I recommended.Mac to my parents and they're very happy with it. My dad set up a web page for his band with audio clips and a photo gallery all by himself, and he and my mom have email and a backup system.
My only beef is that you can't get the Backup program without buying.Mac. I've already got a web host, but would love to use it to back up my system to my web host, which I talk about a little bit above your post.
And, probably because of.Mac, I can't mount an FTP drive as writeable without jumping through a ton of hoops.
Another Dreamhost customer, I see. The great thing about them is that they've got a great backup policy. You should check out the wiki article
I've been meaning to write the scripts that'll handle all that stuff for me, but haven't really had the time. I've taken to autosyncing my irreplaceables to my iPod whenever it's connected and keeping financial documents in encrypted disk images.
What I really would like is the ability to mount FTP sites as writeable on my Mac. Rsyncing is fine for backing up, but the ability to drag a file onto a drive and have it show up where others can see it is the only advantage these file backup sites seem to have over a hosting account.
I've got 224 GB of storage space and 2.6 TB of monthly bandwidth, along with an image gallery, blog, SSH and FTP access, and email with spam filtering for $9.99/month + $10/year for the domain name.
Golf balls have bumps and divots over the surface to enable longer flight times. Surely these additional bumps will also aid the shuttle's aerodynamics?
Only if you're going to be whacking it with a giant hammer that's also designed to give it backspin. But that's the kind of stuff NASA wants to avoid.
That's a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be rather easily solved since it takes next to nothing to convert a conventional gas pump to use diesel engine, and since diesel can be shipped in the same trucks as gasoline.
Or you could, ya know, install NeoOffice and not have to explain it to anyone, and have all the fonts work, and have the printing work like everything else normal.
Out of the box, OS X has a relatively slow tracking speed. You can turn the tracking speed up if it really bothers you.
And, no, you can't select a file and press delete to move it to the trash. You need to push Cmd (Apple) + Delete to move an item to the trash. And you can't do a hard delete (like a Unix rm command) from the Finder either. This is a feature, not a bug. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally bumped delete and watched as Windows either moved my file to the "Recycle Bin" or deleted it outright.
You could argue that because Windows has a smaller menu bar "strike zone", it forces you to aim better, and in the long run actually increases your efficiency.
Yes, but even the best pitchers don't hit the strike zone all the time. Having a bigger clickable area is always better in terms of interface design.
I switched from a Mac to PC at home and I use both daily at work. Once you get used to a platform you'll be fast on it. I find OSX to be much more sluggish than my Windows 2000 and XP machines due to OSX's disk swapping (virtual memory usage).
This isn't a user interface complaint, but it's very true that OS X will use all the RAM you can through at it. I don't recommend running it with less than 1GB, which is very cheap if you don't buy it through Apple. And as long as you don't buy a Mac Mini, you can do this without voiding your warranty.
If you're going to be buying running a lot of applications at once, it's important to have as much RAM as possible. But when you can get 2GB of RAM for under $150, there's really no reason not to.
Take, for example, the way menus appear. This affects a lot more than just the OS, since many apps use the same interface widgets. If a menu takes 1/10th of a second to appear, then you could be wasting hours of time over the course of a week or month sitting there waiting for a window to load. Having them appear almost instantly would save that time.
The same goes for positioning the menu bars for an application at the top of the window rather than the top of the screen. On the Mac, the menu bar is essentially infinite in size. You don't have to worry about overshooting it vertically. On Windows, the menu bar is only about 50 pixels high, meaning that every time you overshoot it, it's another 1/10th of a second in lost productivity.
You're forgetting that the earth, and therefore the biology on the earth, is not a closed system. If you're eating every day, you're not a closed system either. Entropy only increases in closed systems.
And it's not just random mutations, though they are a part of it. There's also natural variations within a species. If you started castrating of the people who weren't redheads, we'd end up with a larger percentage of the population who are redheads in a few generations since other traits are being selected against.
Expand this to a species spread over different areas eating different kinds of foods or dealing with different pressures and expand the timeframe over a few million years and evolution isn't impossible.
If you're not getting "warm" colors from CFL bulbs, you're probably using older bulbs. The flickering also points to this. My wife can't stand CRT monitors at 75Hz, but she hasn't complained about our CFL bulbs flickering. She's also got insanely good hearing and doesn't hear them buzz.
This is like the complaint people have with diesel engines. Yeah, the first diesels in the US were smokey and loud and slow, but new ones are virtually indistinguishable from gas engines and use 50% less fuel or more. Yet, people still avoid them because they don't want a "noisy, smokey, slow diesel car."
The problem is that you don't really need a CS degree to do CS work. I started in a CS program and found out it was for people who wanted to work with theory. I switched to Penn State's IST degree. It covered a lot of the bases of technology work, from databases to software development to networking, and had enough electives that you could specialize in any one of those systems and had a strong emphasis on project management skills and teamwork.
You could basically make your own track and come out with a lot of experience and knowledge in a specific area, or come out with general knowledge of the IT world. What you don't get is a ton of comp sci theory. But you come out of it ready to get down to business.
And, interestingly, those who I've encountered that have CS degrees tend to write fairly heady code that is a lot more complex than necessary.
I have two problems with that idea. First, it implies that the reallocation of resources will be instantaneous. Second, it implies that what is in the best short term interests of an entity is also in the best short term interests of society, and also in the best long term interests of both society and that entity.
Take, for example, the H1(b) temporary visas. Sure, this solves the resource shortage in the short term, but unless those people permanently move to the US, they're simply going to take their skills back home and lead to a brain drain, causing the companies that hired them and the US economy at large to suffer.
That was a legacy switch, and was primarily made to reduce said monthly fees.
My wife requires the phone number for work, but we found out we could switch to Vonage and keep our number. If we didn't need it, I'd have dropped the phone service a long time ago.
Her birthday is in June, and she needs a new iPod and a new cell phone, and we're already with Cingular and are happy with the service. She saw that you can show pictures to people on that wide screen and said "I want to be able to do that." And now that we've got a baby on the way, it will make it a helluva lot easier than having to lug photos around or view it on my iPod's comparatively small screen, or the tiny screen of an iPod Nano. And having her address book and calendar with her would be very convenient.
So it's not for everybody, but for her it can replace having to carry around two larger items that, were I to buy them separately, would cost about the same price.
I avoid them whenever possible. I hear people talking up TiVo or NetFlix, but you've got to pay a stinking monthly fee. You can't pay as you go or pay for use. That's why I use the iTunes store as my TiVo. If I miss a show, I'll buy THAT EPISODE from iTunes. That way, if I don't use it for a month, it doesn't cost me the same as if I use it all the time.
If there is a service I'd like to use that forces me to pay a monthly fee, I'll spend a few hours trying to get the same functionality without the fee.
If you want this geek's business, either support it with advertising or let me pay based on my usage.
Oh! I never realized it was that easy! Amazing! And I bet if your current boss learns you're looking for another job, like when a recruiter calls you in the middle of the day, he'll be completely understanding about your views.
But why then do they need a corporate email address? Why not a company website with that information? That would be significantly less work to host than an email address.
I think it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson during his talk during Beyond Belief 2006 who explained it like this:
Between 1000 and 1200, the Islamic world was the seat of knowledge. People studied there from all over the globe and many new things were created because of the free flow of ideas. Algebra and alcohol were invented, many stars were named, and the best astrolabes were built in Baghdad.
Then, in the late 12th century, a Muslim cleric rose to power who said that if science or a work of literature didn't agree with the Koran, then the Koran was correct because it was the word of Allah and therefore the final authority. So science started to decline, and the libraries were burned, and the people were driven to superstition. Thankfully, enough survived to not set us back too far, and the Renaissance picked up where the scientists in Baghdad had left off.
And if you can't see the similarities between what happened then in Baghdad and what is happening now in the United States, you are blind.
Why would you want your retail employees to have email? Is it really necessary for the cashier at Wal*Mart to have their own email address when they're probably only going to work there for a few months?
I had something similar happen recently. I went back home and ran out to get the pizza we ordered. Behind the counter stood someone from my high school graduating class. Back then, he was top dog. All the girls fawned all over him. He had a nice car and went to all the parties.
Now I'm the one with the nice car. I'm the one who's got a beautiful wife and a baby on the way and a great new job. And he's still working at the pizza place, still flirting with high school girls, and driving his now old, beat up car.
Slashdot Mirror
I recommended .Mac to my parents and they're very happy with it. My dad set up a web page for his band with audio clips and a photo gallery all by himself, and he and my mom have email and a backup system.
My only beef is that you can't get the Backup program without buying .Mac. I've already got a web host, but would love to use it to back up my system to my web host, which I talk about a little bit above your post.
And, probably because of .Mac, I can't mount an FTP drive as writeable without jumping through a ton of hoops.
Another Dreamhost customer, I see. The great thing about them is that they've got a great backup policy. You should check out the wiki article
I've been meaning to write the scripts that'll handle all that stuff for me, but haven't really had the time. I've taken to autosyncing my irreplaceables to my iPod whenever it's connected and keeping financial documents in encrypted disk images.
What I really would like is the ability to mount FTP sites as writeable on my Mac. Rsyncing is fine for backing up, but the ability to drag a file onto a drive and have it show up where others can see it is the only advantage these file backup sites seem to have over a hosting account.
I've got 224 GB of storage space and 2.6 TB of monthly bandwidth, along with an image gallery, blog, SSH and FTP access, and email with spam filtering for $9.99/month + $10/year for the domain name.
Only if you're going to be whacking it with a giant hammer that's also designed to give it backspin. But that's the kind of stuff NASA wants to avoid.
That's a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be rather easily solved since it takes next to nothing to convert a conventional gas pump to use diesel engine, and since diesel can be shipped in the same trucks as gasoline.
Or you could, ya know, install NeoOffice and not have to explain it to anyone, and have all the fonts work, and have the printing work like everything else normal.
Out of the box, OS X has a relatively slow tracking speed. You can turn the tracking speed up if it really bothers you.
And, no, you can't select a file and press delete to move it to the trash. You need to push Cmd (Apple) + Delete to move an item to the trash. And you can't do a hard delete (like a Unix rm command) from the Finder either. This is a feature, not a bug. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally bumped delete and watched as Windows either moved my file to the "Recycle Bin" or deleted it outright.
Yes, but even the best pitchers don't hit the strike zone all the time. Having a bigger clickable area is always better in terms of interface design.
This isn't a user interface complaint, but it's very true that OS X will use all the RAM you can through at it. I don't recommend running it with less than 1GB, which is very cheap if you don't buy it through Apple. And as long as you don't buy a Mac Mini, you can do this without voiding your warranty.
If you're going to be buying running a lot of applications at once, it's important to have as much RAM as possible. But when you can get 2GB of RAM for under $150, there's really no reason not to.
Take, for example, the way menus appear. This affects a lot more than just the OS, since many apps use the same interface widgets. If a menu takes 1/10th of a second to appear, then you could be wasting hours of time over the course of a week or month sitting there waiting for a window to load. Having them appear almost instantly would save that time.
The same goes for positioning the menu bars for an application at the top of the window rather than the top of the screen. On the Mac, the menu bar is essentially infinite in size. You don't have to worry about overshooting it vertically. On Windows, the menu bar is only about 50 pixels high, meaning that every time you overshoot it, it's another 1/10th of a second in lost productivity.
You're forgetting that the earth, and therefore the biology on the earth, is not a closed system. If you're eating every day, you're not a closed system either. Entropy only increases in closed systems.
And it's not just random mutations, though they are a part of it. There's also natural variations within a species. If you started castrating of the people who weren't redheads, we'd end up with a larger percentage of the population who are redheads in a few generations since other traits are being selected against.
Expand this to a species spread over different areas eating different kinds of foods or dealing with different pressures and expand the timeframe over a few million years and evolution isn't impossible.
To be completely fair, they're not just having fun with evolution. They've got their quantum mechanics and biology screwed up, too.
That is, unless you think you don't need to eat a ton of food to instantaneously heal yourself, or that the human mind is able to affect gravity.
If the T-Mobile apps are as good as the iPhone apps, I don't think many people would care enough to want to try and hack it.
But I seriously doubt it.
If you're not getting "warm" colors from CFL bulbs, you're probably using older bulbs. The flickering also points to this. My wife can't stand CRT monitors at 75Hz, but she hasn't complained about our CFL bulbs flickering. She's also got insanely good hearing and doesn't hear them buzz.
This is like the complaint people have with diesel engines. Yeah, the first diesels in the US were smokey and loud and slow, but new ones are virtually indistinguishable from gas engines and use 50% less fuel or more. Yet, people still avoid them because they don't want a "noisy, smokey, slow diesel car."
The problem is that you don't really need a CS degree to do CS work. I started in a CS program and found out it was for people who wanted to work with theory. I switched to Penn State's IST degree. It covered a lot of the bases of technology work, from databases to software development to networking, and had enough electives that you could specialize in any one of those systems and had a strong emphasis on project management skills and teamwork.
You could basically make your own track and come out with a lot of experience and knowledge in a specific area, or come out with general knowledge of the IT world. What you don't get is a ton of comp sci theory. But you come out of it ready to get down to business.
And, interestingly, those who I've encountered that have CS degrees tend to write fairly heady code that is a lot more complex than necessary.
I have two problems with that idea. First, it implies that the reallocation of resources will be instantaneous. Second, it implies that what is in the best short term interests of an entity is also in the best short term interests of society, and also in the best long term interests of both society and that entity.
Take, for example, the H1(b) temporary visas. Sure, this solves the resource shortage in the short term, but unless those people permanently move to the US, they're simply going to take their skills back home and lead to a brain drain, causing the companies that hired them and the US economy at large to suffer.
That was a legacy switch, and was primarily made to reduce said monthly fees.
My wife requires the phone number for work, but we found out we could switch to Vonage and keep our number. If we didn't need it, I'd have dropped the phone service a long time ago.
How about a method that uses images and PHP?
Or, rather, my wife is getting one.
Her birthday is in June, and she needs a new iPod and a new cell phone, and we're already with Cingular and are happy with the service. She saw that you can show pictures to people on that wide screen and said "I want to be able to do that." And now that we've got a baby on the way, it will make it a helluva lot easier than having to lug photos around or view it on my iPod's comparatively small screen, or the tiny screen of an iPod Nano. And having her address book and calendar with her would be very convenient.
So it's not for everybody, but for her it can replace having to carry around two larger items that, were I to buy them separately, would cost about the same price.
I avoid them whenever possible. I hear people talking up TiVo or NetFlix, but you've got to pay a stinking monthly fee. You can't pay as you go or pay for use. That's why I use the iTunes store as my TiVo. If I miss a show, I'll buy THAT EPISODE from iTunes. That way, if I don't use it for a month, it doesn't cost me the same as if I use it all the time.
If there is a service I'd like to use that forces me to pay a monthly fee, I'll spend a few hours trying to get the same functionality without the fee.
If you want this geek's business, either support it with advertising or let me pay based on my usage.
Oh! I never realized it was that easy! Amazing! And I bet if your current boss learns you're looking for another job, like when a recruiter calls you in the middle of the day, he'll be completely understanding about your views.
But why then do they need a corporate email address? Why not a company website with that information? That would be significantly less work to host than an email address.
I think it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson during his talk during Beyond Belief 2006 who explained it like this:
Between 1000 and 1200, the Islamic world was the seat of knowledge. People studied there from all over the globe and many new things were created because of the free flow of ideas. Algebra and alcohol were invented, many stars were named, and the best astrolabes were built in Baghdad.
Then, in the late 12th century, a Muslim cleric rose to power who said that if science or a work of literature didn't agree with the Koran, then the Koran was correct because it was the word of Allah and therefore the final authority. So science started to decline, and the libraries were burned, and the people were driven to superstition. Thankfully, enough survived to not set us back too far, and the Renaissance picked up where the scientists in Baghdad had left off.
And if you can't see the similarities between what happened then in Baghdad and what is happening now in the United States, you are blind.
Why would you want your retail employees to have email? Is it really necessary for the cashier at Wal*Mart to have their own email address when they're probably only going to work there for a few months?
I had something similar happen recently. I went back home and ran out to get the pizza we ordered. Behind the counter stood someone from my high school graduating class. Back then, he was top dog. All the girls fawned all over him. He had a nice car and went to all the parties.
Now I'm the one with the nice car. I'm the one who's got a beautiful wife and a baby on the way and a great new job. And he's still working at the pizza place, still flirting with high school girls, and driving his now old, beat up car.
I made a mistake, it wasn't "Swing" it was "Spring." The homonyms got crossed in my brain.
And I'm still pulling out my hair trying to get a project from our CVS repository to run in Tomcat through Eclipse.