I think the confusion is coming from the two ways of looking at it. You are correct in all of your statements, except for a few important things:
1. The low end iPod has always cost $299.
2. The low end iPod has been upgraded from 15GB to 20GB.
3. Yesterday, the 20GB iPod would have come with a dock, remote, and carrying case, and now it does not.
You can either look at it as a price/accessory reduction in the 20GB model, or you can look at it as an upgrade in the storage capacity of the low end model.
I was thinking along the lines of a "dead on" option for your post. The original post is most definitely brilliant. Sometimes I wish I could just mod someone as "right".
I have also heard that statistic, but the explaination I heard was that they needed the extra time to orient themselves. If the cat starts out too close to the ground, they don't have time to flip over. But, it was a long time ago that I heard it and I can't remember where I got it from. However, I do remember watching slow motion video of a cat flipping over in mid-air. Pretty cool stuff.
Now, if only I could teach my ferrets to do that......
Thank you for confirming the fact that I like to take things apart. Now I can say I'm officially a hacker. Although, I did border closely on being an enemy of the state....
Using the Software Manger - uncheck all removable media
Add ftp sources for the current release and the cooker.
Change the release # in the updates_source to "current" eg. 9.2 > 10.0 (or just "current", as there is usually a link to the current release on the ftp server.
That should always give you access to the lastest versions of a package, although sometimes there are a lot of dependencies, but I've always had them work.
I haven't actually upgraded to 10.0, but at this point most of my packages are from the official 10.0 release, and some are from the cooker, and the system runs just fine.
Besides which, what does a GUI actually add to the package management experience?
Um...how about the ability to browse avalible packages by category so you can find what you want when you don't know the name of the package. I'm a fan of Mandrake's graphical frontend rpmdrake which works through the control panel. It provided a great transition into the world of linux for me the former-windows-user. People new to linux don't know that xine is a great video player that may not be included in their distro, but if they go browsing in the Multimedia category, they can read a description of xine and learn what it is. You can even search the descriptions, so I could type "video player" and it would show up all the packages that were video players. I simple check a little box next to the one I want, click install, click ok when it tells me what other packages need to be installed as dependencies, and watch it download and install everthing automatically.
No...we pay people who know how to do that to do it for us.
Here's the solution: Regular maintenance. Just bring me your computer every 3 months or 3,000 webpages and I'll clean it up for you. For just $29.95 I'll clean out your chache, strip out the spyware and adware, reset your homepage, update your virus definitions, and clean the screen.
For just another $19.95 you can also have an anti-virus scan run, and the hard drive de-fragmented.
Now, of course, this is the kind of regular maintenance that us geeks can handle, but the average user doesn't want to have to mess with. So they can pay me to do it for them.
You can swap out your Ford Radio if you know about the rebate program. You can get a free gas tank adapter. You atill have to find out the alternatives exist and go to the trouble of availing yourself of the opportunity.
But here's where most average computer users are with that:
"But what if the new radio doesn't work? What if I break something trying to switch the radios? I don't know anything about how car radios are built. I don't know how to install the adapter. What if I break it when I'm installing it and then I can't put any gas in my car at all and then my huge investment in this car is worthless. I don't think the Ford Station is all that bad. I don't mind buying Ford gas. I know some of those kids in the area are putting all that crazy non-Ford stuff in their cars, but I'm just not so good with cars. Maybe I'll have the kid down the street come and look at my car sometime....when I get around to it. Till then, I'm just too afraid I might break the car and what I have works well enough, I guess."
Aw, you had to go and make me get all philosophical...
Why is sustaining a single pitch different from repeating a single pitch? Rhythm.
Well then, is there more meaning in rhythm than pitch? Is the absence of rhythm less meaningfull than the presense of rhythm? Is pitch more meaningfull than the lack of pitch? Was John Cage crazy?
Oh, now we're in it.... What is art? What is language? What is music?
You can find meaning in a lot of things. In fact, it is that ability to find meaning where there is none which got me through many long papers for school.
So yes, there can be meaning in a single, solitary, unrepeated note.
Sheet music is also capable of telling you much more. Pitch, rhythm, dynamics, articultation, pitch bending (glissando), phrasing, and much more can be notated in written music. Especially when dealing with contemporary composers, they seem much more likely to be very specific about what they want the performer to do. I would say you can notate just as much in written music as you can in a MIDI instruction set.
You'll also see much more information in a script than in a book. A script will include actions to be taken by the actor, pauses, and various other things that I can only guess at as I've never actually seen a modern script. I know vocalists have a phonetic alphabet they work from which woulnd't make a whole lot of sense to a normal person (and yes, I am making the implication that vocalists aren't normal). However, that phonetic alphabet is much more specific about the actual sound you're to make than regular written English.
So yes, you can compare sheet music and MIDI. Just becuase someone who could recognize all of those instructions in MIDI doesn't know how they would be notated in printed music doesn't mean they aren't there.
"There are only a few people who actually create in the order that the viewer/reader will perceives their art"
You mean, like all performing artists. I know you referenced the creative and visual arts, but as the article is also about music, wouldn't it be only fair to consider the performing arts? As a classical musician, I typically perform pieces written by others. My art is the performance. If you chose to listen to me, you would experience my art from beginning to end, in the order I would create it. In a performance, you can't take back notes you've already played. Often times, my interpretation is subject to change (even if only slightly from what I've prepared and practiced) with the mood of the particular performance. Part of the artistry is in never performing the same work the same way twice, so in that sense, the art is being created as and in the order in which the listener percieves it.
Wow, when I ordered my 9.2 DVD (no box, just the DVD from the Mandrake website) it came 2 day air. The FedEx guy came to place 3 times in one day to make sure it got there on the second day. Either it's harder to ship the box, or things with shipping have gone downhill since 9.2 came out. I also never expected something so cool from FedEx, but I have to give the guy credit, he came by 3 times in the same day.
Maybe I just got lucky. I'm sorry waiting for the box is tainting your experience. Mandrake 9.2 was the first linux I actually bought, and I'm glad it was such a good experience. It makes me highly likely to continue supporting Mandrake in the future.
I guess I'll reply since you were modded "insightful."
The link was very interesting. Unfortunately, the literacy rate of the United States is not necessarily equal to the literacy rate among Sprint customer service representatives and therefore does not necessarily contradict my perception of the truth based on my personal experience and the experiences of those I know. I found it interesting that several countries claim higher literacy rates, including Trinidad, which is referenced by a later poster as a call center location.
Unfortunately the ability to read at whatever level will qualify you for that statistic or even read the script does not a good customer service experience make. Since you brought it up, what I would really like in a good customer service experience is a representative capable of independent critical thinking. The ability to read fluently with clear articulation should be an absolute minimum requirement.
Please forgive my ignorance of html, but there is more information about the status of Ebonics as a separate language at www.cal.org/ebonics/. So, that would negate your point about my ability to understand someone from my own country speaking the same language. According to several sources, African American Vernacular English is a separate language, which I do not speak. The ideal then would be a representative who is able to communicate with the customer in his/her native language, in the case of most Sprint customers, American English. I'm sure we'd be a little upset if the call centers in India allowed their representatives to speak to all callers in Indian.
In reality I'm not as harsh as my previous post. That was my anger and frustration speaking and was meant to be taking with a grain of salt and an ounce of humor. It seems that most of the other people who read it were able to do that.
Yeah, with Sprint, instead of the heavy Indian accent, you get a heavy Ebonics umm...accent? They're just as hard to understand and much less likely to be able to read.
I'm not sorry to be harsh when it's the truth based on not only my experience, but also that of everyone I know and everything I've read. I've never heard a good story with Sprint customer service. One of my co-workers is currently considering legal action against them to get things fixed.
Multiple accounts is definintely an easy way to go. You only need one "admin" account with the ability to install stuff. Give that password only to the person in charge of the machine.
In the Users pane of System Prefs you can create a student account and then click on capabilities and pretty much block them out of everything.
In our OSX lab, we don't let them burn cds or open most of the utilites (including system prefs). They can't run most of the programs that came with OSX, like iMovie or the Address book. We just set up a new cafe image with only a browser and the most popular chat clients in the dock, and then turned off that user's ability to change the dock. The "Cafe" user only has the capability to run those programs. Simple Finder is also a good idea.
Once, we accidentally left some of the system prefs access on and the machine had a new desktop background within hours. People, especially teenagers will want to push the rules just as far as they can, you have to lock them out of as much as possible.
I didn't mean the comment as personally as you seem to have taken it. I have been bothered by the incompotent girlfriend/wife comments for a while, and you just happened to give me the opportunity I needed to vent. I readily admit that women are in the minority when it comes to adopting/not fearing technology, but that doesn't mean all women. Maybe I'm just bitter cause all those other women make me look bad. The thing is, it's hard for a women to get taken seriously in the computer world. Some of us are nerds too.
I wouldn't say I was offended, more like you just hit a sore spot, but thank you for the apology. I will also take this opportunity to apologize for my comment coming out harsher than I meant it.
"but for crying out loud those people are our girlfriends and/or Wives"
It's actually my BOYFIEND who's blindly addicted to OSX. I'm the one who put Yellowdog on our old iBook to make it usefull. I had to show him how to use tab-autocomplete in the terminal and how to use man pages when he couldn't remember what flags to use, for crying out loud. And I'm just a girl. Maybe it's this prejudice against the opposite sex which results in "geeks" always complaining about how they don't get the girls.
"In the end though, I just can't feel bad about some rats. I think of them as the animal equivalent of fleas or mosquitoes in that no matter how many you kill there's still more of them out there somewhere and when you encounter them in their natural state they are always a pain in the ass."
Unfortuanely, I could easily apply that logic to people. No matter how many you get rid of there are still a lot more of them out there, and I've encountered plenty who are pains in the ass. It's not a matter of numbers or temperment that make the rats a good choice, it's the fact that they're OCD and don't weigh enough to detonate a mine.
If intelligence is a factor in relative worth, I think you would have to elevate them above fleas and mosquitoes as they are very smart. Granted, they use their powers for evil rather than good.
I don't think PETA could get too upset over this (other than the fact that the first group died because they were left to boil on the tarmac). As long as the rats are well taken care of in their off-time. As I understand it, one of the big advantages to rats over dogs is that the dogs will occasionally get blown up, while the rats are too light to set off the mine. So we went from dogs getting blown up to nothing (theoretically) getting blown up.
Ever since I got my iPaq and started using it to take notes in class, I've been looking for something similar in a paperback book form factor. I love the iPaq, but it would be nice to be able to write more than 5 words on the screen at a time before I have to wait for it to figure out what I wrote and clear the screen so I can start writing again. As a girl, it's not about does it fit in my pocket, but does it fit in my purse anyway. I've got room for a slightly bigger device.
With my limited (non-existant) ability to figure out the Japanese, I can't really tell what it has in it other than the 20G hard drive. If it also has WiFi and Bluetooth, I want one. Now, if only they could cram an optical drive into these things...mmmmmm....super portable DVD. Although, I guess you could just rip them and put them on the hard drive.
I guess I better start saving up now, so I'll be able to afford one when it hits the US market in 3 years.
It's not that the trend is dying down, it's just that the first generation of those kids are growing up. They're in college learning that the knowledge they got when they were 12 can be used to rule the world.
Heck, I was breaking stuff with vi when I was 8, world domination can't be too far away now.
Actually, since I'm sitting here in KDE I'll try to check my email. One of the default icons on the KDE taskbar looks like a picture of a letter, maybe that will do it. Yup, that launches Kmail. One of the big advantages to the GUI is the use of pictures that can suggest what a program may do. If that nice little picture is not on my taskbar (and big assumtion here - that I know what the K menu is and does) I can open my K menu. I have a "what to do" entry. That looks like a good place to look. Hmmmm, no check email option. Well, I hear that email is this thing you do on the internet, and there is a "use the internet" option. Ah, there it is, one of the options is "read and send mail" and it will open Kmail. On the windows side, with XP, there's a big button at the top of the start menu called email, which opens Outlook. That's pretty easy to find, even if I don't know that the name of the email program is outlook. The real problem is, if I have to go through all of that, I probably don't know how to set up an email account anyway.
What I was really trying to do with my dilogue was show that sometimes the feedback you get isn't a very usefull dialogue at all. The computer doesn't speak the same language I do. A command line is only as powerfull as the commands you know.
I think the best interface for a newbie is a real live person who can sit down with them and show them how whatever interface they want to use works. Computers speak a language of their own, and it's easier to get used to that language (visual or typed) when you have someone to show you around.
I submit the following "dialogue" I had with my computer for your amusement....
$ check email bash: check: command not found $ get email bash: get: command not found $ read email (I had to ^C out of this one, good thing I know how to do that) $ find email find: email: No such file or directory $ where is my email bash: where: command not found $ help email bash: help: no help topics match `email'. Try `help help' or `man -k email' or `info email'. $ man -k email audiosend (1) - Send an audio email message showaudio
hmmmmm...still no email......yup, that's an intuitive dialogue I just had
BTW, can any mac user tell me: how well does the ACPI equivalent on MAC work?
It just works, which is more than I can say for my PC. Mandrake 9.2 can't put my (Toshiba) laptop to sleep, and it's eats battery way faster than windows due to it's inability to throttle the processor. Oh yeah, and there's no driver for my wireless card
I have had Mandrake 9.1 for PPC and Yellow Dog on a little G3 iBook, and it just works. I shut the lid, the machine goes to sleep, the little light up apple turns off and the blinky sleep light on the front comes on. I was blown away when it just worked like that. It also comes back almost instanly on re-opening the lid. It obviously works just as well in OSX, with the exception of it not handling it when I move from one wireless network to another while it's asleep. It usually needs to be reminded that it's not in the same place it was when I put it to sleep. I was equally blown away when the airport just worked. Aside from the installation glitches in Yellow Dog, I find it to be just as good as anything else you could run on an iBook.
As a windows kid by raising (well, okay, I started on DOS with some Unix utilities as well), I much prefer to run linux on my iBook. First of all, the KDE desktop is just way more farmiliar to me. Second of all, as I get better with the various Unix commands, and use them more in managing computers in the computer lab where I work, I find linux to be a much simpler environment. I get really frustrated when trying to do Unix stuff in OSX. With linux, I know where my.conf files are, what they do, and how to edit them. Preferences in OSX live in at least 3 different places, making it insanely frustrating to try and manage all of them on the machines in the lab.
For me, I run linux on my iBook because it's more farmiliar. OSX is fine for internet and email, but to get things done, I prefer linux.
I guess I should qualify why I even have an iBook in the first place....I bought it used and abused from a friend. My boyfriend is a Mac nut and needed a backup machine to use while his other mac was busy with renders so he put 10.3 on it. I made him leave me about 5G at the end of the drive for linux. The more OS's I use, the more I hate them all.
Les Mis is not a play, it is a musical. In fact, there is little to no spoken word in Les Mis making it almost an opera, which would make the music quite important.
Many people seem to think that if all the musicians are doing is playing from the score, then a machine may as well be doing it. To me, that's like saying, "if all the actors are doing is reading from the script, then we may as well replace them with robots." The fact is, despite the mess of markings that is a classical score, there are many more things not on that page that musicians are expected to fill in. There is a passion and subtlety of emotion, expression, articualtion, and sound that no machine can reproduce.
As a classicaly trained musician soon to graduate with my Master's in performance, I may be a bit biased, but the majority of my training hinges on those very points. Playing the music on the page is a given, you just have to be able to do at least that. What gets you a job and makes the music worth listening to, is doing more than what's on the page.
Now admittedly, that's hard to do for a show that's been running for so long. Many people have pointed out the business end of this decission. So, lets look at this from a business point of view...If the market demand for performance of this show no longer supports it being preformed in a space big enough, then the market has no more need for this show. Maybe it's time to learn a new show.
I think that all adds up to about $.04. Thanks for reading
Slashdot Mirror
I think the confusion is coming from the two ways of looking at it. You are correct in all of your statements, except for a few important things:
1. The low end iPod has always cost $299.
2. The low end iPod has been upgraded from 15GB to 20GB.
3. Yesterday, the 20GB iPod would have come with a dock, remote, and carrying case, and now it does not.
You can either look at it as a price/accessory reduction in the 20GB model, or you can look at it as an upgrade in the storage capacity of the low end model.
I was thinking along the lines of a "dead on" option for your post. The original post is most definitely brilliant. Sometimes I wish I could just mod someone as "right".
I have also heard that statistic, but the explaination I heard was that they needed the extra time to orient themselves. If the cat starts out too close to the ground, they don't have time to flip over. But, it was a long time ago that I heard it and I can't remember where I got it from. However, I do remember watching slow motion video of a cat flipping over in mid-air. Pretty cool stuff.
Now, if only I could teach my ferrets to do that......
Thank you for confirming the fact that I like to take things apart. Now I can say I'm officially a hacker. Although, I did border closely on being an enemy of the state....
Using the Software Manger - uncheck all removable media
Add ftp sources for the current release and the cooker.
Change the release # in the updates_source to "current" eg. 9.2 > 10.0 (or just "current", as there is usually a link to the current release on the ftp server.
That should always give you access to the lastest versions of a package, although sometimes there are a lot of dependencies, but I've always had them work.
I haven't actually upgraded to 10.0, but at this point most of my packages are from the official 10.0 release, and some are from the cooker, and the system runs just fine.
Um...how about the ability to browse avalible packages by category so you can find what you want when you don't know the name of the package. I'm a fan of Mandrake's graphical frontend rpmdrake which works through the control panel. It provided a great transition into the world of linux for me the former-windows-user. People new to linux don't know that xine is a great video player that may not be included in their distro, but if they go browsing in the Multimedia category, they can read a description of xine and learn what it is. You can even search the descriptions, so I could type "video player" and it would show up all the packages that were video players. I simple check a little box next to the one I want, click install, click ok when it tells me what other packages need to be installed as dependencies, and watch it download and install everthing automatically.
No...we pay people who know how to do that to do it for us.
Here's the solution: Regular maintenance. Just bring me your computer every 3 months or 3,000 webpages and I'll clean it up for you. For just $29.95 I'll clean out your chache, strip out the spyware and adware, reset your homepage, update your virus definitions, and clean the screen.
For just another $19.95 you can also have an anti-virus scan run, and the hard drive de-fragmented.
Now, of course, this is the kind of regular maintenance that us geeks can handle, but the average user doesn't want to have to mess with. So they can pay me to do it for them.
But here's where most average computer users are with that:
"But what if the new radio doesn't work? What if I break something trying to switch the radios? I don't know anything about how car radios are built. I don't know how to install the adapter. What if I break it when I'm installing it and then I can't put any gas in my car at all and then my huge investment in this car is worthless. I don't think the Ford Station is all that bad. I don't mind buying Ford gas. I know some of those kids in the area are putting all that crazy non-Ford stuff in their cars, but I'm just not so good with cars. Maybe I'll have the kid down the street come and look at my car sometime....when I get around to it. Till then, I'm just too afraid I might break the car and what I have works well enough, I guess."
Aw, you had to go and make me get all philosophical...
Why is sustaining a single pitch different from repeating a single pitch? Rhythm.
Well then, is there more meaning in rhythm than pitch?
Is the absence of rhythm less meaningfull than the presense of rhythm?
Is pitch more meaningfull than the lack of pitch?
Was John Cage crazy?
Oh, now we're in it....
What is art?
What is language?
What is music?
You can find meaning in a lot of things. In fact, it is that ability to find meaning where there is none which got me through many long papers for school.
So yes, there can be meaning in a single, solitary, unrepeated note.
Sheet music is also capable of telling you much more. Pitch, rhythm, dynamics, articultation, pitch bending (glissando), phrasing, and much more can be notated in written music. Especially when dealing with contemporary composers, they seem much more likely to be very specific about what they want the performer to do. I would say you can notate just as much in written music as you can in a MIDI instruction set.
You'll also see much more information in a script than in a book. A script will include actions to be taken by the actor, pauses, and various other things that I can only guess at as I've never actually seen a modern script. I know vocalists have a phonetic alphabet they work from which woulnd't make a whole lot of sense to a normal person (and yes, I am making the implication that vocalists aren't normal). However, that phonetic alphabet is much more specific about the actual sound you're to make than regular written English.
So yes, you can compare sheet music and MIDI. Just becuase someone who could recognize all of those instructions in MIDI doesn't know how they would be notated in printed music doesn't mean they aren't there.
"There are only a few people who actually create in the order that the viewer/reader will perceives their art"
You mean, like all performing artists. I know you referenced the creative and visual arts, but as the article is also about music, wouldn't it be only fair to consider the performing arts? As a classical musician, I typically perform pieces written by others. My art is the performance. If you chose to listen to me, you would experience my art from beginning to end, in the order I would create it. In a performance, you can't take back notes you've already played. Often times, my interpretation is subject to change (even if only slightly from what I've prepared and practiced) with the mood of the particular performance. Part of the artistry is in never performing the same work the same way twice, so in that sense, the art is being created as and in the order in which the listener percieves it.
Oh, that's it....I give up all the mod points I already used on this article just becuase there is no option for "horrible horrible pun."
Wow, when I ordered my 9.2 DVD (no box, just the DVD from the Mandrake website) it came 2 day air. The FedEx guy came to place 3 times in one day to make sure it got there on the second day. Either it's harder to ship the box, or things with shipping have gone downhill since 9.2 came out. I also never expected something so cool from FedEx, but I have to give the guy credit, he came by 3 times in the same day. Maybe I just got lucky. I'm sorry waiting for the box is tainting your experience. Mandrake 9.2 was the first linux I actually bought, and I'm glad it was such a good experience. It makes me highly likely to continue supporting Mandrake in the future.
I guess I'll reply since you were modded "insightful."
The link was very interesting. Unfortunately, the literacy rate of the United States is not necessarily equal to the literacy rate among Sprint customer service representatives and therefore does not necessarily contradict my perception of the truth based on my personal experience and the experiences of those I know. I found it interesting that several countries claim higher literacy rates, including Trinidad, which is referenced by a later poster as a call center location.
Unfortunately the ability to read at whatever level will qualify you for that statistic or even read the script does not a good customer service experience make. Since you brought it up, what I would really like in a good customer service experience is a representative capable of independent critical thinking. The ability to read fluently with clear articulation should be an absolute minimum requirement.
Please forgive my ignorance of html, but there is more information about the status of Ebonics as a separate language at www.cal.org/ebonics/. So, that would negate your point about my ability to understand someone from my own country speaking the same language. According to several sources, African American Vernacular English is a separate language, which I do not speak. The ideal then would be a representative who is able to communicate with the customer in his/her native language, in the case of most Sprint customers, American English. I'm sure we'd be a little upset if the call centers in India allowed their representatives to speak to all callers in Indian.
In reality I'm not as harsh as my previous post. That was my anger and frustration speaking and was meant to be taking with a grain of salt and an ounce of humor. It seems that most of the other people who read it were able to do that.
Yeah, with Sprint, instead of the heavy Indian accent, you get a heavy Ebonics umm...accent? They're just as hard to understand and much less likely to be able to read.
I'm not sorry to be harsh when it's the truth based on not only my experience, but also that of everyone I know and everything I've read. I've never heard a good story with Sprint customer service. One of my co-workers is currently considering legal action against them to get things fixed.
Multiple accounts is definintely an easy way to go. You only need one "admin" account with the ability to install stuff. Give that password only to the person in charge of the machine.
In the Users pane of System Prefs you can create a student account and then click on capabilities and pretty much block them out of everything.
In our OSX lab, we don't let them burn cds or open most of the utilites (including system prefs). They can't run most of the programs that came with OSX, like iMovie or the Address book. We just set up a new cafe image with only a browser and the most popular chat clients in the dock, and then turned off that user's ability to change the dock. The "Cafe" user only has the capability to run those programs. Simple Finder is also a good idea.
Once, we accidentally left some of the system prefs access on and the machine had a new desktop background within hours. People, especially teenagers will want to push the rules just as far as they can, you have to lock them out of as much as possible.
I didn't mean the comment as personally as you seem to have taken it. I have been bothered by the incompotent girlfriend/wife comments for a while, and you just happened to give me the opportunity I needed to vent. I readily admit that women are in the minority when it comes to adopting/not fearing technology, but that doesn't mean all women. Maybe I'm just bitter cause all those other women make me look bad. The thing is, it's hard for a women to get taken seriously in the computer world. Some of us are nerds too.
I wouldn't say I was offended, more like you just hit a sore spot, but thank you for the apology. I will also take this opportunity to apologize for my comment coming out harsher than I meant it.
Can we all just get along now?
I'll bite.....
"but for crying out loud those people are our girlfriends and/or Wives"
It's actually my BOYFIEND who's blindly addicted to OSX. I'm the one who put Yellowdog on our old iBook to make it usefull. I had to show him how to use tab-autocomplete in the terminal and how to use man pages when he couldn't remember what flags to use, for crying out loud. And I'm just a girl. Maybe it's this prejudice against the opposite sex which results in "geeks" always complaining about how they don't get the girls.
"In the end though, I just can't feel bad about some rats. I think of them as the animal equivalent of fleas or mosquitoes in that no matter how many you kill there's still more of them out there somewhere and when you encounter them in their natural state they are always a pain in the ass."
Unfortuanely, I could easily apply that logic to people. No matter how many you get rid of there are still a lot more of them out there, and I've encountered plenty who are pains in the ass. It's not a matter of numbers or temperment that make the rats a good choice, it's the fact that they're OCD and don't weigh enough to detonate a mine.
If intelligence is a factor in relative worth, I think you would have to elevate them above fleas and mosquitoes as they are very smart. Granted, they use their powers for evil rather than good.
I don't think PETA could get too upset over this (other than the fact that the first group died because they were left to boil on the tarmac). As long as the rats are well taken care of in their off-time. As I understand it, one of the big advantages to rats over dogs is that the dogs will occasionally get blown up, while the rats are too light to set off the mine. So we went from dogs getting blown up to nothing (theoretically) getting blown up.
But it sure would make a nice PDA replacement.
Ever since I got my iPaq and started using it to take notes in class, I've been looking for something similar in a paperback book form factor. I love the iPaq, but it would be nice to be able to write more than 5 words on the screen at a time before I have to wait for it to figure out what I wrote and clear the screen so I can start writing again. As a girl, it's not about does it fit in my pocket, but does it fit in my purse anyway. I've got room for a slightly bigger device.
With my limited (non-existant) ability to figure out the Japanese, I can't really tell what it has in it other than the 20G hard drive. If it also has WiFi and Bluetooth, I want one. Now, if only they could cram an optical drive into these things...mmmmmm....super portable DVD. Although, I guess you could just rip them and put them on the hard drive.
I guess I better start saving up now, so I'll be able to afford one when it hits the US market in 3 years.
It's not that the trend is dying down, it's just that the first generation of those kids are growing up. They're in college learning that the knowledge they got when they were 12 can be used to rule the world.
Heck, I was breaking stuff with vi when I was 8, world domination can't be too far away now.
Actually, since I'm sitting here in KDE I'll try to check my email. One of the default icons on the KDE taskbar looks like a picture of a letter, maybe that will do it. Yup, that launches Kmail. One of the big advantages to the GUI is the use of pictures that can suggest what a program may do. If that nice little picture is not on my taskbar (and big assumtion here - that I know what the K menu is and does) I can open my K menu. I have a "what to do" entry. That looks like a good place to look. Hmmmm, no check email option. Well, I hear that email is this thing you do on the internet, and there is a "use the internet" option. Ah, there it is, one of the options is "read and send mail" and it will open Kmail. On the windows side, with XP, there's a big button at the top of the start menu called email, which opens Outlook. That's pretty easy to find, even if I don't know that the name of the email program is outlook. The real problem is, if I have to go through all of that, I probably don't know how to set up an email account anyway.
What I was really trying to do with my dilogue was show that sometimes the feedback you get isn't a very usefull dialogue at all. The computer doesn't speak the same language I do. A command line is only as powerfull as the commands you know.
I think the best interface for a newbie is a real live person who can sit down with them and show them how whatever interface they want to use works. Computers speak a language of their own, and it's easier to get used to that language (visual or typed) when you have someone to show you around.
I submit the following "dialogue" I had with my computer for your amusement....
$ check email
bash: check: command not found
$ get email
bash: get: command not found
$ read email
(I had to ^C out of this one, good thing I know how to do that)
$ find email
find: email: No such file or directory
$ where is my email
bash: where: command not found
$ help email
bash: help: no help topics match `email'. Try `help help' or `man -k email' or `info email'.
$ man -k email
audiosend (1) - Send an audio email message
showaudio
hmmmmm...still no email......yup, that's an intuitive dialogue I just had
BTW, can any mac user tell me: how well does the ACPI equivalent on MAC work?
.conf files are, what they do, and how to edit them. Preferences in OSX live in at least 3 different places, making it insanely frustrating to try and manage all of them on the machines in the lab.
It just works, which is more than I can say for my PC. Mandrake 9.2 can't put my (Toshiba) laptop to sleep, and it's eats battery way faster than windows due to it's inability to throttle the processor. Oh yeah, and there's no driver for my wireless card
I have had Mandrake 9.1 for PPC and Yellow Dog on a little G3 iBook, and it just works. I shut the lid, the machine goes to sleep, the little light up apple turns off and the blinky sleep light on the front comes on. I was blown away when it just worked like that. It also comes back almost instanly on re-opening the lid. It obviously works just as well in OSX, with the exception of it not handling it when I move from one wireless network to another while it's asleep. It usually needs to be reminded that it's not in the same place it was when I put it to sleep. I was equally blown away when the airport just worked. Aside from the installation glitches in Yellow Dog, I find it to be just as good as anything else you could run on an iBook.
As a windows kid by raising (well, okay, I started on DOS with some Unix utilities as well), I much prefer to run linux on my iBook. First of all, the KDE desktop is just way more farmiliar to me. Second of all, as I get better with the various Unix commands, and use them more in managing computers in the computer lab where I work, I find linux to be a much simpler environment. I get really frustrated when trying to do Unix stuff in OSX. With linux, I know where my
For me, I run linux on my iBook because it's more farmiliar. OSX is fine for internet and email, but to get things done, I prefer linux.
I guess I should qualify why I even have an iBook in the first place....I bought it used and abused from a friend. My boyfriend is a Mac nut and needed a backup machine to use while his other mac was busy with renders so he put 10.3 on it. I made him leave me about 5G at the end of the drive for linux. The more OS's I use, the more I hate them all.
To address a few of the concerns raised here:
Les Mis is not a play, it is a musical. In fact, there is little to no spoken word in Les Mis making it almost an opera, which would make the music quite important.
Many people seem to think that if all the musicians are doing is playing from the score, then a machine may as well be doing it. To me, that's like saying, "if all the actors are doing is reading from the script, then we may as well replace them with robots." The fact is, despite the mess of markings that is a classical score, there are many more things not on that page that musicians are expected to fill in. There is a passion and subtlety of emotion, expression, articualtion, and sound that no machine can reproduce.
As a classicaly trained musician soon to graduate with my Master's in performance, I may be a bit biased, but the majority of my training hinges on those very points. Playing the music on the page is a given, you just have to be able to do at least that. What gets you a job and makes the music worth listening to, is doing more than what's on the page.
Now admittedly, that's hard to do for a show that's been running for so long. Many people have pointed out the business end of this decission. So, lets look at this from a business point of view...If the market demand for performance of this show no longer supports it being preformed in a space big enough, then the market has no more need for this show. Maybe it's time to learn a new show.
I think that all adds up to about $.04. Thanks for reading