My 12" Powerbook G4 (purchased in September), is completely unusable if there is sunlight within my field of vision - I literally can't even see if there's something on the screen unless I shade my eyes. If I am using it, it has to be indoors and out of the sun (which sucks because my desk faces my window to avoid glare on the screen).
Bellsouth had DSL capability for years but releasing to the home user would have cannibalized their business T1 subscriptions.
Pacific Bell tried another tactic - 128k up, 32k down for $39.99/mo, 512k up, 64k down for I think something like $79.99, and 1.5m down, 128k up for a ridiculous $249.99. I compared this to prices for DSL service from Telus, right next door to Pacific Bell (across the Washington/BC border), and found that Telus's prime offering - 1.5m down, 512k up - was a mere $39.99 as well - in Canadian dollars.
I say to the FCC, prevent these companies from stopping other projects, like municipal Wi-Fi, municipal FTTH, etc. These companies refuse to set up these services, which are in high demand, but they want to prevent other entities from doing it too, because then if they ever got around to caring about that market, it would be too bad.
Make the big conglomerates stop jerking people around, and maybe your country's broadband situation will stop being as depressing as it is.
Real competition is going from nothing to 10% in the short span of time that it has taken Firefox. Compare this to Opera's gains of pretty much nothing in all the time it's been around (what is it at now? 1%? 1.1%?), and yeah, I'd say that's competition.
If Firefox were 'holding strong' at 10%, then yeah, that wouldn't be much competition - but it's not. It's growing, slower now, but still growing. Last time I checked it was at 6%, and now we're at 10%. How long until 15%? Then more? I look forward to it.
Perhaps, but then consider offices like mine - 15 Firefox installations off one download. Larger offices achieve larger numbers - one download can translate into hundreds of installations easily, whereas it's unlikely that one install came as a result of hundreds of installations.
In the end Apple may lose some customers, if the transition is too difficult for the software developers, or if the Intel chips can't perform as well, or if the rate of piracy goes up.
A few sidenotes on this sentence. First, from all indications, the switch for software developers (with the exception of anything that touches the hardware) is absurdly easy. Applications like Colloquy are already being built as Universal Binaries. Adobe's ported their jazz already, and the Unreal Tournament crew is expecting to have a patch ready on the first day of release.
As for the Intel chips, news is leaking out from under the door about the new development boxes, based on the P4, being faster than dual-G5 machines in a lot of respects, and equally as fast in many others.
And lastly, piracy. Windows got as popular as it was because of piracy - people pirated it, it became ubiquitous, and developers had more of a market for it. If OS X becomes easily pirate-able, made to run on generic Dell-like machines, then this will increase the demand for software. It's not like piracy of applications will change - that's still dramatically easy. It all comes down to whether people will buy the machines - or does it? Where does Apple's money come from? The iPod. If they lose margin on their machines, will it hurt? Hard to say. It will bring more people into the Mac 'fold', which will help everyone that isn't Apple, such as hardware developers, software developers, etc.
The more of a market there is for OS X Software, the more people will see it as legitimate. If you can get Simply Accounting on your Mac, if you can get all those other apps that people need but can't get right now, then people can switch. I know I'd love that right now - put in an order for fifteen Mac Minis and a dual- PowerMac for the graphic designer, and voila! No viruses, no shitty 'oh, it's just being a dick, reboot' issues, no more screwing around with Norton Antivirus messing up computers and slowing them down to a trickle of CPU, no more 'oops I uninstalled my nForce drivers now I have no network/sound/video' (this happened three times in a day).
This switch will be a good thing, and piracy, believe it or not, will be a good thing. I look forward to it.
Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
Perhaps you're thinking of a different 'progressive enhancement' than I'm used to. When I think progressive enhancement, I think of the method I (and those I know) use to construct websites.
Write your content
Mark your content up using semantic markup
Once the content is marked up, do the design (or have a graphic designer do this parallel to the first two steps
Convert the graphical design to CSS and apply to site
(optional) Add Javascript to enhance the functionality of the already working site
Where a lot of developers make their mistakes is that they use things like Javascript and (to a lesser extent) CSS for the main functionality of their site - for example, a navigation bar of non-links with dropdown menus of links. If, however, the javascript doesn't work in your browser, you get no links and cannot browse the site.
The proper way to do things is to build a site that works before even adding CSS. Once you have your content in a presentable manner, then you add CSS. This ensures that your HTML will be usable across all browsers (e.g. w3m). Once that is done, you add CSS to style it. This makes it a lot easier to work around crappy IE bugs, because you're doing it one step at a time and don't have to worry about putting hacks into the HTML or using nonstandard tags.
Only after one has a working site should one add Javascript - the rare exception can be said to be 'web applications', where the functionality of the site requires client-side scripting. Regardless, adding Javascript last means that your site will work without Javascript or without the Javascript implementation you're used to. This is important.
For an excellent example of these principles used, specifically the use of Javascript as an extension of the page, and not as a component of the page, take a look at the Happy Spork image gallery. Play with it with Javascript on, and with Javascript off, and notice that the functionality is exactly the same - just accomplished differently - in either case.
That is what I think of when I think progressive design. Maybe I'm thinking of something different than you are.
At $100, this is too pricey for a first-aid kit unless you're in a really high-risk situation for major trauma -- the only place outside of the military which strikes me as obvious is a construction site.
What I wonder (I don't have a biology degree, and I'm actually really bad at it) is would this help hemophiliacs? Their blood doesn't clot nearly fast enough to seal an injury, but I wonder if this would help? Hemophiliacs don't necessarily lack the clotting agent, but are sometimes (often?) just deficient in it.
Then again, for that matter, does this even need a clotting agent? Perhaps the bandage serves as the clotting agent itself, and thus requires no such agent in the blood. If that were the case, then hemophiliacs could carry around a pack of these, and if they have an accident or somesuch, just slap one on and not worry about dying from a paper cut.
For the Canadians in the audience, Gateworld has a list of non-US airdates; however, checking the Global and TQS websites for the local listings here in Montreal, I see no mention of either Stargate or Battlestar Galactica. I guess it is bittorrent for me.
Discounting the 500,000 set top boxes, apparently their are about 65,535 licensed installations out their.
Imagine how many licensed installations they could have had if they'd used an unsignedlong for their license control system instead! The world would truly be a different place.
This fails also in Safari - the first tabbable element on the page is the button. Shift-tabbing up from that lands me in the tab (as in tabbed-browsing) area.
Ten points for style, but minus several million for accessibility.
Re:Education Sucks in the US? That's news to me!
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't be certain about yourself, but personally, I succeed in school despite their best efforts, not because of them. I was constantly bored, I learned the contents of the lesson in a matter of minutes instead of a matter of days, and so on. I was often caught unawares when it was my turn to read from the text or story because I was usually several pages ahead. In high school I finished the book (To Kill a Mockingbird, not a hard read) when everyone else was on chapter two. In grade four, I was lending novels to my teacher, and was surprised at how long it took her to bring them back.
That being said, I feel that the school system has failed me. I always burned through the knowledge that was given, then had to wait around for more. As the years dragged on, this gap because that much more pronounced, and eventually, I just stopped paying attention entirely. My grades plummeted from an A+ average to a C, I started failing courses because I didn't even bother to learn the material anymore, and my choice of university was based on prerequisites (the university I went to let just about anyone in).
If I were allowed to learn at my own pace, I could have finished the vast majority of my schooling by the age of 12. I could have been in university at 16, and graduated at 20. As it is, I didn't even graduate high school until I was 19, because of the hoops they made me jump through (had to get x hours in 'work experience' in my chosen field), with the result that I had moved across the country, worked for months, and travelled around the world, all on my own dime, before I'd even graduated high school.
Compare this with the experiences of my stepsiblings. When my stepbrother, probably about 14 or 15 at the time, came to stay with us for a summer (as he often did), we discovered, one day, that he was incapable of reading in any practical sense. He gave it a good try, but he just wasn't any good at reading, punctuation, grammar, spelling, or comprehension. I first noticed this, in fact, when he was unable to properly read aloud the title of a song. He was reading at what I would approximate as a second- or third-grade level, and he was about to enter high school! How is it possible that he has succeeded six grades beyond his capability? More amazingly, how is it possible that in the two months he was staying with us, he made more strides in his reading ability than in the previous six years of 'school'?
Another example is my stepsister. You and I probably don't even think about libraries. They're just libraries, right? Well when she was about the same age, 14 or 15 (and I was younger than her) she was staying with us for the summer, and my mother and I discovered that she didn't know what a library was, or rather, how it worked. She knew they kept books there, but that was it, and it was a great surprise to her to learn the mechanics. You don't have to pay for the books! You can keep them for two weeks, and then renew them if you're not done! Your card is free (your district may vary)! This was all a complete shock to her. How is it possible to get to your teen years without learning the mechanics of a library?
A lot of these examples, it's true, can be chalked up to parents. Her parents never took her to the library, his parents never got him into reading, and my mother routinely had a stack of six or eight novels books before we even thought about leaving the library. Regardless, isn't this something that schools are supposed to pick up on? Shouldn't a school notice that kids can't read? Or that kids can read faster and more avidly than any other student in their grade? Yet somehow, they don't. There's nothing in place for situations like this, and those rare teachers that do take the time and effort to help kids are never rewarded by the school system, and rarely rewarded by the parents.
Parents are fucked up, society is fucked up, those are both true, but the school system is no less fucked up, and it needs fixing just as well.
I'd appreciate it if any death penalty advocates could please cite a published work (in a reputable journal) which clearly shows statistical evidence that the death penalty actually acts as a deterrant in the mind of would-be criminals.
I can't find the reference, but I read somewhere that criminals who get the death penalty are far less likely to repeat than criminals who receive a live sentence and are paroled.
If I pay a fee and can only watch the movies when, where, and on what netflix decides, they won't get my money. We'll see.
You mean like if you pay $3.99 for a new release, but only get to watch it for two days, or $2.99 for an older movie and you can watch it for a week? Or like you pay a certain amount per month and you can watch a lot of movies, but only a certain amount at once?
Most people hear 'DRM' and think 'when I buy something, they'll restrict my rights'. Well what about rentals? You don't *have* any rights in that case, except to watch it for the predetermined time. It's not yours to do with as you please, and no rights are being infringed upon by preventing you from copying it, so why not?
What people *should* be complaining about is the inability to cross-platformize things like this. Can I watch DRM'ed WMV files in OS X? I doubt it, but maybe Windows Media Player has that functionality, but it's such a godawful piece of crap that no one would use it anyway. It is this that concerns me, that I will be unable to continue my participation in the digital revolution (or whatever we're calling it nowadays) because I do not care to pay for an inferior system. Alas.
I'll give you a hint: union regulations that prohibit firing someone just for being completely fucking incompetent at their job. When I was working at a similar Superstore in a different city, most of the people I was working with were either clueless slack-jawed idiots or ditzy blondes, or, if you were lucky, just didn't show up for work ('oh, you're from Superstore? no, she's not coming in today, she went camping.' What the fuck?)
These people cannot even be trusted to find the right end of a price scanner, let alone be aware of a release date. Not saying that all of the people at the stores are idiots, but when you hire an idiot, they're awfully hard to get rid of, and then shit like this happens and I can't even be bothered to act surprised.
In the case of OS X (especially Tiger with Quartz 2D Extreme turned on), they're eating up VRAM and chewing up GPU cycles, neither of which gets anywhere near half utilization when you're recalculating numbers in a spreadsheet or copying that file. In fact, because of the amount of things that OS X offloads, it's actually more efficient, using less CPU and less ram than it would if it were using the CPU to drive compositing.
On top of that, shadows are a depth and location cue, as is transparency (when done right). Also, in the Longhorn screenshots, they provide transparency but also use a blur effect, which results in being able to see that something is underneath (perhaps not what, exactly), but also reduces the interference with the foreground that usually accompanies it.
Transparency in the OS X Dock, as another example helps reduce the intrusiveness of the Dock taking up the screen space it does. If it were a big black (green, blue, red, themed) box, then it would be distracting, but with transparency, it actually prevents this from occurring, which can increase usability.
The last time I checked the U.S. Code, "piracy" is a crime punishable by death (for air piracy; sea piracy is punishable by life imprisonment).
Wait... air piracy? Wow... Seriously, who is that badass? I wonder if I could join their crew... If it's anything like the air piracy I'm used to, that would be a killer lifestyle!
The whole point of the way internet routing works is to allow traffic to route across alternate links when the "best" link goes down. Having a single pipe feeding an entire country is pretty damn stupid.
I'm not sure about the American system, but in Canada, 'reasonable doubt' is restricted to criminal law. Civil suits, on the other hand, are measured on 'a balance of probabilities', and thus have different requirements that are to be met.
The second of May, '95. Why not? It must have been in May, they started with the mugs a while back, and it makes sense to release at the start or end of the month.
And I can't imagine how the dog's mind would survive intact, but that's just me.
Dude, have you never played Resident Evil? Never seen Dawn of the Dead? The mind isn't supposed to survive. DUH! Otherwise most zombies would go back to work instead of feasting on delicious brains.
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My 12" Powerbook G4 (purchased in September), is completely unusable if there is sunlight within my field of vision - I literally can't even see if there's something on the screen unless I shade my eyes. If I am using it, it has to be indoors and out of the sun (which sucks because my desk faces my window to avoid glare on the screen).
Fantastic machine, mediocre LCD.
Bellsouth had DSL capability for years but releasing to the home user would have cannibalized their business T1 subscriptions.
Pacific Bell tried another tactic - 128k up, 32k down for $39.99/mo, 512k up, 64k down for I think something like $79.99, and 1.5m down, 128k up for a ridiculous $249.99. I compared this to prices for DSL service from Telus, right next door to Pacific Bell (across the Washington/BC border), and found that Telus's prime offering - 1.5m down, 512k up - was a mere $39.99 as well - in Canadian dollars.
I say to the FCC, prevent these companies from stopping other projects, like municipal Wi-Fi, municipal FTTH, etc. These companies refuse to set up these services, which are in high demand, but they want to prevent other entities from doing it too, because then if they ever got around to caring about that market, it would be too bad.
Make the big conglomerates stop jerking people around, and maybe your country's broadband situation will stop being as depressing as it is.
Real competition is going from nothing to 10% in the short span of time that it has taken Firefox. Compare this to Opera's gains of pretty much nothing in all the time it's been around (what is it at now? 1%? 1.1%?), and yeah, I'd say that's competition.
If Firefox were 'holding strong' at 10%, then yeah, that wouldn't be much competition - but it's not. It's growing, slower now, but still growing. Last time I checked it was at 6%, and now we're at 10%. How long until 15%? Then more? I look forward to it.
Perhaps, but then consider offices like mine - 15 Firefox installations off one download. Larger offices achieve larger numbers - one download can translate into hundreds of installations easily, whereas it's unlikely that one install came as a result of hundreds of installations.
In the end Apple may lose some customers, if the transition is too difficult for the software developers, or if the Intel chips can't perform as well, or if the rate of piracy goes up.
A few sidenotes on this sentence. First, from all indications, the switch for software developers (with the exception of anything that touches the hardware) is absurdly easy. Applications like Colloquy are already being built as Universal Binaries. Adobe's ported their jazz already, and the Unreal Tournament crew is expecting to have a patch ready on the first day of release.
As for the Intel chips, news is leaking out from under the door about the new development boxes, based on the P4, being faster than dual-G5 machines in a lot of respects, and equally as fast in many others.
And lastly, piracy. Windows got as popular as it was because of piracy - people pirated it, it became ubiquitous, and developers had more of a market for it. If OS X becomes easily pirate-able, made to run on generic Dell-like machines, then this will increase the demand for software. It's not like piracy of applications will change - that's still dramatically easy. It all comes down to whether people will buy the machines - or does it? Where does Apple's money come from? The iPod. If they lose margin on their machines, will it hurt? Hard to say. It will bring more people into the Mac 'fold', which will help everyone that isn't Apple, such as hardware developers, software developers, etc.
The more of a market there is for OS X Software, the more people will see it as legitimate. If you can get Simply Accounting on your Mac, if you can get all those other apps that people need but can't get right now, then people can switch. I know I'd love that right now - put in an order for fifteen Mac Minis and a dual- PowerMac for the graphic designer, and voila! No viruses, no shitty 'oh, it's just being a dick, reboot' issues, no more screwing around with Norton Antivirus messing up computers and slowing them down to a trickle of CPU, no more 'oops I uninstalled my nForce drivers now I have no network/sound/video' (this happened three times in a day).
This switch will be a good thing, and piracy, believe it or not, will be a good thing. I look forward to it.
Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
Perhaps you're thinking of a different 'progressive enhancement' than I'm used to. When I think progressive enhancement, I think of the method I (and those I know) use to construct websites.
Where a lot of developers make their mistakes is that they use things like Javascript and (to a lesser extent) CSS for the main functionality of their site - for example, a navigation bar of non-links with dropdown menus of links. If, however, the javascript doesn't work in your browser, you get no links and cannot browse the site.
The proper way to do things is to build a site that works before even adding CSS. Once you have your content in a presentable manner, then you add CSS. This ensures that your HTML will be usable across all browsers (e.g. w3m). Once that is done, you add CSS to style it. This makes it a lot easier to work around crappy IE bugs, because you're doing it one step at a time and don't have to worry about putting hacks into the HTML or using nonstandard tags.
Only after one has a working site should one add Javascript - the rare exception can be said to be 'web applications', where the functionality of the site requires client-side scripting. Regardless, adding Javascript last means that your site will work without Javascript or without the Javascript implementation you're used to. This is important.
For an excellent example of these principles used, specifically the use of Javascript as an extension of the page, and not as a component of the page, take a look at the Happy Spork image gallery. Play with it with Javascript on, and with Javascript off, and notice that the functionality is exactly the same - just accomplished differently - in either case.
That is what I think of when I think progressive design. Maybe I'm thinking of something different than you are.
At $100, this is too pricey for a first-aid kit unless you're in a really high-risk situation for major trauma -- the only place outside of the military which strikes me as obvious is a construction site.
What I wonder (I don't have a biology degree, and I'm actually really bad at it) is would this help hemophiliacs? Their blood doesn't clot nearly fast enough to seal an injury, but I wonder if this would help? Hemophiliacs don't necessarily lack the clotting agent, but are sometimes (often?) just deficient in it.
Then again, for that matter, does this even need a clotting agent? Perhaps the bandage serves as the clotting agent itself, and thus requires no such agent in the blood. If that were the case, then hemophiliacs could carry around a pack of these, and if they have an accident or somesuch, just slap one on and not worry about dying from a paper cut.
I feel perfectly justified and guiltless by downloading it.
Enh, I just buy the DVDs when they come out, I figure if it's ok to watch them after I buy them it's ok to watch them before I buy them.
For the Canadians in the audience, Gateworld has a list of non-US airdates; however, checking the Global and TQS websites for the local listings here in Montreal, I see no mention of either Stargate or Battlestar Galactica. I guess it is bittorrent for me.
Yo-ho, yo-ho.
Nonsense! I look forward to shopping for my first dual-layer 52x/52x/48x/32x/24x/16x/8x/4x/2x/2x/2x/4x/2x/2x/2x CD/DVD/BD/HD-DVD+/-RW/RAM drive.
Discounting the 500,000 set top boxes, apparently their are about 65,535 licensed installations out their.
Imagine how many licensed installations they could have had if they'd used an unsignedlong for their license control system instead! The world would truly be a different place.
I find it distracting when someone doesn't bother with even elementary proofreading.
This would read better as:
I find it distracting when someone doesn't even bother with elementary proofreading.
Otherwise you may be referring to 'even elementary proofreading' which does not happen to be bothered with. It could also read:
I find it distracting when someone doesn't bother with even the most elementary of proofreading.
This gives that sort of sophisticated, British-accent sort of grammar that we all know and love so much.
This fails also in Safari - the first tabbable element on the page is the button. Shift-tabbing up from that lands me in the tab (as in tabbed-browsing) area.
Ten points for style, but minus several million for accessibility.
I can't be certain about yourself, but personally, I succeed in school despite their best efforts, not because of them. I was constantly bored, I learned the contents of the lesson in a matter of minutes instead of a matter of days, and so on. I was often caught unawares when it was my turn to read from the text or story because I was usually several pages ahead. In high school I finished the book (To Kill a Mockingbird, not a hard read) when everyone else was on chapter two. In grade four, I was lending novels to my teacher, and was surprised at how long it took her to bring them back.
That being said, I feel that the school system has failed me. I always burned through the knowledge that was given, then had to wait around for more. As the years dragged on, this gap because that much more pronounced, and eventually, I just stopped paying attention entirely. My grades plummeted from an A+ average to a C, I started failing courses because I didn't even bother to learn the material anymore, and my choice of university was based on prerequisites (the university I went to let just about anyone in).
If I were allowed to learn at my own pace, I could have finished the vast majority of my schooling by the age of 12. I could have been in university at 16, and graduated at 20. As it is, I didn't even graduate high school until I was 19, because of the hoops they made me jump through (had to get x hours in 'work experience' in my chosen field), with the result that I had moved across the country, worked for months, and travelled around the world, all on my own dime, before I'd even graduated high school.
Compare this with the experiences of my stepsiblings. When my stepbrother, probably about 14 or 15 at the time, came to stay with us for a summer (as he often did), we discovered, one day, that he was incapable of reading in any practical sense. He gave it a good try, but he just wasn't any good at reading, punctuation, grammar, spelling, or comprehension. I first noticed this, in fact, when he was unable to properly read aloud the title of a song. He was reading at what I would approximate as a second- or third-grade level, and he was about to enter high school! How is it possible that he has succeeded six grades beyond his capability? More amazingly, how is it possible that in the two months he was staying with us, he made more strides in his reading ability than in the previous six years of 'school'?
Another example is my stepsister. You and I probably don't even think about libraries. They're just libraries, right? Well when she was about the same age, 14 or 15 (and I was younger than her) she was staying with us for the summer, and my mother and I discovered that she didn't know what a library was, or rather, how it worked. She knew they kept books there, but that was it, and it was a great surprise to her to learn the mechanics. You don't have to pay for the books! You can keep them for two weeks, and then renew them if you're not done! Your card is free (your district may vary)! This was all a complete shock to her. How is it possible to get to your teen years without learning the mechanics of a library?
A lot of these examples, it's true, can be chalked up to parents. Her parents never took her to the library, his parents never got him into reading, and my mother routinely had a stack of six or eight novels books before we even thought about leaving the library. Regardless, isn't this something that schools are supposed to pick up on? Shouldn't a school notice that kids can't read? Or that kids can read faster and more avidly than any other student in their grade? Yet somehow, they don't. There's nothing in place for situations like this, and those rare teachers that do take the time and effort to help kids are never rewarded by the school system, and rarely rewarded by the parents.
Parents are fucked up, society is fucked up, those are both true, but the school system is no less fucked up, and it needs fixing just as well.
I'd appreciate it if any death penalty advocates could please cite a published work (in a reputable journal) which clearly shows statistical evidence that the death penalty actually acts as a deterrant in the mind of would-be criminals.
I can't find the reference, but I read somewhere that criminals who get the death penalty are far less likely to repeat than criminals who receive a live sentence and are paroled.
If I pay a fee and can only watch the movies when, where, and on what netflix decides, they won't get my money. We'll see.
You mean like if you pay $3.99 for a new release, but only get to watch it for two days, or $2.99 for an older movie and you can watch it for a week? Or like you pay a certain amount per month and you can watch a lot of movies, but only a certain amount at once?
Most people hear 'DRM' and think 'when I buy something, they'll restrict my rights'. Well what about rentals? You don't *have* any rights in that case, except to watch it for the predetermined time. It's not yours to do with as you please, and no rights are being infringed upon by preventing you from copying it, so why not?
What people *should* be complaining about is the inability to cross-platformize things like this. Can I watch DRM'ed WMV files in OS X? I doubt it, but maybe Windows Media Player has that functionality, but it's such a godawful piece of crap that no one would use it anyway. It is this that concerns me, that I will be unable to continue my participation in the digital revolution (or whatever we're calling it nowadays) because I do not care to pay for an inferior system. Alas.
I'll give you a hint: union regulations that prohibit firing someone just for being completely fucking incompetent at their job. When I was working at a similar Superstore in a different city, most of the people I was working with were either clueless slack-jawed idiots or ditzy blondes, or, if you were lucky, just didn't show up for work ('oh, you're from Superstore? no, she's not coming in today, she went camping.' What the fuck?)
These people cannot even be trusted to find the right end of a price scanner, let alone be aware of a release date. Not saying that all of the people at the stores are idiots, but when you hire an idiot, they're awfully hard to get rid of, and then shit like this happens and I can't even be bothered to act surprised.
In the case of OS X (especially Tiger with Quartz 2D Extreme turned on), they're eating up VRAM and chewing up GPU cycles, neither of which gets anywhere near half utilization when you're recalculating numbers in a spreadsheet or copying that file. In fact, because of the amount of things that OS X offloads, it's actually more efficient, using less CPU and less ram than it would if it were using the CPU to drive compositing.
On top of that, shadows are a depth and location cue, as is transparency (when done right). Also, in the Longhorn screenshots, they provide transparency but also use a blur effect, which results in being able to see that something is underneath (perhaps not what, exactly), but also reduces the interference with the foreground that usually accompanies it.
Transparency in the OS X Dock, as another example helps reduce the intrusiveness of the Dock taking up the screen space it does. If it were a big black (green, blue, red, themed) box, then it would be distracting, but with transparency, it actually prevents this from occurring, which can increase usability.
The last time I checked the U.S. Code, "piracy" is a crime punishable by death (for air piracy; sea piracy is punishable by life imprisonment).
Wait... air piracy? Wow... Seriously, who is that badass? I wonder if I could join their crew... If it's anything like the air piracy I'm used to, that would be a killer lifestyle!
He's a pretty cool dude, once you get past the ego and the constant attempts at world domination.
Steve Jobs does icons?
The whole point of the way internet routing works is to allow traffic to route across alternate links when the "best" link goes down. Having a single pipe feeding an entire country is pretty damn stupid.
Maybe they accidentally cut off both lines.
I'm not sure about the American system, but in Canada, 'reasonable doubt' is restricted to criminal law. Civil suits, on the other hand, are measured on 'a balance of probabilities', and thus have different requirements that are to be met.
The second of May, '95. Why not? It must have been in May, they started with the mugs a while back, and it makes sense to release at the start or end of the month.
And I can't imagine how the dog's mind would survive intact, but that's just me.
Dude, have you never played Resident Evil? Never seen Dawn of the Dead? The mind isn't supposed to survive. DUH! Otherwise most zombies would go back to work instead of feasting on delicious brains.