Count me in! it may be a bit bothersome to get around / disable the Win8 UI-elements I don't like, but apart from that this sounds like a really good deal.
I've commented elsewhere on this thread and refrained from mentioning any particular authors/books, but of course I heartily recommend anyone reading Terry Pratchett's books.:-)
If you think there is that one book that will turn your life around I fear you're in for a disappointment.
Yes, there are straight-up self-help-books [non-fiction] that claim to do so (or people who claim those books work that way). Then there are some [fictional] books that are often claimed to have a guaranteed, immediate impact on you life (eg Atlas Shrugged, The Hitchhiker's Guide, various religious books).
I fear that none of those books will do anything for you if you're not ready to take from books what they can actually offer: insights into different ways of thinking, of storytelling, glimpses into different realities. I'd say it doesn't matter much what you read... the point is: you should read a lot.
I'm trying not to give any kind of general advice here, just telling how it worked/works for me. I read everything: The back of cereal boxes, novels, blogs, wikipedia, fiction (well, that was covered by "novels", wasn't it?), non-fiction, you name it. The thing is: I enjoy it. It's not some kind of plan I set up one day: "Read Everything!" Rather it's a pastime I developed over many years that has given me thousands of hours of fun, procrastination -- and the occasional very, very good insight.
Try it... but don't be too disappointed if it doesn't work out for you (*). You say you "need to do something to enhance [your] career"... well, maybe it's not in books. What (I believe) you crave is more insight into life, yours, others, the worlds. You may get to books on a more circuitious route -- find/remember something you really care about, do it, experience it, maybe later start reading about it -- and go off on tangents -- that's what "reading" really is all about. Did I mention you have to give it (yourself) a lot of time? [Oh bother, there I go, making "self-help"-statements...]
Well, while I'm at it I might ad this little nugget: whatever books the other people in this thread suggest: you may confidently skip those. Unless something actually intrigues you. But as long as you feel you have to read a particular book probably not much good will come from it.
ac
(*) I, at one point, realized computer games were a legitimate and culturally significant form of art. I find them utterly fascinating, love to read about them... yet for the life of me I can't get the hang of them. So far I've found every "game" I've played tedious grinding.
Now this I'd really like to see. However I don't think we're going to get this anytime soon, the signal-processing to determine what's an intentional (edge-)touch and what's just touches caused by holding the device is insane.
You, as a hotmail-user, may not have had a problem with receiving spam, but many people (me included) had massive problems with spam from hotmail-accounts during the late nineties/early noughts. It's not for nothing that hotmail at some point became synonymous with "dodgy-offer-by-nigerian-royalty-mail". Those were the days before many of us had good hosters/providers with grade-A server-side spam-filtering. At one point I simply stopped bothering, set up a local rule that would automatically move anything received from a hotmail-account to the thrash and told anyone I knew to stay the hell away from hotmail if they still wanted to communicate with me via e-mail.
hotmail may be a decent mail provider today, but they burned a lot of trust in the early days. So much, that to this day anyone with a @hotmail.com-address feels kind of dodgy/unprofessional to me, even though I know hotmail isn't as bad as it used to be.
The polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem describes this (in a humorous fashion) in one of his Ijon Tichy / Professor A. Donda short stories.
Prof. Donda has the theory that information = mass, proceeds to create a new field of study as a pretext to cram the maximum amount of information into the smallest space possible. He succeeds, creating an information singularity that makes all of the fixed, stored information in the universe go kablooie. Tichy and Donda end up somewhere in the jungle, looking at old copies of Playboy magazine.
The iPod Touch just seems a whole lot sturdier too
Seconded. My 4 year old daughter has been using my old 1st Gen. Touch for a year now... dropped it, smeared it with whatever gunk was on her fingers... sometimes the screen was so encrusted with god-knows-what it felt like a relief-map of the alps. At one point some sugary goo must have entered the device, because the home-button stopped working. I figured I hadn't much to lose, so I soaked the bottom half in an alcoholic cleaner... whaddaya know -- it works again like on day one.
I initially bought the thing as a (rather expensive) toy for myself, but it turned out to be an invaluable Device For Peace And Harmony On Long Road Trips And Train Rides.:-)
She doesn't yet play games, but loves to watch old Sesame Street clips, Shaun The Sheep, look at the family photos I loaded onto it and listens to music. At 3 years old she had the interface figured out in about two days.
P.S.: Being a Responsible Parent I obviously severely limit her time with the iPod, also I used the parental controls to lower the maximum volume.
What distinguishes this notebook from a netbook IMO is the lack of an integrated 3G/UMTS modem (not even optional). My guess for this is they don't want to cannibalize their iPad sales.
Well, what we *really* know is it was there 56 years ago (actually ~59 years ago, according to the distance given in the wikipedia-entry (53 ly) and the date of the press release (Feb. 2004).:)
Linguists say "African-American Vernacular English".
What does it say about our society if a group we need to integrate is so isolated it's developing an incompatible dialect?
Ah -- a problem I've been trying to raise awareness to for ages: how to incorporate Linguists into our society, make them valuable and productive members, even. Sadly Linguists appear to be a bunch of stubborn bastards who relish in the esoteric obscurity and unfathomable tenebrity of their patois.
"[...] say what you want about Steve Jobs, but it will be a cold day in hell before a product comes out of his company that can be described as "unusable.""
Well, there was the infamous "Hockey Puck"-mouse. I worked at a multimedia roadshow and workshop in 1999 and could see first hand how a large sample of users (of various levels of skill) interacted with this abomination. We ended up having to buy clip-on thingies for the mice so people would be able to use them(*). Say what you will about Macs and the Mac OS (I've always liked them), but I've yet to see a good mouse produced by Apple (and that includes the current generation mice).
(*) Yes, we could have just used any other USB-Mouse, but for some (contractual? sponsor?) reason we were required to use only Apple equipment.
VLC just happily bypasses [region codes] and plays anything.
Sadly there are a number of CD/DVD-drives around where the drive itself checks the region code of the inserted disk and acts (or rather: refuses to act) accordingly -- nothing VLC (or any other software DVD-ripper for that matter) can do. The Matshita-drives used in most portable Macs come to mind. The only workaround would be to re-flash the drive with a different firmware, but often the drives/laptops ar obsolete by the time someone comes up with an alternative firmware. Oh, and of course your warranty's shot if anything goes wrong.
Definition is presently understood to be resolution along an axis. If you hijack it to mean the presence of an axis, what happens when the resolution along that axis changes?
Super-High-Definition.
You shouldn't consider a career in marketing, really.
I went from Vista to Win7 RC1 and didn't have any problems. Every time I see a comment like this, I think to myself "Why don't I ever have these problems?" Well?
Possibly for the same reason I can install Linux and not have to keep a terminal window open for every little thing, or constantly tweak it. We are not drama queens
Same here with Mac OS upgrades. When a completely new OS-Revision is released (10.4/5/6), or even just a minor point-release (10.n.n), you should hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Apple-centric forums.
Mind you: you hear (read) mostly from people who have a problem. In my experience it's mostly people who sometime in the past did something to their OS they were explicitly told not to (or at least warned about), because it might cause problems in the future ("Input-Manager Haxxies" come to mind). Now, I by no means want to give the impression that all Mac-OS-updates will run flawless, unless you did something unsavoury (in fact I have been bitten by a pure Apple-Mistake myself (sometime around 10.2.8 -- my USB-Peripherals would suddenly Kernel-Panic my Mac (which had run flawlessly until then)), also there sometimes are 3rd-party programs that use (more or less suddenly) revoked routines (does happen each and every time with parts of the Adobe CS-Suite)...
Having said all that: the really, really bad "upgrade experiences" usually happen to people who at sometime in the past had already b0rked their system.... or did not read the news: I make quite a lot of money with Adobe CS3 on MacOS X 10.5.x. (I'm a designer by trade). I did a little rearch when 10.6 came out, realized, that the (acutually rather minor) problems with CS3/OSX10.6 still were showstoppers for my workflow and continue to work very productively with yesterday's OS (Mac OS 10.5.x) and yesterday's Adobe-"Suite" (CS3). YMMV
Joking aside I (slightly off-topically) must admit that, yes I actually am a Mac user, and to me Photoshop is as much a valuable tool for my income as it is a favorite toy.
I'm out of mod-points right now, which probably is a good thing, because i'd have modded you "insightful" on impulse. That probably would have been wrong, since your scenario is not universally attractive, But boy did you hit my personal idea of unlimited whimsy.
One addition, though: I'd first buy all my favourite works of art (as and when available), then pay the master art-forgers of this world the requisite monies to create exact, indistinguishable replicas of them. Then, when it's definitely impossible to distinguish between original and "fake" I'd donate half of my collection to the public. Which version goes to the museums and which version remains with me would be decided by double-blind random events. Who owns the original? What is the original? Who cares... the bottom line is: a lot of extraordinarily talented craftsmen (and -women) would get payed well for their work, and some of the greatest works of art would now exist twice. Ah... what a wonderful world that would be.
And the best thing: those shenannigans, costly as the might be, would likely only use up a tiny fraction of my vast fortune, leaving lots and lots of money to be spent on serious, humanist causes. Which would get me tons of karma, but would be utterly depressing to manage. So (since I'm so incredibly rich, remember) I'll just pay people (administrators) to care. And some other people to audit them. And, maybe, some people to audit the auditors (I don't mind losing money, but the people who should receive it might). Yep, I thing that would be A Good Thing(TM) all around.:)
a.c.
P.S.: Yes, I'd own the Trademark on "A Good Thing", too, but would only enforce it when evil fucks misuse it. See how nice I am?:)
Major changes in OS 10.6 are mostly cosmetic from what I can tell.
Well, maybe you want to take a closer look at what's actually new in OS X 10.6 -- I'd say it's a lot more than just a cosmetic change.
I'm not going to go into the details of every major OS X revision, but you should note that the upgrade price for 10.6 from 10.5 is not the usual $ 100, but only $ 29. Apple basically says that 10.6 is what 10.5 could have been, had they had more time. 10.6 has massive changes under the hood (see above), but actually very little "cosmetics" or obvious new features (e.g. TimeMachine or Spotlight in previous revisions).
They're doing something very simillar to what Microsoft appears to be doing with the transition from Vista to 7, but unlike Microsoft they're not charging the users full price for a major system overhaul (this time;) ).
I'm not sure you're aware of how the world of high-finance works. There have been hedge funds handling over $10B with FIVE employees. Seriously.
I'm not exactly doubting you (in 2009 sadly someting like this sounds all too believable), yet I'd rather have some (reliable, checkable) corroboration (i.e.: links) for that statement of yours. It was, after all, blindly believing in credible (but unchecked) statements from one trusted guy that got all those investors into the mess they're in.
Slashdot Mirror
Count me in!
it may be a bit bothersome to get around / disable the Win8 UI-elements I don't like, but apart from that this sounds like a really good deal.
I've commented elsewhere on this thread and refrained from mentioning any particular authors/books, but of course I heartily recommend anyone reading Terry Pratchett's books. :-)
If you think there is that one book that will turn your life around I fear you're in for a disappointment.
Yes, there are straight-up self-help-books [non-fiction] that claim to do so (or people who claim those books work that way). Then there are some [fictional] books that are often claimed to have a guaranteed, immediate impact on you life (eg Atlas Shrugged, The Hitchhiker's Guide, various religious books).
I fear that none of those books will do anything for you if you're not ready to take from books what they can actually offer: insights into different ways of thinking, of storytelling, glimpses into different realities. I'd say it doesn't matter much what you read... the point is: you should read a lot.
I'm trying not to give any kind of general advice here, just telling how it worked/works for me. I read everything: The back of cereal boxes, novels, blogs, wikipedia, fiction (well, that was covered by "novels", wasn't it?), non-fiction, you name it. The thing is: I enjoy it. It's not some kind of plan I set up one day: "Read Everything!" Rather it's a pastime I developed over many years that has given me thousands of hours of fun, procrastination -- and the occasional very, very good insight.
Try it... but don't be too disappointed if it doesn't work out for you (*). You say you "need to do something to enhance [your] career"... well, maybe it's not in books. What (I believe) you crave is more insight into life, yours, others, the worlds. You may get to books on a more circuitious route -- find/remember something you really care about, do it, experience it, maybe later start reading about it -- and go off on tangents -- that's what "reading" really is all about. Did I mention you have to give it (yourself) a lot of time? [Oh bother, there I go, making "self-help"-statements...]
Well, while I'm at it I might ad this little nugget: whatever books the other people in this thread suggest: you may confidently skip those. Unless something actually intrigues you. But as long as you feel you have to read a particular book probably not much good will come from it.
ac
(*) I, at one point, realized computer games were a legitimate and culturally significant form of art. I find them utterly fascinating, love to read about them... yet for the life of me I can't get the hang of them. So far I've found every "game" I've played tedious grinding.
Now this I'd really like to see. However I don't think we're going to get this anytime soon, the signal-processing to determine what's an intentional (edge-)touch and what's just touches caused by holding the device is insane.
What with the shaking and the accidentially dropping phones into toilets etc. ... He may have been onto something there...
:-)
(I kid, I kid)
You, as a hotmail-user, may not have had a problem with receiving spam, but many people (me included) had massive problems with spam from hotmail-accounts during the late nineties/early noughts. It's not for nothing that hotmail at some point became synonymous with "dodgy-offer-by-nigerian-royalty-mail". Those were the days before many of us had good hosters/providers with grade-A server-side spam-filtering. At one point I simply stopped bothering, set up a local rule that would automatically move anything received from a hotmail-account to the thrash and told anyone I knew to stay the hell away from hotmail if they still wanted to communicate with me via e-mail.
hotmail may be a decent mail provider today, but they burned a lot of trust in the early days. So much, that to this day anyone with a @hotmail.com-address feels kind of dodgy/unprofessional to me, even though I know hotmail isn't as bad as it used to be.
The polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem describes this (in a humorous fashion) in one of his Ijon Tichy / Professor A. Donda short stories.
Prof. Donda has the theory that information = mass, proceeds to create a new field of study as a pretext to cram the maximum amount of information into the smallest space possible. He succeeds, creating an information singularity that makes all of the fixed, stored information in the universe go kablooie. Tichy and Donda end up somewhere in the jungle, looking at old copies of Playboy magazine.
The picture may well be a fake.
Seconded. My 4 year old daughter has been using my old 1st Gen. Touch for a year now... dropped it, smeared it with whatever gunk was on her fingers... sometimes the screen was so encrusted with god-knows-what it felt like a relief-map of the alps. At one point some sugary goo must have entered the device, because the home-button stopped working. I figured I hadn't much to lose, so I soaked the bottom half in an alcoholic cleaner... whaddaya know -- it works again like on day one.
:-)
I initially bought the thing as a (rather expensive) toy for myself, but it turned out to be an invaluable Device For Peace And Harmony On Long Road Trips And Train Rides.
She doesn't yet play games, but loves to watch old Sesame Street clips, Shaun The Sheep, look at the family photos I loaded onto it and listens to music. At 3 years old she had the interface figured out in about two days.
P.S.: Being a Responsible Parent I obviously severely limit her time with the iPod, also I used the parental controls to lower the maximum volume.
... to the thrash.
Did I miss anything?
What distinguishes this notebook from a netbook IMO is the lack of an integrated 3G/UMTS modem (not even optional). My guess for this is they don't want to cannibalize their iPad sales.
And a /. discussion full of sound and fury.
Well, what we *really* know is it was there 56 years ago (actually ~59 years ago, according to the distance given in the wikipedia-entry (53 ly) and the date of the press release (Feb. 2004). :)
Ah -- a problem I've been trying to raise awareness to for ages: how to incorporate Linguists into our society, make them valuable and productive members, even. Sadly Linguists appear to be a bunch of stubborn bastards who relish in the esoteric obscurity and unfathomable tenebrity of their patois.
"[...] say what you want about Steve Jobs, but it will be a cold day in hell before a product comes out of his company that can be described as "unusable.""
Well, there was the infamous "Hockey Puck"-mouse.
I worked at a multimedia roadshow and workshop in 1999 and could see first hand how a large sample of users (of various levels of skill) interacted with this abomination. We ended up having to buy clip-on thingies for the mice so people would be able to use them(*). Say what you will about Macs and the Mac OS (I've always liked them), but I've yet to see a good mouse produced by Apple (and that includes the current generation mice).
(*) Yes, we could have just used any other USB-Mouse, but for some (contractual? sponsor?) reason we were required to use only Apple equipment.
You might as well have given the literary source for this quote.
;)
Sadly there are a number of CD/DVD-drives around where the drive itself checks the region code of the inserted disk and acts (or rather: refuses to act) accordingly -- nothing VLC (or any other software DVD-ripper for that matter) can do. The Matshita-drives used in most portable Macs come to mind. The only workaround would be to re-flash the drive with a different firmware, but often the drives/laptops ar obsolete by the time someone comes up with an alternative firmware. Oh, and of course your warranty's shot if anything goes wrong.
Super-High-Definition.
You shouldn't consider a career in marketing, really.
Same here with Mac OS upgrades. When a completely new OS-Revision is released (10.4/5/6), or even just a minor point-release (10.n.n), you should hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Apple-centric forums.
Mind you: you hear (read) mostly from people who have a problem. In my experience it's mostly people who sometime in the past did something to their OS they were explicitly told not to (or at least warned about), because it might cause problems in the future ("Input-Manager Haxxies" come to mind). Now, I by no means want to give the impression that all Mac-OS-updates will run flawless, unless you did something unsavoury (in fact I have been bitten by a pure Apple-Mistake myself (sometime around 10.2.8 -- my USB-Peripherals would suddenly Kernel-Panic my Mac (which had run flawlessly until then)), also there sometimes are 3rd-party programs that use (more or less suddenly) revoked routines (does happen each and every time with parts of the Adobe CS-Suite)...
Having said all that: the really, really bad "upgrade experiences" usually happen to people who at sometime in the past had already b0rked their system.... or did not read the news: I make quite a lot of money with Adobe CS3 on MacOS X 10.5.x. (I'm a designer by trade). I did a little rearch when 10.6 came out, realized, that the (acutually rather minor) problems with CS3/OSX10.6 still were showstoppers for my workflow and continue to work very productively with yesterday's OS (Mac OS 10.5.x) and yesterday's Adobe-"Suite" (CS3).
YMMV
... at least we've got... er... Photoshop.
Joking aside I (slightly off-topically) must admit that, yes I actually am a Mac user, and to me Photoshop is as much a valuable tool for my income as it is a favorite toy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg
I'm out of mod-points right now, which probably is a good thing, because i'd have modded you "insightful" on impulse. That probably would have been wrong, since your scenario is not universally attractive, But boy did you hit my personal idea of unlimited whimsy.
:)
:)
One addition, though: I'd first buy all my favourite works of art (as and when available), then pay the master art-forgers of this world the requisite monies to create exact, indistinguishable replicas of them. Then, when it's definitely impossible to distinguish between original and "fake" I'd donate half of my collection to the public. Which version goes to the museums and which version remains with me would be decided by double-blind random events. Who owns the original? What is the original? Who cares... the bottom line is: a lot of extraordinarily talented craftsmen (and -women) would get payed well for their work, and some of the greatest works of art would now exist twice. Ah... what a wonderful world that would be.
And the best thing: those shenannigans, costly as the might be, would likely only use up a tiny fraction of my vast fortune, leaving lots and lots of money to be spent on serious, humanist causes. Which would get me tons of karma, but would be utterly depressing to manage. So (since I'm so incredibly rich, remember) I'll just pay people (administrators) to care. And some other people to audit them. And, maybe, some people to audit the auditors (I don't mind losing money, but the people who should receive it might). Yep, I thing that would be A Good Thing(TM) all around.
a.c.
P.S.: Yes, I'd own the Trademark on "A Good Thing", too, but would only enforce it when evil fucks misuse it. See how nice I am?
Well, maybe you want to take a closer look at what's actually new in OS X 10.6 -- I'd say it's a lot more than just a cosmetic change.
;) ).
I'm not going to go into the details of every major OS X revision, but you should note that the upgrade price for 10.6 from 10.5 is not the usual $ 100, but only $ 29. Apple basically says that 10.6 is what 10.5 could have been, had they had more time. 10.6 has massive changes under the hood (see above), but actually very little "cosmetics" or obvious new features (e.g. TimeMachine or Spotlight in previous revisions).
They're doing something very simillar to what Microsoft appears to be doing with the transition from Vista to 7, but unlike Microsoft they're not charging the users full price for a major system overhaul (this time
What?
:)
ac
I'm not exactly doubting you (in 2009 sadly someting like this sounds all too believable), yet I'd rather have some (reliable, checkable) corroboration (i.e.: links) for that statement of yours. It was, after all, blindly believing in credible (but unchecked) statements from one trusted guy that got all those investors into the mess they're in.