Are bank clerks well paid these days, or are banks cutting costs everywhere they can and paying as little as possible to these people? Why should the staff care? Are they paid to care? Do they have some sort of job security and loyalty from the company that helps them care?
Or is it more that staff have personal pride in their work and mostly try hard but now and then stuff slips through?
There's a great story about the first person to accurately measure the height of Mount Everest, whose name escapes me at the moment.
His calculations came out to precisely 29,000 feet. Thinking no-one would believe such a round number, he added two feet to make 29,002 feet but was greatly annoyed by the whole thing.
Later it was more accurately measured at 29,029 feet (going from memory here) using lasers or something.
The Spectrum was pretty bad, but the version reviewed looks wonderful compared to the one my family owned.
The keys were rubber, you had to do hand-gymnastics to enter a command (you can't type P-E-E-K, you hit down the symbol shift key, the shift key and press the O key) and when the computer heated up the rubber keys felt weird.
But the article's wrong - there is a backspace! You hold down symbol shift and press 0 (zero). Not convenient, but it exists.
And what about the ZX-80? Those thin membrane keyboards were atrocious! Still, with a full kilobyte of programmable memory you felt you were living in the future!
the Lisa (with its "borrowed" GUI design courtesy of Xerox labs)
No.
Apple licensed some concepts from Xerox and greatly developed others. Jef Raskin was an Apple employee who, more than just about anyone, developed the GUI concept from the ground up.
Have you ever seen a Xerox GUI in action? It's not pretty and it's barely usable. Apple brought a lot to that metaphor but they'd already done a lot of work on the Mac and GUI. For some reason people like yourself either don't know that or forget it, preferring to believe that the Mac GUI sprang fully formed in Xerox and was cruelly stolen by Apple. It's a lie, often repeated but that doesn't make it any less a lie.
I'd be surprised if Linux were considered seriously at all. Under OS X Apple have a development toolkit that they've put a lot of work into and covers everything from UI to coding. The OS itself has been ported from PPC to Intel very smoothly, leading me to think it can be ported well to other processors. The Apple devs are thoroughly familiar with the OS and can ask the OS devs for help if they really need to.
Contrast with Linux, where nearly all of those positives disappear. It's a great OS, yes, but what does Apple know about it?
OS X should've been a no-brainer and I think the article's overstating the decision against Linux.
I think you're missing a point here - there are plenty of people who don't want to build a PC or just want a small, unobtrusive box behind the monitor. These people will prefer a less powerful PC like the Shuttle from the article, or a Mac Mini, than the clunker under the desk whining away when they put it under load.
Yes, it's easy to build a nice, powerful and cheap PC, but it's very hard to do that in a tiny form factor.
While some of the fires were caused by ruptured gas lines, I understand that many of the fires following the earthquake were caused by people realising that they were uninsured against earthquakes (act of God) but were insured against fire.
Did you see that Simpsons episode, with Homer's Internet company "CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet" ?
Closer to reality than we ever thought possible, except instead of the 'buyout' violence directed at Homer, it's actually directed at Microsoft shareholders. Those poor, suffering shareholders.
As an example, I recall that the Lord of the Rings was written and edited entirely by hand. That's over a thousand pages, revised, rewritten, pencilled notes in margins and crossed out lines. And that's not counting the back-story, which is of equal size.
While that's not unusual for the period, Christopher Tolkien (the son) released thirteen books based entirely on the revisions and notes, detailing how they changed over time. Again, I would expect that you could do this with pretty much any book prior to 1980, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Writing is about getting the ideas down, and the ideas all come from the author's head. The tool matters less, although a good tool can ease the process.
He also provides links to other OS X writing software. He must feel pretty comfortable with his competition!
I'm toying with the idea of purchasing Scrivener myself. I tried the demo and like the way you can jot down notes and images in a pretty free-form way. It's close to the way I write.
While you clearly disagree, I use my computer to reduce the amount of mucking about I have to do to get simple things done.
The iTunes database does this for me.
Dragging and dropping music doesn't scale either. What is a neat system on a 256MB device is a huge pain on a 60GB device, once you factor in ID3 tags, changes, etc. It also lacks the control with auto playlists based on how often I play or how high I rate the songs. These are solid features that make a real difference. To do it your way we'd have to manually update our playlists whenever we wanted to change them.
If you're doing the work of a file system, you bought the wrong metaphor!
1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.
Can any mods give that sentence +5 insightful? The rest of the post is great as well, but that sentence shows insight.
It also neatly encapsulates one of the major theorems about Internet social behaviour.
The project site makes it pretty clear there's no design document for the game, no central vision of what it will be. They're going to design it once they've got the people together, so it's going to be one of those designed-by-committee games.
That way lies adequacy and weak gameplay.
Still, I wish them well and since they're off to a bad start it can only improve from here.
So 2 months ago, my sister's marketing company bought her a new Apple, and she told them she didn't want it. They gave it to her anyway, and it's been sitting in its box unopened ever since. She went out and bought a 'regular'[sic] laptop with her own money.
So a couple of dumb sales staff annoyed her so much she went out and spent a thousand dollars or so to avoid using the product they sold?
I think your name's not working - your reality is not being mastered at all.
You're projecting a lot, and when you drop in terms like "initiation", "Kool-Aid" and "better than thou" it's pretty clear that you've got issues with how you relate to a company.
Someone shouldn't have to be an expert in networking to connect a router up. They shouldn't have to be a sysadmin to use a networked drive or home server/NAS box.
Users are sold the concept of plug and go but buy devices that are plug and configure, configure, get help, hope, maybe get it working, call a friend and finally return to a salesperson who will make them feel stupid.
Similarly, people shouldn't have to be engineers to not be ripped off when they get their car serviced. They shouldn't have to be lawyers to avoid being ripped off when they buy a house. They shouldn't have to be a builder to avoid being ripped off when they pay hundreds of thousands for a house to be constructed for them.
Damnit! they shouldn't have to be sysadmins to use a simple NAS box!
Any person competent in a specialist field can easily baffle lay-people. Many types of business have government oversight to ensure compliance to standards and help lay-people avoid being ripped off. The rest rely on truth in advertising.
People in the computing world are sold all the bells and whistles but are too often given a do-it-yourself kit. It's not their fault that the computing world is full of half-arsed products and devices that are useless until you work for ages to make them live up to their promises.
Be careful when you blame users when the computing media sells all the products as revolutionarily simple.
Lastly, why should the people paying the money need to be experts? What are they paying for, if not in-built expertise?
This post is spot on. Too much equipment is too complex and the answer from a lot of people is "you're not smart enough to have this" which misses the point in the same way that a brick isn't a dolphin.
Home servers and NAS boxes should be plug and play (to use a hackneyed phrase). We should be able to plug a device in and it's smart enough to work with the computer to maximise usefulness.
The users, after all, are paying the bills. We've got better things to do with our time than be sysadmins for ourselves.
My money goes to devices with simplicity in mind. My D-Link 323 required a lot of effort to set it up for AFP (I want it to be transparent to our OS X machines) and it really shouldn't have. I upgraded my router/modem to a modem plus the Apple Airport Extreme and that device was much more simple to set up, and not just because it works well with my Mac. The software is smart, and takes care of stuff that frankly, I shouldn't have to.
Like many people here, I can handle all the complexity in the world. I prefer to save complexity for where it's needed and reward simplicity where it's possible.
You missed the point, say you never ever touch a p2p network ever again, what stops the RIAA from posting the latest Britney Spears song, marking it ith YOUR watermark, and then sue you for $100.000.
Okay, I was wondering where you were going with this, but you're well into tinfoil hat territory here. If you think like this, then there's no way you'll accept any logical or reasoned argument so it's not worth trying.
I hope that the delay means the product will be as close to Will Wright's vision as humanly possible. That's the upside of delayed games, and the examples you cite are good ones as well.
The downside is that we can always point to other delayed games that have turned out less than great, or sometimes turned out to be nothing more than vapourware.
Slashdot Mirror
Are bank clerks well paid these days, or are banks cutting costs everywhere they can and paying as little as possible to these people? Why should the staff care? Are they paid to care? Do they have some sort of job security and loyalty from the company that helps them care?
Or is it more that staff have personal pride in their work and mostly try hard but now and then stuff slips through?
There's a great story about the first person to accurately measure the height of Mount Everest, whose name escapes me at the moment.
His calculations came out to precisely 29,000 feet. Thinking no-one would believe such a round number, he added two feet to make 29,002 feet but was greatly annoyed by the whole thing.
Later it was more accurately measured at 29,029 feet (going from memory here) using lasers or something.
The Spectrum was pretty bad, but the version reviewed looks wonderful compared to the one my family owned.
The keys were rubber, you had to do hand-gymnastics to enter a command (you can't type P-E-E-K, you hit down the symbol shift key, the shift key and press the O key) and when the computer heated up the rubber keys felt weird.
But the article's wrong - there is a backspace! You hold down symbol shift and press 0 (zero). Not convenient, but it exists.
And what about the ZX-80? Those thin membrane keyboards were atrocious! Still, with a full kilobyte of programmable memory you felt you were living in the future!
the Lisa (with its "borrowed" GUI design courtesy of Xerox labs)
No.
Apple licensed some concepts from Xerox and greatly developed others. Jef Raskin was an Apple employee who, more than just about anyone, developed the GUI concept from the ground up.
Have you ever seen a Xerox GUI in action? It's not pretty and it's barely usable. Apple brought a lot to that metaphor but they'd already done a lot of work on the Mac and GUI. For some reason people like yourself either don't know that or forget it, preferring to believe that the Mac GUI sprang fully formed in Xerox and was cruelly stolen by Apple. It's a lie, often repeated but that doesn't make it any less a lie.
Read and learn
I'd be surprised if Linux were considered seriously at all. Under OS X Apple have a development toolkit that they've put a lot of work into and covers everything from UI to coding. The OS itself has been ported from PPC to Intel very smoothly, leading me to think it can be ported well to other processors. The Apple devs are thoroughly familiar with the OS and can ask the OS devs for help if they really need to.
Contrast with Linux, where nearly all of those positives disappear. It's a great OS, yes, but what does Apple know about it?
OS X should've been a no-brainer and I think the article's overstating the decision against Linux.
Thanks for that post, it was a good laugh.
Ah, Europe the size of Texas... that cracks me up.
I think you're missing a point here - there are plenty of people who don't want to build a PC or just want a small, unobtrusive box behind the monitor. These people will prefer a less powerful PC like the Shuttle from the article, or a Mac Mini, than the clunker under the desk whining away when they put it under load.
Yes, it's easy to build a nice, powerful and cheap PC, but it's very hard to do that in a tiny form factor.
With deals like these, will Linux become the dominant home operating system for the thrifty?
So... will people who want to spend as little as possible go for a cheap PC with a free OS, free Office package and lots of other free software..?
Well, that's a poser isn't it?
While some of the fires were caused by ruptured gas lines, I understand that many of the fires following the earthquake were caused by people realising that they were uninsured against earthquakes (act of God) but were insured against fire.
Did you see that Simpsons episode, with Homer's Internet company "CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet" ?
Closer to reality than we ever thought possible, except instead of the 'buyout' violence directed at Homer, it's actually directed at Microsoft shareholders. Those poor, suffering shareholders.
That's a good point.
As an example, I recall that the Lord of the Rings was written and edited entirely by hand. That's over a thousand pages, revised, rewritten, pencilled notes in margins and crossed out lines. And that's not counting the back-story, which is of equal size.
While that's not unusual for the period, Christopher Tolkien (the son) released thirteen books based entirely on the revisions and notes, detailing how they changed over time. Again, I would expect that you could do this with pretty much any book prior to 1980, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Writing is about getting the ideas down, and the ideas all come from the author's head. The tool matters less, although a good tool can ease the process.
The author may not develop for Windows, but he does provide some links to Windows-based writing software in a similar vein to Scrivener"
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.html
He also provides links to other OS X writing software. He must feel pretty comfortable with his competition!
I'm toying with the idea of purchasing Scrivener myself. I tried the demo and like the way you can jot down notes and images in a pretty free-form way. It's close to the way I write.
While you clearly disagree, I use my computer to reduce the amount of mucking about I have to do to get simple things done.
The iTunes database does this for me.
Dragging and dropping music doesn't scale either. What is a neat system on a 256MB device is a huge pain on a 60GB device, once you factor in ID3 tags, changes, etc. It also lacks the control with auto playlists based on how often I play or how high I rate the songs. These are solid features that make a real difference. To do it your way we'd have to manually update our playlists whenever we wanted to change them.
If you're doing the work of a file system, you bought the wrong metaphor!
...Kurt Cobain?
He's the guy that sang the line "I don't have a gun," and then showed us he was being ironic.
He needs to post another blog under the name Fake Zed Shaw for those comments.
Still, his post today did say he was just kidding about some of it. Some of it.
1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.
Can any mods give that sentence +5 insightful? The rest of the post is great as well, but that sentence shows insight.
It also neatly encapsulates one of the major theorems about Internet social behaviour.
Hey, you come out of it pretty well. Apparently you're awesome, like a ninja. That's got to be good.
(I'm only adequate, like a French pikeman from the Napoleonic wars. I dream of being awesome like a ninja.)
Even getting that far, I suspect he's said actionable things - I hope his "enemies" aren't as unbalanced as he appears to be.
Yes, but what would people hurt by his astounding rant sue for?
"Hey! I got his last $10! Let's buy a six-pack and watch him get kicked out onto the street again!"
The project site makes it pretty clear there's no design document for the game, no central vision of what it will be. They're going to design it once they've got the people together, so it's going to be one of those designed-by-committee games.
That way lies adequacy and weak gameplay.
Still, I wish them well and since they're off to a bad start it can only improve from here.
So 2 months ago, my sister's marketing company bought her a new Apple, and she told them she didn't want it. They gave it to her anyway, and it's been sitting in its box unopened ever since. She went out and bought a 'regular'[sic] laptop with her own money.
So a couple of dumb sales staff annoyed her so much she went out and spent a thousand dollars or so to avoid using the product they sold?
Wow. She really let them get to her.
I think your name's not working - your reality is not being mastered at all.
You're projecting a lot, and when you drop in terms like "initiation", "Kool-Aid" and "better than thou" it's pretty clear that you've got issues with how you relate to a company.
Be careful here.
Someone shouldn't have to be an expert in networking to connect a router up. They shouldn't have to be a sysadmin to use a networked drive or home server/NAS box.
Users are sold the concept of plug and go but buy devices that are plug and configure, configure, get help, hope, maybe get it working, call a friend and finally return to a salesperson who will make them feel stupid.
Similarly, people shouldn't have to be engineers to not be ripped off when they get their car serviced. They shouldn't have to be lawyers to avoid being ripped off when they buy a house. They shouldn't have to be a builder to avoid being ripped off when they pay hundreds of thousands for a house to be constructed for them.
Damnit! they shouldn't have to be sysadmins to use a simple NAS box!
Any person competent in a specialist field can easily baffle lay-people. Many types of business have government oversight to ensure compliance to standards and help lay-people avoid being ripped off. The rest rely on truth in advertising.
People in the computing world are sold all the bells and whistles but are too often given a do-it-yourself kit. It's not their fault that the computing world is full of half-arsed products and devices that are useless until you work for ages to make them live up to their promises.
Be careful when you blame users when the computing media sells all the products as revolutionarily simple.
Lastly, why should the people paying the money need to be experts? What are they paying for, if not in-built expertise?
This post is spot on. Too much equipment is too complex and the answer from a lot of people is "you're not smart enough to have this" which misses the point in the same way that a brick isn't a dolphin.
Home servers and NAS boxes should be plug and play (to use a hackneyed phrase). We should be able to plug a device in and it's smart enough to work with the computer to maximise usefulness.
The users, after all, are paying the bills. We've got better things to do with our time than be sysadmins for ourselves.
My money goes to devices with simplicity in mind. My D-Link 323 required a lot of effort to set it up for AFP (I want it to be transparent to our OS X machines) and it really shouldn't have. I upgraded my router/modem to a modem plus the Apple Airport Extreme and that device was much more simple to set up, and not just because it works well with my Mac. The software is smart, and takes care of stuff that frankly, I shouldn't have to.
Like many people here, I can handle all the complexity in the world. I prefer to save complexity for where it's needed and reward simplicity where it's possible.
You missed the point, say you never ever touch a p2p network ever again, what stops the RIAA from posting the latest Britney Spears song, marking it ith YOUR watermark, and then sue you for $100.000.
Okay, I was wondering where you were going with this, but you're well into tinfoil hat territory here. If you think like this, then there's no way you'll accept any logical or reasoned argument so it's not worth trying.
I hope that the delay means the product will be as close to Will Wright's vision as humanly possible. That's the upside of delayed games, and the examples you cite are good ones as well.
The downside is that we can always point to other delayed games that have turned out less than great, or sometimes turned out to be nothing more than vapourware.