Fortunately the trend is well established. Thus, I predict that future videogame players will all be lean, flexible, well-muscled, finely-trained athletes able to beat up football players and steal their lunch money.
I don't think it's a question of control on the person who is passing, but someone slow up front making a sudden turn in front of you.
It is precisely a question of control on the part of the person who is passing. The person in front of you has the right of way. Always, always, always -- because you can see him better than he can see you. If he has to make a sudden turn or chooses to make one, that's his right. You don't have the right to be "coming up from behind FAST" anywhere that a person in front of you might turn. If the slope is crowded enough that that's an issue, SLOW DOWN.
Here are the standard seven safety rules of the slope, usually printed prominently in various locations on the mountain:
Always stay in control and be able to stop or avoid other people or objects.
People ahead of you have the right of way. It is your responsibility to avoid them.
You must not stop where you obstruct a trail or are not visible from above.
Whenever starting downhill or merging into a trail, look uphill and yield to others.
Always use devices to help prevent run away equipment.
Observe all posted signs and warnings. Keep off closed trails and out of closed areas.
Prior to using any lift, you must have the knowledge and ability to load, ride, and unload safely.
(Both my parents were ski patrollers. I love to ski fast too, but I do so where and when it is safe, not on crowded bunny slopes. If somebody has to hear you yell "on the left!" to avoid you crashing into them, you're not skiing safely.)
There are deaf skiiers on the slopes. You never noticed this before because hearing well really isn't necessary to ski well.
If someone crashes into you passing you on your left and they yelled at you that they were coming up on you to pass you have no one to blame but yourself.
Slower skiiers have the right of way. Yelling is never a reasonable substitute for passing in a controlled manner in such a way that you can avoid the other skiiers no matter what they do. If somebody crashes into you from behind, it's their fault for not slowing the frick down to a safe passing speed, it's not your fault for failing to hear their muffled yell over the wind noise through your earmuffs or over the sound of your iPod Nano. You shouldn't need to hear anything in order to ski safely.
If a beginner is blocking your way, don't swish right past them and hope they (a) hear your warning, (b) understand what you want them to do, (c) have the necessary control to do it. Instead, slow down and wait for an opportunity to pass that gives them a wide enough berth so as to avoid all chance of a collision.
People listening to music while skiing/snowboarding has always concerned me for the same reasons why it's illegal to have headsets on while driving.
This is a silly concern unless you're also going to ban earmuffs and hats that cover the ear. Oh, and wind noise. Pretty much everybody on the slope is somewhat hearing-impaired some of the time - likely to say "WHAT?" the first time you ask them something. The slower skiers have the right of way - there is no need to rely on hearing for normal interactions between skiiers.
"Because I'm Chinese. We wrap everything in plastic wrap. You should see the remote controls..."
Having been to Guangdong in the summer, that habit makes sense to me. Imagine it's really humid and there's no air conditioning - wrapping the remotes is a fine idea. To prevent corrosion of the battery contacts, if nothing else.
the people you heard bitch about the DRM should have purchased card versions of the software maybe?
DRM that locks software to a card means if you want to have five games available you have to carry around five cards. I refuse to do that. Any card that can't reside/in/ the device at all times stays home or doesn't get bought in the first place. It's fine for a home machine to have carts, but that's just death for a PDA.
The Newton originally had card-based apps; they didn't sell either.
(As for GBA, I bought one once I could get 64-game carts for it from Hong Kong.:-) )
China is still very much more a copier of technology than an innovator. Once they become successful innovators, then we have to worry.
No, then we have to celebrate, because we'll reap the benefits of their innovation. They'll invent ways to make things and provide services better and cheaper than before, and the world will be a better place for it. What nonsense the original article is, whining about us losing a "science crown". The world economy is a collaboration, not a competition! The richer and cleverer people in other countries get, the better off we will be.
"To the best of my knowledge, [Dvorak]'s never had a serious scoop regarding Apple -- a significant prediction that turned out to be right -- and he's been on the job for at least two decades."
The funny thing about that quote is to look farther down the page and find it was inspired by Dvorak's claim in April of 2003 that Apple was planning to move to Intel hardware.
Can you name a country with a list of freedoms greater than the US?
Sure. Hong Kong has typically had more economic freedoms such as the freedom to import and export without being taxed. Holland has more freedom to sell marijuana. Israel and Switzerland have more freedom to own automatic weapons. Russia and France have more freedom to copy software, and so on.
This, BTW, is why in all Western countries there is always a steady number of unemployed people
Are you claiming there's no unemployment or underemployment in non-Western countries?
Why would low wages "keep business profitable" and "help the economy grow" more than high wages? Are you assuming prices don't decline when wages do?
What keeps business profitable and the economy growing is wages that reflect the market demand for labor, and that will differ both between countries and between industries.
That's funny, I see new station wagons on the roads.
The fuel regulations apply to the average fuel economy of all the cars sold by a particular company, not to every particular car. So manufacturers can sell a few station wagons that exceed the average, so long as they sell enough subcompacts to make up for it. You can find the specifics of the regulation here.
Car buyers wanted a certain amount of room. It was hard to provide that much room in stylish cars with a gas mileage better than 27.5 mpg. Redefining most station wagons as trucks solves the problem of meeting the CAFE standard, because light trucks and vans have a much lower fleet average target -- 20.7 mpg.
Average fuel economy was increasing before the CAFE standards were passed and it had the perverse effect of lowering them. If CAFE were repealed we would probably see more station wagons, fewer SUVs and faster increases in fuel efficiency due to fewer people buying more car than they need.
Likewise, I don't get why SUVs are better than station wagons. That's all they get used for by most owners.
SUVs are station wagons. What makes them better is that station wagons essentially became illegal due to the CAFE regulations. If we got rid of fleet fuel economy standards, station wagons would make a comeback in no time.
Until I read the article I had no idea I had to select some text and launch specific applications in order to make Services options become active. Wow, what a non-discoverable user interface! I always just thought it was a menu full of greyed-out items. No, worse: it's a menu full of items/some/ of which are greyed out, but the others have submenus so they all have to be selected individually in order to determine that they, too, are greyed out and inactive. Ugh.
Half the items in the list don't even have a reasonable excuse for being greyed. For instance, "make new sticky note" should just launch the app if it hasn't been, and "search with google" should bring up the google home page if no text is selected. Any others that require text should put up a dialog to let me type or paste the text they need, or should just use the clipboard text -- anything to let the user know that the options actually can be made to do something.
Also, Quicksilver is able to address Services, which has loads of possibilities.
I hadn't even heard of Quicksilver prior to today. Which makes the original post useful, but also undermines the overall thrust of it. She's saying "OS X works better for me because I discovered a bunch of obscure programs that make it work really well." The flip side of that is that (a) it probably doesn't work so well for people who haven't discovered those obscure programs, and (b) Windows probably works better for people who have found equivalently obscure programs to help them on the Windows side.
And then she claims the Dock/Finder is better than the Start Menu/Windows Explorer, yet installed a half-dozen 3rd-party tools because the Dock/Finder doesn't really meet her needs. I have a sneaking suspicion the Start Menu would meet her needs just fine if she installed a few alternate launch utilities such that she almost never needed to use it.
As for me, I've used Mac OS X for years and have never yet found a use for the "Services" menu. But I guess I'll keep trying...
You'd think that someone of Raskin's stature and relevance to Apple's success would at least have an honorable mention somewhere
When the 128k mac shipped, the signatures of the people who created it were molded on the inside of the case. Here's the collection; Jef's name in the bottom-left corner.
That's probably the best mention Apple gave Raskin - his name's inside every 128k and 512k mac.
Really? Where. Name a major city where this is the case.
Scottsdale, Arizona is a good example. They used Rural/Metro as their private carrier until 2004. linky. Here's Rural/Metro's history and locations. From the history link:
Rural/Metro's history goes back more than 50 years, when founder Lou Witzeman became concerned that his neighborhood didn't have fire protection. So he pooled together some money, bought a fire truck, and asked his neighbors to subscribe to his fledgling company.
With the company was also born a new way of thinking about health and safety services. As a private sector company, Rural/Metro is dedicated to finding the most cost-effective ways to deliver the highest quality ambulance transportation and fire protection services.
My original source on this was the book _The Enterprise of Law_ by Bruce Benson. You can get all the specifics there if you're interested.
Where fire protection is private, the cost tends to be covered by subscription as part of the homeowner's fire insurance policy required by the lender.
And in this case do I have a choice of fire protection companies? Can I choose to have the guys from engine 39 be my fire department instead of those cocksuckers at District 12?
Historically, there have been cities where multiple competing firms provide coverage. You subscribe to one and they put a number on your house that makes it easier to find. Or it could just be a free-for-all -- whichever company puts out the fire gets reimbursed by your insurance agency, so the companies compete to get there first. The Wikipedia article on fire brigades includes an amusing section in this regard:
Even after the formation of paid fire companies in the United States, there were disagreements and often fights over territory. New York City companies were famous for sending runners out to fires with a large barrel to cover the hydrant closest to the fire in advance of the engines. Often fights would break out between the runners and even the responding fire companies for the right to fight the fire and, therefore, the insurance money that would be paid to the company that fought it.
This report summarizes a variety of studies comparing cost and effectiveness of private/subscription versus public fire departments.
So let me see if I have this straight: You're against small, municipally controlled WiFi networks but you're in favor of large, government subsidized and authorized Telcos developing these networks?
No, I'm just as opposed to government granting monopoly authorization to telcos on the local loop. The only reason you don't see the same people complaining about this is that it's a fait accompli. It's better to fight the current battle on the current front than endlessly bemoan battles lost years ago. I'm not even saying that I want all fire departments to be private. I'm just objecting to your implied claim that fire protection inherently couldn't be provided without tax dollars when it currently/is/ so provided in many places.
Here are services I have never used:
- The fire department
Fire protection is provided by private for-profit companies in many cities and counties in the US, and is provided by a volunteer organization that is not tax funded in many others.
Many innovations in firefighting technique were pioneered by for-profit fire companies, which tend to produce better service at lower cost than public tax-funded ones.
Need the fire department? Well, they are currently billing at $85/hour/firefighter plus equipment and supplies.
Where fire protection is private, the cost tends to be covered by subscription as part of the homeowner's fire insurance policy required by the lender.
All this proves is you can fit a lower-powered nano-ITX mobo in the same case as a Mac Mini, and power it up.
It's worse than that. If you read carefully, you'll note that he used a prototype board that's not yet shipping to customers. So even if it worked, he'd be comparing a product that's on store shelves now to components that might be available soon. Not really an apples-to-apples comparison, so to speak.
Dailygammon.com is a site I helped create for playing backgammon over the web. Our users who visit China say they can't get through to us from there since last week. I thought it was strange that we'd make the list, since we have essentially no political or news focus. Looking at the list of domains known to have been banned, I realized it was probably due to the name -- a lot of english-language newspaper sites have names like dailytribune, dailytelegraph, dailyjournal. Thus, assume you won't be able to access your hometown newspaper without some sort of mechanism in place.
One easy thing you can do is install this cgi proxy script on some host you know isn't yet banned. Then when you need to surf the web from an internet kiosk or similarly restrictive environment, access all the banned sites by way of that script.
Or in situations where you have full control of the machine, ssh to a known host on the other side of the firewall and do your surfing from there.
Have you ever tried typing DVORAK? You'll quickly realize that its much, much easier on the hands.
I tried typing Dvorak. Used a typing tutor, remapped my keyboard at work and home, the whole works. After a few months, I was still slower and making more errors on dvorak than I had been on qwerty. And I couldn't use vi productively. I gave up and went back to qwerty.
The main way dvorak was "easier on the hands" for me was that it forced me to type slower. Other than that, I didn't really notice a difference.
I suspect 90% of the gain for people who notice a gain is that switching layouts forces them to train to a degree they hadn't recently (or perhaps ever) done and to pay more attention to their typing and hand position.
The copper is easy. Hammer it to get it out of the rocks, and hammer it some more to shape it into useful things like fish hooks.
Doh! I should have known that.
In that case, after the small things -- tools for acquiring a dinner that could be roasted over the fire or in the coals -- the thing to make given sufficient copper and spare time is nice big copper pots. Cisterns to hold rainwater, mostly. A cooking pot for boiling crabs. Copper sheeting would also make a nice roofing material for a house.
Immediately, you need water, food and shelter. Shelter is the easiest: tie a length of rope between two palm trees, drape the sail cloth over the line and weigh down the corners appropriately; you've got a basic pup tent or tube tent to (somewhat) protect yourself from the sun and the wind.
You can get water from coconuts a la Cast Away. Use the obsidian to fashion spear heads for fishing, and the flint to sharpen your axe. (You can actually catch fish in a river with your hands alone - I'm not sure if that applies here. In any case, tools are a good thing. ) Crabs should be pretty easy to catch with the help of a cup or a basket or a spear.
Use the "large lens" to start a fire for warmth at night and to cook the fish. And perhaps to look for ships.
Medium term: Build a big SOS sign and have moss handy to throw on the fire for smoke to signal any passing plane or boat. Build a more permanent shelter. Explore the entire island and inventory everything on it.
Long term: Build a smokehouse. Find ways to accumulate and stockpile excess water and food and firewood beyond your daily needs -- especially water. If no rescue boat shows up, ultimately build a raft or sailboat and take your chances.
Eat the berries every once in a while so you don't get scurvy. I don't know enough metalurgy to do anything with the sulfer/hematite/copper, but it's not clear you need it anyway. Do you? What am I missing? If I knew metalurgy I'd probably want to cast more nails or make a drill bit...
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately the trend is well established. Thus, I predict that future videogame players will all be lean, flexible, well-muscled, finely-trained athletes able to beat up football players and steal their lunch money.
It is precisely a question of control on the part of the person who is passing. The person in front of you has the right of way. Always, always, always -- because you can see him better than he can see you. If he has to make a sudden turn or chooses to make one, that's his right. You don't have the right to be "coming up from behind FAST" anywhere that a person in front of you might turn. If the slope is crowded enough that that's an issue, SLOW DOWN.
Here are the standard seven safety rules of the slope, usually printed prominently in various locations on the mountain:
- Always stay in control and be able to stop or avoid other people or objects.
- People ahead of you have the right of way. It is your responsibility to avoid them.
- You must not stop where you obstruct a trail or are not visible from above.
- Whenever starting downhill or merging into a trail, look uphill and yield to others.
- Always use devices to help prevent run away equipment.
- Observe all posted signs and warnings. Keep off closed trails and out of closed areas.
- Prior to using any lift, you must have the knowledge and ability to load, ride, and unload safely.
(Both my parents were ski patrollers. I love to ski fast too, but I do so where and when it is safe, not on crowded bunny slopes. If somebody has to hear you yell "on the left!" to avoid you crashing into them, you're not skiing safely.)n/t.
There are deaf skiiers on the slopes. You never noticed this before because hearing well really isn't necessary to ski well.
If someone crashes into you passing you on your left and they yelled at you that they were coming up on you to pass you have no one to blame but yourself.
Slower skiiers have the right of way. Yelling is never a reasonable substitute for passing in a controlled manner in such a way that you can avoid the other skiiers no matter what they do. If somebody crashes into you from behind, it's their fault for not slowing the frick down to a safe passing speed, it's not your fault for failing to hear their muffled yell over the wind noise through your earmuffs or over the sound of your iPod Nano. You shouldn't need to hear anything in order to ski safely.
If a beginner is blocking your way, don't swish right past them and hope they (a) hear your warning, (b) understand what you want them to do, (c) have the necessary control to do it. Instead, slow down and wait for an opportunity to pass that gives them a wide enough berth so as to avoid all chance of a collision.
This is a silly concern unless you're also going to ban earmuffs and hats that cover the ear. Oh, and wind noise. Pretty much everybody on the slope is somewhat hearing-impaired some of the time - likely to say "WHAT?" the first time you ask them something. The slower skiers have the right of way - there is no need to rely on hearing for normal interactions between skiiers.
Having been to Guangdong in the summer, that habit makes sense to me. Imagine it's really humid and there's no air conditioning - wrapping the remotes is a fine idea. To prevent corrosion of the battery contacts, if nothing else.
DRM that locks software to a card means if you want to have five games available you have to carry around five cards. I refuse to do that. Any card that can't reside /in/ the device at all times stays home or doesn't get bought in the first place. It's fine for a home machine to have carts, but that's just death for a PDA.
The Newton originally had card-based apps; they didn't sell either. (As for GBA, I bought one once I could get 64-game carts for it from Hong Kong. :-) )
No, then we have to celebrate, because we'll reap the benefits of their innovation. They'll invent ways to make things and provide services better and cheaper than before, and the world will be a better place for it. What nonsense the original article is, whining about us losing a "science crown". The world economy is a collaboration, not a competition! The richer and cleverer people in other countries get, the better off we will be.
The funny thing about that quote is to look farther down the page and find it was inspired by Dvorak's claim in April of 2003 that Apple was planning to move to Intel hardware.
Sure. Hong Kong has typically had more economic freedoms such as the freedom to import and export without being taxed. Holland has more freedom to sell marijuana. Israel and Switzerland have more freedom to own automatic weapons. Russia and France have more freedom to copy software, and so on.
Are you claiming there's no unemployment or underemployment in non-Western countries?
Why would low wages "keep business profitable" and "help the economy grow" more than high wages? Are you assuming prices don't decline when wages do?
What keeps business profitable and the economy growing is wages that reflect the market demand for labor, and that will differ both between countries and between industries.
That's because there were TV cameras present. The Revolution will not be televised.
The fuel regulations apply to the average fuel economy of all the cars sold by a particular company, not to every particular car. So manufacturers can sell a few station wagons that exceed the average, so long as they sell enough subcompacts to make up for it. You can find the specifics of the regulation here.
Car buyers wanted a certain amount of room. It was hard to provide that much room in stylish cars with a gas mileage better than 27.5 mpg. Redefining most station wagons as trucks solves the problem of meeting the CAFE standard, because light trucks and vans have a much lower fleet average target -- 20.7 mpg.
Average fuel economy was increasing before the CAFE standards were passed and it had the perverse effect of lowering them. If CAFE were repealed we would probably see more station wagons, fewer SUVs and faster increases in fuel efficiency due to fewer people buying more car than they need.
SUVs are station wagons. What makes them better is that station wagons essentially became illegal due to the CAFE regulations. If we got rid of fleet fuel economy standards, station wagons would make a comeback in no time.
Half the items in the list don't even have a reasonable excuse for being greyed. For instance, "make new sticky note" should just launch the app if it hasn't been, and "search with google" should bring up the google home page if no text is selected. Any others that require text should put up a dialog to let me type or paste the text they need, or should just use the clipboard text -- anything to let the user know that the options actually can be made to do something.
Oh, well. Good to know now, at least.
I hadn't even heard of Quicksilver prior to today. Which makes the original post useful, but also undermines the overall thrust of it. She's saying "OS X works better for me because I discovered a bunch of obscure programs that make it work really well." The flip side of that is that (a) it probably doesn't work so well for people who haven't discovered those obscure programs, and (b) Windows probably works better for people who have found equivalently obscure programs to help them on the Windows side.
As for me, I've used Mac OS X for years and have never yet found a use for the "Services" menu. But I guess I'll keep trying...
When the 128k mac shipped, the signatures of the people who created it were molded on the inside of the case. Here's the collection; Jef's name in the bottom-left corner.
That's probably the best mention Apple gave Raskin - his name's inside every 128k and 512k mac.
Scottsdale, Arizona is a good example. They used Rural/Metro as their private carrier until 2004. linky. Here's Rural/Metro's history and locations. From the history link:
My original source on this was the book _The Enterprise of Law_ by Bruce Benson. You can get all the specifics there if you're interested. Historically, there have been cities where multiple competing firms provide coverage. You subscribe to one and they put a number on your house that makes it easier to find. Or it could just be a free-for-all -- whichever company puts out the fire gets reimbursed by your insurance agency, so the companies compete to get there first. The Wikipedia article on fire brigades includes an amusing section in this regard: This report summarizes a variety of studies comparing cost and effectiveness of private/subscription versus public fire departments.So let me see if I have this straight: You're against small, municipally controlled WiFi networks but you're in favor of large, government subsidized and authorized Telcos developing these networks?
No, I'm just as opposed to government granting monopoly authorization to telcos on the local loop. The only reason you don't see the same people complaining about this is that it's a fait accompli. It's better to fight the current battle on the current front than endlessly bemoan battles lost years ago. I'm not even saying that I want all fire departments to be private. I'm just objecting to your implied claim that fire protection inherently couldn't be provided without tax dollars when it currently /is/ so provided in many places.
- The fire department
Fire protection is provided by private for-profit companies in many cities and counties in the US, and is provided by a volunteer organization that is not tax funded in many others.
Many innovations in firefighting technique were pioneered by for-profit fire companies, which tend to produce better service at lower cost than public tax-funded ones.
Need the fire department? Well, they are currently billing at $85/hour/firefighter plus equipment and supplies.
Where fire protection is private, the cost tends to be covered by subscription as part of the homeowner's fire insurance policy required by the lender.
One easy thing you can do is install this cgi proxy script on some host you know isn't yet banned. Then when you need to surf the web from an internet kiosk or similarly restrictive environment, access all the banned sites by way of that script.
Or in situations where you have full control of the machine, ssh to a known host on the other side of the firewall and do your surfing from there.
I tried typing Dvorak. Used a typing tutor, remapped my keyboard at work and home, the whole works. After a few months, I was still slower and making more errors on dvorak than I had been on qwerty. And I couldn't use vi productively. I gave up and went back to qwerty.
The main way dvorak was "easier on the hands" for me was that it forced me to type slower. Other than that, I didn't really notice a difference.
I suspect 90% of the gain for people who notice a gain is that switching layouts forces them to train to a degree they hadn't recently (or perhaps ever) done and to pay more attention to their typing and hand position.
In that case, after the small things -- tools for acquiring a dinner that could be roasted over the fire or in the coals -- the thing to make given sufficient copper and spare time is nice big copper pots. Cisterns to hold rainwater, mostly. A cooking pot for boiling crabs. Copper sheeting would also make a nice roofing material for a house.
Immediately, you need water, food and shelter. Shelter is the easiest: tie a length of rope between two palm trees, drape the sail cloth over the line and weigh down the corners appropriately; you've got a basic pup tent or tube tent to (somewhat) protect yourself from the sun and the wind.
You can get water from coconuts a la Cast Away. Use the obsidian to fashion spear heads for fishing, and the flint to sharpen your axe. (You can actually catch fish in a river with your hands alone - I'm not sure if that applies here. In any case, tools are a good thing. ) Crabs should be pretty easy to catch with the help of a cup or a basket or a spear.
Use the "large lens" to start a fire for warmth at night and to cook the fish. And perhaps to look for ships.
Medium term: Build a big SOS sign and have moss handy to throw on the fire for smoke to signal any passing plane or boat. Build a more permanent shelter. Explore the entire island and inventory everything on it.
Long term: Build a smokehouse. Find ways to accumulate and stockpile excess water and food and firewood beyond your daily needs -- especially water. If no rescue boat shows up, ultimately build a raft or sailboat and take your chances.
Eat the berries every once in a while so you don't get scurvy. I don't know enough metalurgy to do anything with the sulfer/hematite/copper, but it's not clear you need it anyway. Do you? What am I missing? If I knew metalurgy I'd probably want to cast more nails or make a drill bit...