So, when Apple sells well, it is proof that it is innovative, but when MS sells well, it is because they are entrenched. Hypocrisy.
There were plenty of mp3 players that only had a few buttons. Just as there were plenty that had lots of buttons. You are rationalizing.
The iPod touch was just a PDA with a focus on the mp3 player. This was not innovative. It was a perfectly fine product, but innovative it was not. The iPhone was late to the game of merging the PDAs and Phones. As said before. The iPad is just a big iPod. It is no more innovative than McDonalds coming out with a bigger sized soda.
Your claim that type ahead was an Apple innovation makes no sense, since you start out saying that Apple didn't invent it, but that they were innovative for doing it. If you point is that they did it 'on a phone'. Then your in the same category as all of the people that have tried to claim that something was new because it was 'on a computer', or 'on the internet'. It makes about sense as saying that I am being innovative by pressing the 'i' key. After all, I am the first person to press the i key 'on my computer at 9:13 AM on 8/15/210'. 'i', Innovation!!!
You are rationalizing your hypocrisy. Your car sitting in front of someone else on the freeway has a greater direct effect on the people behind you than their cigarette does on you. Claiming that laws were put in place to reduce your 100 times more damaging pollution to being only 10 times more damaging than cigarettes doesn't make your pollution somehow less bad.
You are describing at best innovation in a sales. Innovation in convincing people that what they have is better irrelevant of whether the product is better, worse, or a product that has been on the market for years, and you have just slapped your name on it. Nothing you said about Apple describes an innovative PRODUCT. By your standards, the MS Windows GUI is one of the most innovative software products ever produced.
Even more so, how is iTunes innovative? How is the iPod innovative? How is the iPhone anything more than an iPod with a phone in it? The worst example of all is the iPad. It is about as innovative as super sizing a meal at McDonalds.
The one that has been throwing me lately is the new use of the term "drop" for a product. Just a short while ago, when a company said they were going to "drop a product", it meant that they were no longer going to sell or support it. It has been dropped from their inventory. Recently, I have been seeing new articles, press releases and as of last thursday, billboards that use the term drop to mean release. I suspect that the term started getting used this new way because someone heard that a product was being 'drop shipped', and then shortened that to 'dropped'. This wouldn't be so bad if 'dropping a product' didn't already have a very specific meaning already.
So, what do you suggest those of us with a lean body mass high enough to define us as 'overweight' do? Should we start amputating? I can tell you that I have been 'obese' many times in my life, and still a lower body fat percentage than a good portion of the people that are 'normal' weight.
The TV is less of an influence than the public school system. Consider that a large portion of the population spends more of there childhood under the car of the state than they do the care of their parents. Then look at any of the threads on education right here on slashdot. Watch for the subject of home schooling to come up and see how many people believe that it is the public schools job to teach their kids the rules of society, and how not sending your kids to public school deprives kids of that training.
Blaming the TV for our social problems might be popular, but it doesn't make it true.
Seriously. Closer to home, I see people in the gym running for ages on the treadmill - why didn't they just run to the gym rather than drive? It is madness.
I have noticed, and been amazed by this also. The take away from it though is that the problem is NOT people being lazy. Running for ages on a treadmill is not the action of a lazy person. The biggest problem is that people have been conned into believing that a diet consisting of primarily sugar is healthy. It is amazing how many people will tell you that the bowl of pasta they are eating is healthy because 'It isn't sugar. It is carbohydrates'. Our diets of slow metabolizing fats that last us through the day have been replaced by quick metabolizing sugars that must be burned immediately or stored as body fat.
Another part of the problem is that we are not measuring people's body fat. We are measuring their weight and height. So, people that are incredibly unhealthy are being told that they are just fine, while other people that are just fine are being told that they are obese. The BMI is bunk, yet is considered the gold standard of health.
Anyone who drives a car, or has someone else drive for them, and complains about smoking is a hypocrite. Heck, anyone who uses electricity that is derived from burning fossil fuels is a hypocrite. Short of being locked in a car with the windows up, the average household's electricity and driving puts more crap into other peoples lungs than smoking will ever do. I would love it if tomorrow every smoker woke up and decided that they had quit, but the second had smoke claim is utter BS.
Bingo! I am technically obese on bad days, yet you cans see my stomach muscles, and that is where I carry my body fat. My lean body mass is just shy of making me 'overweight' and that is because I don't work out. If I did work out, there is no way that I could keep my lean body mass in the 'normal' range for a persons full weight. People should go get hydrostatically weighed. A lot 'normal' and 'overweight' people would be in for a shock.
Personally, I'm not impressed by the 'obese' title. I am 'obese' by the definition that the government, insurance and health industries use. While I could lose a couple of pounds, you can still see my stomach muscles. There is this myth that those of use that are naturally muscular don't exist. It is important to note that this is our definition of 'obese'.
So, should really muscular people stop moving so that they can drop some of that fuel wasting muscle? Personally, I'm not sure how I am going to get rid of it, since just sitting in front of my computer has made me muscular enough that my lean body mass is only 15 pounds under the 'overweight' line per the BMI.
I agree. My son has been doing multiplication since he was 4. Pretty much as soon has he knew addition, I just explained that multiplication was a shortcut for addition, and off he went. Honestly, learning variables is something that any halfway intelligent 6 year old can handle. Go into family style restaurants and look at the kids menus. They very frequently have the 'replace the numbers with letters and discover the secret message' puzzles on them. The same for many fast food kids meal containers. Little kids have no problem understanding variables. Just tell them that the x is the mystery number that they have to figure out, and they will get it just fine.
When I initially planned my child's curriculum, I was quickly reminded that kid's math books try to hide variables from kids. So, instead of just calling the math they learn at a young age what it is, Algebra, they just call it math and replace all of the letter variables with box and underline symbols for variables, and then when they get older, tell them that they are taking Algebra and it is totally different from what they have been doing since they were 5. 5+1=_+4 is just as much Algebra as 5+1=x+4. As you say, if kids are taught that = means equality, much of the difficulty of math goes away.
A better solution is to find a better school. A better public school, or a private school, or a charter school, or something.
Seriously? So, basically be rich? You know, sell your home and move if you don't like your kids teachers? Or shell out for the tuition of a private school, along with the problems that they have? Really? That is your solution?
But home schooling pretty much fails to develop a kid's social skills. And I've always felt that one of the more important things that public schooling does is develop social skills.
When I was first looking into homeschooling, I went to a home school supply store. The owner starting jabbering on to me how the public schools were not there to educate the kids, but they were a social program to indoctrinate them into a labor social system. Red flags went up in my head telling me that this woman was a loon. Yet, I constantly hear anti-home school people repeating basically the same thing. Of course, 'social skills' is one of those things that are almost impossible to objectively measure. Since home schooled kids wipe the floor in every subject that can be objectively measured, the public school advocates latch on to 'social skills'.
Home schooled kids don't generally have to put up with schoolyard bullies.
The existence of bullies in public schools in evidence that the public schools don't teach kids good social skills. Also, your comment implies that getting punched in the face and harassed on a daily basis by someone while police require you to remain in the persons presence is a good thing. You must be planning for your kids to live their adult lives in jail, because that is the only place that adults are required by law to take daily physical and verbal abuse.
They don't have to make friends.
Nobody has to make friends. My home schooled son has more of them than I did when I was his age and in public school. This seems to be a common occurrence among the many home schooled families I know.
They don't learn about compromises and sharing and common interests the way you do when you're surrounded by other people all day long.
Wrong again. They have to be BETTER at it than public schooled kids. All of their friends are kids who CHOOSE to be around them, as opposed to the public school kids who have people being FORCED to be around them.
They don't learn to file the rough edges off their own personality, so that they can get along with others.
I point back to your bully remark earlier.
They're more concerned about sheltering their kid either from harm, or from opposing viewpoints.
It is actually the opposite. The political and social viewpoints of home schooled families are far more varied than what you find in the public school. Combine that with a heavy indoctrination system by the schools, and the far smaller amount of time that public schooled parents spend with their families, and you get homogeneity in students of public school. When home schooled kids hear a subject being debated they are universally encouraged to ask questions and to put in their 2 cents.
I have yet to see this socially well adjust public schooled population that you seem to be claiming exists.
I witnessed a good example of this. A good friend of mine has a 9 year old daughter. We were watching her for an evening, and my wife decided to play 'Addition Bingo' with her and our 6 year old son. Things went fine for all of the single digit addition. She whipped out the answer quick as can be. Then she was presented with her first 2 digit math problem. It was 13 + 0. The poor little girl was completely stumped. She hadn't memorized addition up to 13, and she simply didn't know how to add zero to the number 13.
As for not understanding the = sign. The reason is that it appears most teachers don't understand it. They treat it as a separate operator from < and >. =, > and < are all the same symbol. They are just two lines with the space showing what side is larger. In <, the space between the ends of the lines on the left is smaller, and the right is larger. Thus the number on the left will be smaller and the right is larger. Conversely, in >, it is still two lines, but this time the space at the ends of the right side are smaller and the space on the left said is bigger. The = sign is the final choice. In an = sign, the space between the lines on the left side is the same size as the space between the lines on the right side. Thus the numbers are the same size. <, >, = are icons. They are drawings of what they are used for. You can't get much simpler than that. They are by a far margin the MOST obvious symbols in math.
Part of how we got to this state is that, as other have pointed out, kids are taught that = is "find the answer". Then when presenting < and >, students are told that they are like "alligators where the smaller alligator is eating the bigger alligator". I kid you not. The standard method for teachers to explain is to tell kids they represent alligators. The idea that they don't just point out that they are pictures is bad enough, but on what planet does "the smaller predator eats the bigger predator" make sense. Sure it can happen, but it certainly isn't logical. So, what kids end up doing is learning math as some kind of bizarre fable where alligators eat each other, but in the opposite way than you would expect.
Very few Mac programs 'close' when you click the 'X'. If you want to 'quit' a program, you either use the keyboard shortcut (Command-Q for every app on the Mac), or you click the app menu and select quit. It is consistent to such a degree that you will find the same options on every Mac program out there. In additional, there are almost no apps that 'quit' when you click the 'X'. The ones that do actually quit are limited to a few system utilities. The rest just stay resident in the background as needed. It makes launching them again much faster, and has no negative impact on performance since the memory management is so well done (Wired, Active, Inactive, and Free). The same is true for iOS4. It's all to common I will find 20 to 30 apps just sitting there in the background on my iPhone. They have no impact on performance, even when working with 512 MB.
You are wrong. Taking a Mac with only software supplied by Apple, the number of programs that come with the system that close verses stay running when you push the red X is about 50/50. This is horribly inconsistent, and that isn't even counting the fact that a red X means stop totally irrelevant to computers. Also, shortcut keys are not "intuitive". They are something that you can train to do, but they are not any more intuitive than typing load "*",8,1.
The UI probably doesn't make sense to you, because your were raised on Windows or Linux.
I was raised on the Commodore KIM-2, then the Atari 800, TI-99-4A, Apple II, C-64, PDP, DEC Rainbow 100, Amiga, and DOS. I never even saw Windows until version 3.0 which would have been over a decade into my computer usage. So, no. The fact that I see the inconsistencies and unintuativeness of MacOS is because there are some brain dead UI choices. Your comment is one of the reasons I suspect that the poor UI of MacOS doesn't get fixed. Any complaint, no matter how legitimate, get dissmissed as the person being "raised on Windows".
The OS X UI however, makes sense to someone who's never sat in front of a computer. They click the plus symbol to maximize the window to fit the doc. Why would it instead fill the entire screen when the doc only takes a portion of that?
No it doesn't. You only think it does because you are used to it. First, the green plus does NOT mean maximize window to fit the doc. That is just wrong. E.g. Of the applications that COMES INTALLED BY DEFAULT, pressing the green plus button:
Address Book: Fills entire screen when the doc only takes a portion of it. Then changes functionality to shrink the window. Neither is fit to the document.
Calculator: Cycles through the three modes of the calculator. It isn't maximizing the window. It is changing the functionality of the application.
DVD Player: Changes between the default windows size, and the last manually set window size. Sometimes this means grow, sometimes this means shrink. Never does it mean fit window to document in any way.
Chess: Increases window to maximum height of screen, then changes functionality to shrink window to the last manually set size. It does not increase to fit doc as the doc resizes to the window. There is also no indication that you can resize the windows manually, as there is not corner grab bar to indicate it, and the curser does not change when you are in the corner. You are supposed to just magically know.
Dictionary: Fills entire screen when the doc only takes a portion of it. Then changes functionality to shrink the window. Neither is fit to the document.
iPhoto: Fills the entire screen, not sized to document. Sets screen to last manually set size. Not sized to document.
iTunes: fills the entire screen and changes functionality. Does not resize to document. Then functionality changes to shrink window, not to a document size and changes functionality to the application.
I'll tell you what makes Macs better. The UI. Everyone know that green plus buttons should make a windows smaller, and a red X should sometimes close a program, and sometimes only close the window, leaving the program still running. Most of all, everyone know that the most logical way to eject a disk from a drive is to throw it in the garbage can. Until Apples competitors can match Apple in at least these obviously superior UI elements, they have no hope of being compared to Apple in quality and ease of use.
On my myTouch and Nexus 1, voice dialing worked from day one as well. My big complaint was that there was NOT a confirmation button. This meant that when the phone invariably got the wrong name, it would call the wrong person. I have heard people complain that Android couldn't do voice dialing, but I have yet to see one that doesn't.
I would say that Plants vs. Zombies is a very good example of this. While it does look good, it doesn't have wiz bang graphics, and it has no real special effects. The graphics qualities are so low, that you don't even see the difference when it was ported to the iPhone. I would guess that it could be scaled down to a 16 color 320x200 screen and still be an awsome game by today's standards.
It's all fiction anyway, but it helps to try to understand the technology imagined in these fictions. The technologies imagined in SciFi are quite often candidate for implementation in our present or near future.
I didn't even realize that the point of the private browsing had anything to do with sites you visited. I thought it was clearly being marketed at a way to keep the next person sitting at your computer from seeing that you were visiting porn sites. Having your wife or kids follow behind you on the computer only to have porn sites pop up when they start typing in an address was a pretty big problem for a lot of people. This problem got even worse when the address bar started doing better type ahead by prioritizing heavily visited sites.
I mean really, as much as IP address change, they don't change that often, so it wouldn't be hard for sites tracking users to just use the IP address. All it would take is for 1 site that you visit logged in to act as an IP update source, and bingo, you are being tracked no matter what software you run on your computer. The only way around that would be to never log in to any sites, or run through some kind of proxy.
So, it is simple. Don't expect the private browsing to keep you from being tracked by web sites. There is nothing the browser makers can do about that. Use it to keep your 6 year old from accidentally finding out that you have been visiting 'Dirty DORA's anal Dungeon'.
If you have something legitimate to mock the man about, you should mock him for that. When people mock him for describing the internet as a series of tubes, they just sound stupid. Heck, even your example of "I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday." isn't really that bad, since he was obviously talking about an internet email. This would be opposed to an internal email. Is his comment any worse that the millions of people that refer to an internet search as Googling? Sure his poor wording didn't catch on, and wasn't already in popular use, but while his slang may not have been great, and his sys admin lied to him as to why it took so long for his email to arrive, the content of his was legitimate. Even if I disagree with him. What really happened here was that someone complained about what he said, the complainer was wrong, and once the sharks started feeding, the irrational complaints just kept going.
We saw the same thing with Dan Quayle. There may have been plenty of things to ridicule the man for, but at the time of the famous "potatoe" incident, "potatoe" was a valid, even if less used, spelling of the word. It was commonly spelled that way by the populace, many teachers were teaching that spelling, and it was in many dictionaries as the less common spelling of the word. No one at the incident noticed anything was wrong until a reporter that obviously couldn't spell well started mouthing off about it. That was picked up by other reporters who started making a big deal about how Dan Quayle couldn't spell. Once it was plastered all over the news, there really wasn't any taking it back, and it is easier for the populace to rationalize that they were wrong and just pretend that "potatoe" was never a valid spelling that it was for them to rationalize that all of the people that they have counted on were complete idiots.
Your 80 year old grandmother is correct. That doesn't stop commercials for the vaccine from claiming that it will kill you. Remember, that just a generation ago, chicken pox was also considered a nothing more than a major childhood inconvenience. Now, people will accuse you of being a killer if you don't give your kid the vaccine that is likely to increase their risk from the disease. For what it is worth, while the chicken pox vaccine seems like are really bad idea, the shingles vaccine seems like a pretty good one. Actually, for an adult that hasn't had chicken pox, the vaccine is a good idea, because they are already past the point of it being a minor illness.
Now for the tinfoil hat time... It give me pause that a new formulation of vaccines can be whipped up in Star Trek time to battle the wildly mutating flu virus, but they cannot seem to produce a vaccine for Herpes from what they already have with the chicken pox vaccine. I am far more concerned about the life long impact that Herpes has on peoples lives than I am about have a flu like disease for a week while you are a kid. While the temporary nature of the chicken pox vaccine will push peoples infectable time to later in life when it is more dangerous to catch the disease, Herpes doesn't get more dangers as you enter adulthood (which when you would be most likely to catch it anyways). While a chicken pox vaccine that last 5 years is more harm than good, a Herpes vaccine that lasts 5 years would be awesome.
The question of vaccinations is not an open and shut case. The chicken pox vaccine is a perfect example of where it can actually INCREASE the danger to recipient. Claiming that vaccines are inherently good is about as logical as claiming that they are always bad.
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So, when Apple sells well, it is proof that it is innovative, but when MS sells well, it is because they are entrenched. Hypocrisy.
There were plenty of mp3 players that only had a few buttons. Just as there were plenty that had lots of buttons. You are rationalizing.
The iPod touch was just a PDA with a focus on the mp3 player. This was not innovative. It was a perfectly fine product, but innovative it was not. The iPhone was late to the game of merging the PDAs and Phones. As said before. The iPad is just a big iPod. It is no more innovative than McDonalds coming out with a bigger sized soda.
Your claim that type ahead was an Apple innovation makes no sense, since you start out saying that Apple didn't invent it, but that they were innovative for doing it. If you point is that they did it 'on a phone'. Then your in the same category as all of the people that have tried to claim that something was new because it was 'on a computer', or 'on the internet'. It makes about sense as saying that I am being innovative by pressing the 'i' key. After all, I am the first person to press the i key 'on my computer at 9:13 AM on 8/15/210'. 'i', Innovation!!!
You are rationalizing your hypocrisy. Your car sitting in front of someone else on the freeway has a greater direct effect on the people behind you than their cigarette does on you. Claiming that laws were put in place to reduce your 100 times more damaging pollution to being only 10 times more damaging than cigarettes doesn't make your pollution somehow less bad.
You are describing at best innovation in a sales. Innovation in convincing people that what they have is better irrelevant of whether the product is better, worse, or a product that has been on the market for years, and you have just slapped your name on it. Nothing you said about Apple describes an innovative PRODUCT. By your standards, the MS Windows GUI is one of the most innovative software products ever produced.
Even more so, how is iTunes innovative? How is the iPod innovative? How is the iPhone anything more than an iPod with a phone in it? The worst example of all is the iPad. It is about as innovative as super sizing a meal at McDonalds.
The one that has been throwing me lately is the new use of the term "drop" for a product. Just a short while ago, when a company said they were going to "drop a product", it meant that they were no longer going to sell or support it. It has been dropped from their inventory. Recently, I have been seeing new articles, press releases and as of last thursday, billboards that use the term drop to mean release. I suspect that the term started getting used this new way because someone heard that a product was being 'drop shipped', and then shortened that to 'dropped'. This wouldn't be so bad if 'dropping a product' didn't already have a very specific meaning already.
So, what do you suggest those of us with a lean body mass high enough to define us as 'overweight' do? Should we start amputating? I can tell you that I have been 'obese' many times in my life, and still a lower body fat percentage than a good portion of the people that are 'normal' weight.
The TV is less of an influence than the public school system. Consider that a large portion of the population spends more of there childhood under the car of the state than they do the care of their parents. Then look at any of the threads on education right here on slashdot. Watch for the subject of home schooling to come up and see how many people believe that it is the public schools job to teach their kids the rules of society, and how not sending your kids to public school deprives kids of that training.
Blaming the TV for our social problems might be popular, but it doesn't make it true.
Seriously. Closer to home, I see people in the gym running for ages on the treadmill - why didn't they just run to the gym rather than drive? It is madness.
I have noticed, and been amazed by this also. The take away from it though is that the problem is NOT people being lazy. Running for ages on a treadmill is not the action of a lazy person. The biggest problem is that people have been conned into believing that a diet consisting of primarily sugar is healthy. It is amazing how many people will tell you that the bowl of pasta they are eating is healthy because 'It isn't sugar. It is carbohydrates'. Our diets of slow metabolizing fats that last us through the day have been replaced by quick metabolizing sugars that must be burned immediately or stored as body fat.
Another part of the problem is that we are not measuring people's body fat. We are measuring their weight and height. So, people that are incredibly unhealthy are being told that they are just fine, while other people that are just fine are being told that they are obese. The BMI is bunk, yet is considered the gold standard of health.
Anyone who drives a car, or has someone else drive for them, and complains about smoking is a hypocrite. Heck, anyone who uses electricity that is derived from burning fossil fuels is a hypocrite. Short of being locked in a car with the windows up, the average household's electricity and driving puts more crap into other peoples lungs than smoking will ever do. I would love it if tomorrow every smoker woke up and decided that they had quit, but the second had smoke claim is utter BS.
Bingo! I am technically obese on bad days, yet you cans see my stomach muscles, and that is where I carry my body fat. My lean body mass is just shy of making me 'overweight' and that is because I don't work out. If I did work out, there is no way that I could keep my lean body mass in the 'normal' range for a persons full weight. People should go get hydrostatically weighed. A lot 'normal' and 'overweight' people would be in for a shock.
Personally, I'm not impressed by the 'obese' title. I am 'obese' by the definition that the government, insurance and health industries use. While I could lose a couple of pounds, you can still see my stomach muscles. There is this myth that those of use that are naturally muscular don't exist. It is important to note that this is our definition of 'obese'.
So, should really muscular people stop moving so that they can drop some of that fuel wasting muscle? Personally, I'm not sure how I am going to get rid of it, since just sitting in front of my computer has made me muscular enough that my lean body mass is only 15 pounds under the 'overweight' line per the BMI.
I agree. My son has been doing multiplication since he was 4. Pretty much as soon has he knew addition, I just explained that multiplication was a shortcut for addition, and off he went. Honestly, learning variables is something that any halfway intelligent 6 year old can handle. Go into family style restaurants and look at the kids menus. They very frequently have the 'replace the numbers with letters and discover the secret message' puzzles on them. The same for many fast food kids meal containers. Little kids have no problem understanding variables. Just tell them that the x is the mystery number that they have to figure out, and they will get it just fine.
When I initially planned my child's curriculum, I was quickly reminded that kid's math books try to hide variables from kids. So, instead of just calling the math they learn at a young age what it is, Algebra, they just call it math and replace all of the letter variables with box and underline symbols for variables, and then when they get older, tell them that they are taking Algebra and it is totally different from what they have been doing since they were 5. 5+1=_+4 is just as much Algebra as 5+1=x+4. As you say, if kids are taught that = means equality, much of the difficulty of math goes away.
A better solution is to find a better school. A better public school, or a private school, or a charter school, or something.
Seriously? So, basically be rich? You know, sell your home and move if you don't like your kids teachers? Or shell out for the tuition of a private school, along with the problems that they have? Really? That is your solution?
But home schooling pretty much fails to develop a kid's social skills. And I've always felt that one of the more important things that public schooling does is develop social skills.
When I was first looking into homeschooling, I went to a home school supply store. The owner starting jabbering on to me how the public schools were not there to educate the kids, but they were a social program to indoctrinate them into a labor social system. Red flags went up in my head telling me that this woman was a loon. Yet, I constantly hear anti-home school people repeating basically the same thing. Of course, 'social skills' is one of those things that are almost impossible to objectively measure. Since home schooled kids wipe the floor in every subject that can be objectively measured, the public school advocates latch on to 'social skills'.
Home schooled kids don't generally have to put up with schoolyard bullies.
The existence of bullies in public schools in evidence that the public schools don't teach kids good social skills. Also, your comment implies that getting punched in the face and harassed on a daily basis by someone while police require you to remain in the persons presence is a good thing. You must be planning for your kids to live their adult lives in jail, because that is the only place that adults are required by law to take daily physical and verbal abuse.
They don't have to make friends.
Nobody has to make friends. My home schooled son has more of them than I did when I was his age and in public school. This seems to be a common occurrence among the many home schooled families I know.
They don't learn about compromises and sharing and common interests the way you do when you're surrounded by other people all day long.
Wrong again. They have to be BETTER at it than public schooled kids. All of their friends are kids who CHOOSE to be around them, as opposed to the public school kids who have people being FORCED to be around them.
They don't learn to file the rough edges off their own personality, so that they can get along with others.
I point back to your bully remark earlier.
They're more concerned about sheltering their kid either from harm, or from opposing viewpoints.
It is actually the opposite. The political and social viewpoints of home schooled families are far more varied than what you find in the public school. Combine that with a heavy indoctrination system by the schools, and the far smaller amount of time that public schooled parents spend with their families, and you get homogeneity in students of public school. When home schooled kids hear a subject being debated they are universally encouraged to ask questions and to put in their 2 cents.
I have yet to see this socially well adjust public schooled population that you seem to be claiming exists.
I witnessed a good example of this. A good friend of mine has a 9 year old daughter. We were watching her for an evening, and my wife decided to play 'Addition Bingo' with her and our 6 year old son. Things went fine for all of the single digit addition. She whipped out the answer quick as can be. Then she was presented with her first 2 digit math problem. It was 13 + 0. The poor little girl was completely stumped. She hadn't memorized addition up to 13, and she simply didn't know how to add zero to the number 13.
As for not understanding the = sign. The reason is that it appears most teachers don't understand it. They treat it as a separate operator from < and >. =, > and < are all the same symbol. They are just two lines with the space showing what side is larger. In <, the space between the ends of the lines on the left is smaller, and the right is larger. Thus the number on the left will be smaller and the right is larger. Conversely, in >, it is still two lines, but this time the space at the ends of the right side are smaller and the space on the left said is bigger. The = sign is the final choice. In an = sign, the space between the lines on the left side is the same size as the space between the lines on the right side. Thus the numbers are the same size. <, >, = are icons. They are drawings of what they are used for. You can't get much simpler than that. They are by a far margin the MOST obvious symbols in math.
Part of how we got to this state is that, as other have pointed out, kids are taught that = is "find the answer". Then when presenting < and >, students are told that they are like "alligators where the smaller alligator is eating the bigger alligator". I kid you not. The standard method for teachers to explain is to tell kids they represent alligators. The idea that they don't just point out that they are pictures is bad enough, but on what planet does "the smaller predator eats the bigger predator" make sense. Sure it can happen, but it certainly isn't logical. So, what kids end up doing is learning math as some kind of bizarre fable where alligators eat each other, but in the opposite way than you would expect.
Very few Mac programs 'close' when you click the 'X'. If you want to 'quit' a program, you either use the keyboard shortcut (Command-Q for every app on the Mac), or you click the app menu and select quit. It is consistent to such a degree that you will find the same options on every Mac program out there. In additional, there are almost no apps that 'quit' when you click the 'X'. The ones that do actually quit are limited to a few system utilities. The rest just stay resident in the background as needed. It makes launching them again much faster, and has no negative impact on performance since the memory management is so well done (Wired, Active, Inactive, and Free). The same is true for iOS4. It's all to common I will find 20 to 30 apps just sitting there in the background on my iPhone. They have no impact on performance, even when working with 512 MB.
You are wrong. Taking a Mac with only software supplied by Apple, the number of programs that come with the system that close verses stay running when you push the red X is about 50/50. This is horribly inconsistent, and that isn't even counting the fact that a red X means stop totally irrelevant to computers. Also, shortcut keys are not "intuitive". They are something that you can train to do, but they are not any more intuitive than typing load "*",8,1.
The UI probably doesn't make sense to you, because your were raised on Windows or Linux.
I was raised on the Commodore KIM-2, then the Atari 800, TI-99-4A, Apple II, C-64, PDP, DEC Rainbow 100, Amiga, and DOS. I never even saw Windows until version 3.0 which would have been over a decade into my computer usage. So, no. The fact that I see the inconsistencies and unintuativeness of MacOS is because there are some brain dead UI choices. Your comment is one of the reasons I suspect that the poor UI of MacOS doesn't get fixed. Any complaint, no matter how legitimate, get dissmissed as the person being "raised on Windows".
The OS X UI however, makes sense to someone who's never sat in front of a computer. They click the plus symbol to maximize the window to fit the doc. Why would it instead fill the entire screen when the doc only takes a portion of that?
No it doesn't. You only think it does because you are used to it. First, the green plus does NOT mean maximize window to fit the doc. That is just wrong. E.g. Of the applications that COMES INTALLED BY DEFAULT, pressing the green plus button:
The list goes on... The green plus simply does
I'll tell you what makes Macs better. The UI. Everyone know that green plus buttons should make a windows smaller, and a red X should sometimes close a program, and sometimes only close the window, leaving the program still running. Most of all, everyone know that the most logical way to eject a disk from a drive is to throw it in the garbage can. Until Apples competitors can match Apple in at least these obviously superior UI elements, they have no hope of being compared to Apple in quality and ease of use.
I noticed a recent improvement in battery life on my Nexus One. I wonder if that is the reason...
On my myTouch and Nexus 1, voice dialing worked from day one as well. My big complaint was that there was NOT a confirmation button. This meant that when the phone invariably got the wrong name, it would call the wrong person. I have heard people complain that Android couldn't do voice dialing, but I have yet to see one that doesn't.
I would say that Plants vs. Zombies is a very good example of this. While it does look good, it doesn't have wiz bang graphics, and it has no real special effects. The graphics qualities are so low, that you don't even see the difference when it was ported to the iPhone. I would guess that it could be scaled down to a 16 color 320x200 screen and still be an awsome game by today's standards.
It's all fiction anyway, but it helps to try to understand the technology imagined in these fictions. The technologies imagined in SciFi are quite often candidate for implementation in our present or near future.
And that is how we got Galaxy Quest.
I didn't even realize that the point of the private browsing had anything to do with sites you visited. I thought it was clearly being marketed at a way to keep the next person sitting at your computer from seeing that you were visiting porn sites. Having your wife or kids follow behind you on the computer only to have porn sites pop up when they start typing in an address was a pretty big problem for a lot of people. This problem got even worse when the address bar started doing better type ahead by prioritizing heavily visited sites.
I mean really, as much as IP address change, they don't change that often, so it wouldn't be hard for sites tracking users to just use the IP address. All it would take is for 1 site that you visit logged in to act as an IP update source, and bingo, you are being tracked no matter what software you run on your computer. The only way around that would be to never log in to any sites, or run through some kind of proxy.
So, it is simple. Don't expect the private browsing to keep you from being tracked by web sites. There is nothing the browser makers can do about that. Use it to keep your 6 year old from accidentally finding out that you have been visiting 'Dirty DORA's anal Dungeon'.
If you have something legitimate to mock the man about, you should mock him for that. When people mock him for describing the internet as a series of tubes, they just sound stupid. Heck, even your example of "I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday." isn't really that bad, since he was obviously talking about an internet email. This would be opposed to an internal email. Is his comment any worse that the millions of people that refer to an internet search as Googling? Sure his poor wording didn't catch on, and wasn't already in popular use, but while his slang may not have been great, and his sys admin lied to him as to why it took so long for his email to arrive, the content of his was legitimate. Even if I disagree with him. What really happened here was that someone complained about what he said, the complainer was wrong, and once the sharks started feeding, the irrational complaints just kept going.
We saw the same thing with Dan Quayle. There may have been plenty of things to ridicule the man for, but at the time of the famous "potatoe" incident, "potatoe" was a valid, even if less used, spelling of the word. It was commonly spelled that way by the populace, many teachers were teaching that spelling, and it was in many dictionaries as the less common spelling of the word. No one at the incident noticed anything was wrong until a reporter that obviously couldn't spell well started mouthing off about it. That was picked up by other reporters who started making a big deal about how Dan Quayle couldn't spell. Once it was plastered all over the news, there really wasn't any taking it back, and it is easier for the populace to rationalize that they were wrong and just pretend that "potatoe" was never a valid spelling that it was for them to rationalize that all of the people that they have counted on were complete idiots.
Your 80 year old grandmother is correct. That doesn't stop commercials for the vaccine from claiming that it will kill you. Remember, that just a generation ago, chicken pox was also considered a nothing more than a major childhood inconvenience. Now, people will accuse you of being a killer if you don't give your kid the vaccine that is likely to increase their risk from the disease. For what it is worth, while the chicken pox vaccine seems like are really bad idea, the shingles vaccine seems like a pretty good one. Actually, for an adult that hasn't had chicken pox, the vaccine is a good idea, because they are already past the point of it being a minor illness.
Now for the tinfoil hat time... It give me pause that a new formulation of vaccines can be whipped up in Star Trek time to battle the wildly mutating flu virus, but they cannot seem to produce a vaccine for Herpes from what they already have with the chicken pox vaccine. I am far more concerned about the life long impact that Herpes has on peoples lives than I am about have a flu like disease for a week while you are a kid. While the temporary nature of the chicken pox vaccine will push peoples infectable time to later in life when it is more dangerous to catch the disease, Herpes doesn't get more dangers as you enter adulthood (which when you would be most likely to catch it anyways). While a chicken pox vaccine that last 5 years is more harm than good, a Herpes vaccine that lasts 5 years would be awesome.
The question of vaccinations is not an open and shut case. The chicken pox vaccine is a perfect example of where it can actually INCREASE the danger to recipient. Claiming that vaccines are inherently good is about as logical as claiming that they are always bad.