theoretical reason why a person whose mental problem has an experiential cause, such as childhood abuse, wouldn't benefit from treatment with drugs.
Successful bio-chemical treatment doesn't prove bio-chemical cause.
My own layman's opinion, for the nothing it is worth, is that there's a mixed bag of biomedical and experiential causes, together with a bunch of people that just don't buy into societies current norms, and are wrongly diagnosed as ill. And that you can change anyone, ill or not, temporarily or permanently, with both drugs and experiences.
Which model? After all we wouldn't want to break the psychiatrist's business model, would we.
Wind causes most of the smells round here.
Did any browser implement this obvious idea...
Display a mini VU meter in any tab who's web page is producing noise. As most web-pages don't produce noise, it wouldn't clutter the UI. And if there's 2 sources, you could probably tell which is which from the flickering of the VU compared to what you hear.
You're supposed to put the blunt end to your ear.