Quoting ptomblin: Point 10: It's awkward to find applications too rare to put on the dock? I dragged my Applications folder to the dock as a folder. If I mouse over to it, I get a drop down menu of every app in the whole folder. Or I can double click on it to open the folder. Or I can go to Spotlight and type the first couple of letters of the application name and have it find the app very quickly.
Couldn't agree more. Drag your important folders to the Dock. (They need to live towards the right edge - there's a faint division to separate apps from data.) I dropped my Docs folder, my Apps folder and a high-use database doc there. If you use it often, Dock it.
Furthermore, if you have easy access to the Apps folder (you can also always shift-Apple-A from the Finder) lets you de-clutter the rest of the Dock. OS X puts the iLife apps on the Dock by default, but I don't use iPhoto, iMovie or iDVD often enough to give them a permanent spot on the Dock. With the Apps folder on the Dock, they are three clicks away no matter what I am doing, in whatever app: One click on the Apps folder in the Dock, then two on the app itself within the folder.
Finally, if you have never used Spotlight (the instant-search gizmo), it works better than you have any ability to imagine. I used my Dad's XP box the other day, and thought Find was broken, it took so long. It was on a large-ish network, had lots of drives to scan, whatever - it still seemed endless after the almost-instant results you get from Spotlight. And, Spotlight seems to employ some sort of predictive behavior to come up with its Top Hit - it's impressive how often that is indeed the file I'm looking for.
I agree it's weird that 3 key Apple apps look different. I don't care though - it all works, and easily.
Along the lines of record companies not updating their contract language to reflect new realities: A fairly recent/. thread (can't find it right now...) said that a standard clause in contracts billed 15% for "breakage" of product. IANAL nor involved in the recording industry in any way, but as I understand it, out of every batch of product the artist would be billed assuming 15% of the items had broken in transit, handling, etc. Back in the days of acetate and even vinyl records, the 15% may have been a fair average. In the days of casette tapes and CDs the breakage rates must have been much lower - I assume in the low single digits.
Now with digital delivery, is there any breakage? I can't think of a scenario where digital product is ever broken... if a file is corrupt, file transfer is interrupted or whatever, the file be re-sent at no cost to anyone (other than a few seconds of bandwidth). And yet artists are still being docked 15% breakage fees on their digital stuff. I think the original article referred to Cheap Trick's digital sales. (I would prefer to see Cheap Trick's loss rate approach 100%, but that's me.)
Back specifically to Weird Al: Get a good lawyer and review every clause before you sign. If you competently signed a shitty contract, I don't see much you can do. If you have the juice to renegotiate, do it. Jump labels? Remember this next time around? Good luck.
Sir, may you be cursed with the fleas of a thousand camels. My retinas are still smoldering from the image you presented. Damn you and all you stand for!
Unlike, say, www.mccain2008.com or mccainforpresident.com (hypothetical, not actual, links), the site mccain.senate.gov is not *his* site, per se. It is a sub-page within the senate.gov site, and I assume must adhere to the cookie policy of the parent site.
As others here have noted, a cookie is not evil. It is like any other tool - a tool that can be used for any number of purposes. This rash of OMG WTF cookiez everywhere is silly.
As a side note, I worked for McCain in the late 80s as a summer intern in his Phoenix office. I never found him to be anything but straightforward and decent.
Congratulations my friend. At the time I write this, you have acheived the only "-1 Funny" mod I have ever seen. Kudos! Now strive for that +5 Troll and you'll have the complete quantum set of Slahdot mods.:)
8th post!
On a more serious note, even if this data was lost through no fault of Marriott's (stolen, say), I think this points out the need to legislate a consumer notification requirement. If there is a reasonable chance that my name and info are on one of those tapes, I think Marriot has the obligation to let me know. They will never do so without being compelled.
The primary reason for decreased aircraft performance at high air temperature is the reduced density of the air. The wings and other lift surfaces of the airplane need air mass to "push" against, and in hot air there is less air mass against which to "push". An airplane could not fly in a vacuum, for instance. This is why space-going rockets adjust direction using small booster rockets, not wings. This is also related to airplanes working best on takeoff and landing when they face into a headwind - the amount of airflow over the wings is greater, compared to a given ground speed, than in still air. If an airplane has to take off or land in a tailwind, it is exceedingly difficult and needs an awful lot of runway.
My father flew jets in the Air Force, and he was stationed in Alaska for 3 years. He said it was the best flying he has ever done - incredibly cold, dense, "thick" air made the planes perform unbelieveably well. The downside was flying along at 20,000 feet and seeing mountaintops poking out of clouds. None of the AF pilots at the time ever hit Mt. McKinley, but he said it sure got several people's attention.
After the AF he flew for America West Airlines in and of Phoenix. On hot summer days it was routine that passenger load limits or baggage limits would be enforced, because the aircraft did not have the ability to takeoff or land with a full load in the thin air. I'm sure there was a large safety margin there, but you get the point.
...is exactly what this seems like. This is not a long-term solution - in fact I suspect its life will be measured in days if not hours before these links are recognized as belonging to Googleborg and blocked accordingly.
These quick-fix workarounds are nifty and amusing, but are no substitute for a permanent end to the Great Firewall. I understand that is a bigger problem to solve. Ultimtely I hope the Chinese realize that they cannot block a thousand floods, and realize that as an (emerging?) first-world country, with global trade alliances, seat on the UN Security Council and so on, that worldviews and perspectives and ideas flow across the border as readily as cash and products.
I'll jump in with some speculation here. I remember reading here on/. a while ago that Apple had trademarked the term Numbers. That would fit their naming schema perfectly for a spreadsheet, so maybe...
They have a spreadsheet already as part of AppleWorks, but it is crufty and OS 9ish. Using the underlying technology, however, I would think it would not be terribly hard to release an OS X spreadsheet as part of the iWork suite. My work certainly includes more than page layout and presentations, so the spreadsheet would be most welcome. I suspect this would be true for most of us here.
If Apple would also modernize the database included in AppleWorks, they would have a truly viable alternative to Office. Pages and Keynote both do a good (not perfect) job of importing and exporting.doc and.ppt files, so it's reasonable to assume Numbers and [Database] would do the same with their MS Office counterparts.
I will leave the arguments about whether Keynote or PowerPoint is "better", or Pages v. Word, to others - to each their own. I will just say, Choice is good.
I understand completely that Fuddrucker's should have asked the BurgerTime guy for his permission to link to his site, or at least given him a head's up that they intended to do so. It's a matter of common courtesy. BUT, the BurgerTime guy handled the situation like a tool.
Who wouldn't want the traffic to their blog/site/whatever? Bump your ad revenue! That's the missing ???? step to profit.
As has been noted, the Fudd's traffic was roughly 5% of his bandwidth, so spare us the "excessive bandwidth charges" sob story.
If you didn't want the traffic, just block it. Redirect it back to Fudd's. Whatever. Don't react like a 13 year old.
And finally: For me this is the best part. He ranted about being hotlinked without notice... this is EXACTLY what he did to the slaughterhouse folks, and even noted with apparent amusement that their sites were being "hammered" (his words). Don't bitch about netiquette and then hose the next guy in exactly the same manner.
Fuddrucker's did nothing fundamentally wrong. They lacked some social graces and failed the common coutesy test, but did nothing malicious, immoral or illegal. The BurgerTime guy trumped all of that.
I've enjoyed reading the threads here, but (as usual) there's a lot of wild speculation, much of it just wrong. I can offer these points, from the perspective of a teacher in the Vail district, at a neighboring campus. Enjoy:
1. The well-known Vail is certainly in Colorado. However, Vail, AZ is essentially eastern metro Tucson. It was originally a tiny ranching / railroad depot town. Now it's a bedroom community for Raytheon, the U of Arizona and greater Tucson. No idea what the population is (it's unincorporated) but it is booming. New houses sprouting absolutely everywhere.
2. The district has 2 existing high schools and this will be the third. One is 3000 students or so, your standard big school. One is tiny, with a focus on technology (maybe 200? students). It is based at an old IBM research park, now run by the U of Arizona. Students do work-study, internships, summer job placement programs, and what not. The third will have 550 or so, and will be the laptop campus.
3. The laptops are Mac iBooks. That should inherently address many of the concerns about durability, viruses and XML. PDF's open natively in OS X's Preview.app, although if you really want Reader, knock yourself out.
4. Safari can easily be configured with a whitelist or a blacklist. The way the school is networked, the IT guy (his name is Wayne, and he's good) can universally apply a "patch" to block access to naughty sites. This is already done at the school server level, but we can also do it on the client computers for when Johnny goes home.
5. $850 is a lot of money, but compared to $600 for instantly-obsolescing textbooks, maybe it ain't so bad. We all bitch about "they should have known better" than to reply to the eBay account notice from Nigeria, or whatever. Seems this might be the place to start teaching "them."
6. Charging/docking stations in every room.
7. As I alluded to, there is a full-time, on-site IT guy. He was mine at my school for the last 3 years. He's good. Not saying nothing will go wrong, but we have folks on hand who can deal with most. And becuase the virus / patch / service pack / whatever issue is largely moot (see iBooks, above) there's less of the putting out fires.
8. There are still books in classrooms. Computers are just tools to find, apply and use information.
9. My understanding is that all relevant docs are downloaded while on campus each day, so the student does not need 'net access at home. If you've got it, go ahead.
10. I also am worried about the squinting at screens. Not sure what to suggest there...
11. I agree that garbage in==garbage out, and a lousy teacher is just a lousy teacher. We work really hard to develop good ones, though, and in the right hands don't you think this could really shine? Think back to when you were 15. If you had this opportunity, would you like it?
12. If any of this worries you, go to one of the other high schools. It really is that simple. This is an idea, an experiment. Lots of us complain about how sucky American schools are. At least we're trying something new.
This submission (and it's not the first from ol' Carl) makes me nervous. He's pointing the Slashhorde to an article at *his* paper. This isn't a citizen saying, "Hello world. You may find this interesting." This is a paid employee trying to bump his pageviews and ad revenue.
For a frontline media outlet that still has some global respect, this is troubling. "Journo ethics" seems quaint, I know, but this still feel wrong. There's a huge outcry here whenever, say, Dvorak writes something inflammatory - "Don't help his pageviews..." Is this so different?
I am an 8th grade math teacher, so the issue of when/whether to use calculators is a frequent topic among my colleagues. My $.02 on this topic:
A calculator is a tool, no more, no less. If it is used incorrectly it can slow understanding, while if it is used appropriately it helps. In the Virginia case, if a student undestood the math conceptually well enough to realize that the fraction 3/4 simply means "3 divided by 4" and thus is equivalent to.75, then I have no problem with the use of a calculator. If a student was simply typing in 3/4 (or.75) and pressing the "F D" button to convert from one form to another, I would not allow their use, since the student has not demonstrated the conceptual mastery proving he "gets it".
From the summary, it sounds like the student found some hidden key combo that performed the conversion. This is the worst-case situation from my perspective - no conceptual understanding, and not even an appropriate use of the tool. It's a clever hack and a good observation, but it is invalid as a measure of their math mastery.
Cheers.
According to http://www.apple.com/support/store/postpurchase.ht ml you have 10 days.
And when they say 10 days, they mean it. I bought a G5 iMac *1* day outside the upgarde window for one of the new software suites (iLife 05, I think). Apple was unwilling to throw me a bone and give me the $20 upgrade price, either at the local Apple Store or over the phone with Apple themselves.
Check whatever rumor site you like, but bear in mind that deadlines are DEADLINES to Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Like our spelling.
Interesting, related article in the current New Yorker about California's medical marijuana law, and just how "legal" it is. Clicky:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_samuels?printable=true
Here's one, courtesy of the NOAA: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/dodecahedron.pdf.
Now they just need to confirm it for Windows! (And actually, you know, complete and ship the game...)
Quoting ptomblin: Point 10: It's awkward to find applications too rare to put on the dock? I dragged my Applications folder to the dock as a folder. If I mouse over to it, I get a drop down menu of every app in the whole folder. Or I can double click on it to open the folder. Or I can go to Spotlight and type the first couple of letters of the application name and have it find the app very quickly.
Couldn't agree more. Drag your important folders to the Dock. (They need to live towards the right edge - there's a faint division to separate apps from data.) I dropped my Docs folder, my Apps folder and a high-use database doc there. If you use it often, Dock it.
Furthermore, if you have easy access to the Apps folder (you can also always shift-Apple-A from the Finder) lets you de-clutter the rest of the Dock. OS X puts the iLife apps on the Dock by default, but I don't use iPhoto, iMovie or iDVD often enough to give them a permanent spot on the Dock. With the Apps folder on the Dock, they are three clicks away no matter what I am doing, in whatever app: One click on the Apps folder in the Dock, then two on the app itself within the folder.
Finally, if you have never used Spotlight (the instant-search gizmo), it works better than you have any ability to imagine. I used my Dad's XP box the other day, and thought Find was broken, it took so long. It was on a large-ish network, had lots of drives to scan, whatever - it still seemed endless after the almost-instant results you get from Spotlight. And, Spotlight seems to employ some sort of predictive behavior to come up with its Top Hit - it's impressive how often that is indeed the file I'm looking for.
I agree it's weird that 3 key Apple apps look different. I don't care though - it all works, and easily.
Along the lines of record companies not updating their contract language to reflect new realities: A fairly recent /. thread (can't find it right now...) said that a standard clause in contracts billed 15% for "breakage" of product. IANAL nor involved in the recording industry in any way, but as I understand it, out of every batch of product the artist would be billed assuming 15% of the items had broken in transit, handling, etc. Back in the days of acetate and even vinyl records, the 15% may have been a fair average. In the days of casette tapes and CDs the breakage rates must have been much lower - I assume in the low single digits.
Now with digital delivery, is there any breakage? I can't think of a scenario where digital product is ever broken... if a file is corrupt, file transfer is interrupted or whatever, the file be re-sent at no cost to anyone (other than a few seconds of bandwidth). And yet artists are still being docked 15% breakage fees on their digital stuff. I think the original article referred to Cheap Trick's digital sales. (I would prefer to see Cheap Trick's loss rate approach 100%, but that's me.)
Back specifically to Weird Al: Get a good lawyer and review every clause before you sign. If you competently signed a shitty contract, I don't see much you can do. If you have the juice to renegotiate, do it. Jump labels? Remember this next time around? Good luck.
Sir, may you be cursed with the fleas of a thousand camels. My retinas are still smoldering from the image you presented. Damn you and all you stand for!
Eccchhh.
Unlike, say, www.mccain2008.com or mccainforpresident.com (hypothetical, not actual, links), the site mccain.senate.gov is not *his* site, per se. It is a sub-page within the senate.gov site, and I assume must adhere to the cookie policy of the parent site.
As others here have noted, a cookie is not evil. It is like any other tool - a tool that can be used for any number of purposes. This rash of OMG WTF cookiez everywhere is silly.
As a side note, I worked for McCain in the late 80s as a summer intern in his Phoenix office. I never found him to be anything but straightforward and decent.
Congratulations my friend. At the time I write this, you have acheived the only "-1 Funny" mod I have ever seen. Kudos! Now strive for that +5 Troll and you'll have the complete quantum set of Slahdot mods. :)
8th post! On a more serious note, even if this data was lost through no fault of Marriott's (stolen, say), I think this points out the need to legislate a consumer notification requirement. If there is a reasonable chance that my name and info are on one of those tapes, I think Marriot has the obligation to let me know. They will never do so without being compelled.
The primary reason for decreased aircraft performance at high air temperature is the reduced density of the air. The wings and other lift surfaces of the airplane need air mass to "push" against, and in hot air there is less air mass against which to "push". An airplane could not fly in a vacuum, for instance. This is why space-going rockets adjust direction using small booster rockets, not wings. This is also related to airplanes working best on takeoff and landing when they face into a headwind - the amount of airflow over the wings is greater, compared to a given ground speed, than in still air. If an airplane has to take off or land in a tailwind, it is exceedingly difficult and needs an awful lot of runway.
My father flew jets in the Air Force, and he was stationed in Alaska for 3 years. He said it was the best flying he has ever done - incredibly cold, dense, "thick" air made the planes perform unbelieveably well. The downside was flying along at 20,000 feet and seeing mountaintops poking out of clouds. None of the AF pilots at the time ever hit Mt. McKinley, but he said it sure got several people's attention.
After the AF he flew for America West Airlines in and of Phoenix. On hot summer days it was routine that passenger load limits or baggage limits would be enforced, because the aircraft did not have the ability to takeoff or land with a full load in the thin air. I'm sure there was a large safety margin there, but you get the point.
Happy New Year.
Well done! [ba dum bum]
This may well be the most relevant, on-topic Frist post ever.
...is exactly what this seems like. This is not a long-term solution - in fact I suspect its life will be measured in days if not hours before these links are recognized as belonging to Googleborg and blocked accordingly.
These quick-fix workarounds are nifty and amusing, but are no substitute for a permanent end to the Great Firewall. I understand that is a bigger problem to solve. Ultimtely I hope the Chinese realize that they cannot block a thousand floods, and realize that as an (emerging?) first-world country, with global trade alliances, seat on the UN Security Council and so on, that worldviews and perspectives and ideas flow across the border as readily as cash and products.
Until then, keep whacking.
I'll jump in with some speculation here. I remember reading here on /. a while ago that Apple had trademarked the term Numbers. That would fit their naming schema perfectly for a spreadsheet, so maybe...
They have a spreadsheet already as part of AppleWorks, but it is crufty and OS 9ish. Using the underlying technology, however, I would think it would not be terribly hard to release an OS X spreadsheet as part of the iWork suite. My work certainly includes more than page layout and presentations, so the spreadsheet would be most welcome. I suspect this would be true for most of us here.
If Apple would also modernize the database included in AppleWorks, they would have a truly viable alternative to Office. Pages and Keynote both do a good (not perfect) job of importing and exporting .doc and .ppt files, so it's reasonable to assume Numbers and [Database] would do the same with their MS Office counterparts.
I will leave the arguments about whether Keynote or PowerPoint is "better", or Pages v. Word, to others - to each their own. I will just say, Choice is good.
I understand completely that Fuddrucker's should have asked the BurgerTime guy for his permission to link to his site, or at least given him a head's up that they intended to do so. It's a matter of common courtesy. BUT, the BurgerTime guy handled the situation like a tool.
Who wouldn't want the traffic to their blog/site/whatever? Bump your ad revenue! That's the missing ???? step to profit.
As has been noted, the Fudd's traffic was roughly 5% of his bandwidth, so spare us the "excessive bandwidth charges" sob story.
If you didn't want the traffic, just block it. Redirect it back to Fudd's. Whatever. Don't react like a 13 year old.
And finally: For me this is the best part. He ranted about being hotlinked without notice... this is EXACTLY what he did to the slaughterhouse folks, and even noted with apparent amusement that their sites were being "hammered" (his words). Don't bitch about netiquette and then hose the next guy in exactly the same manner.
Fuddrucker's did nothing fundamentally wrong. They lacked some social graces and failed the common coutesy test, but did nothing malicious, immoral or illegal. The BurgerTime guy trumped all of that.
I've enjoyed reading the threads here, but (as usual) there's a lot of wild speculation, much of it just wrong. I can offer these points, from the perspective of a teacher in the Vail district, at a neighboring campus. Enjoy:
1. The well-known Vail is certainly in Colorado. However, Vail, AZ is essentially eastern metro Tucson. It was originally a tiny ranching / railroad depot town. Now it's a bedroom community for Raytheon, the U of Arizona and greater Tucson. No idea what the population is (it's unincorporated) but it is booming. New houses sprouting absolutely everywhere.
2. The district has 2 existing high schools and this will be the third. One is 3000 students or so, your standard big school. One is tiny, with a focus on technology (maybe 200? students). It is based at an old IBM research park, now run by the U of Arizona. Students do work-study, internships, summer job placement programs, and what not. The third will have 550 or so, and will be the laptop campus.
3. The laptops are Mac iBooks. That should inherently address many of the concerns about durability, viruses and XML. PDF's open natively in OS X's Preview.app, although if you really want Reader, knock yourself out.
4. Safari can easily be configured with a whitelist or a blacklist. The way the school is networked, the IT guy (his name is Wayne, and he's good) can universally apply a "patch" to block access to naughty sites. This is already done at the school server level, but we can also do it on the client computers for when Johnny goes home.
5. $850 is a lot of money, but compared to $600 for instantly-obsolescing textbooks, maybe it ain't so bad. We all bitch about "they should have known better" than to reply to the eBay account notice from Nigeria, or whatever. Seems this might be the place to start teaching "them."
6. Charging/docking stations in every room.
7. As I alluded to, there is a full-time, on-site IT guy. He was mine at my school for the last 3 years. He's good. Not saying nothing will go wrong, but we have folks on hand who can deal with most. And becuase the virus / patch / service pack / whatever issue is largely moot (see iBooks, above) there's less of the putting out fires.
8. There are still books in classrooms. Computers are just tools to find, apply and use information.
9. My understanding is that all relevant docs are downloaded while on campus each day, so the student does not need 'net access at home. If you've got it, go ahead.
10. I also am worried about the squinting at screens. Not sure what to suggest there...
11. I agree that garbage in==garbage out, and a lousy teacher is just a lousy teacher. We work really hard to develop good ones, though, and in the right hands don't you think this could really shine? Think back to when you were 15. If you had this opportunity, would you like it?
12. If any of this worries you, go to one of the other high schools. It really is that simple. This is an idea, an experiment. Lots of us complain about how sucky American schools are. At least we're trying something new.
Cheers.
"The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!"
The odds are, we've all seen already anyway.
This submission (and it's not the first from ol' Carl) makes me nervous. He's pointing the Slashhorde to an article at *his* paper. This isn't a citizen saying, "Hello world. You may find this interesting." This is a paid employee trying to bump his pageviews and ad revenue.
For a frontline media outlet that still has some global respect, this is troubling. "Journo ethics" seems quaint, I know, but this still feel wrong. There's a huge outcry here whenever, say, Dvorak writes something inflammatory - "Don't help his pageviews..." Is this so different?
"Old one didn't suck." And we're no longer 8.
I am an 8th grade math teacher, so the issue of when/whether to use calculators is a frequent topic among my colleagues. My $.02 on this topic: A calculator is a tool, no more, no less. If it is used incorrectly it can slow understanding, while if it is used appropriately it helps. In the Virginia case, if a student undestood the math conceptually well enough to realize that the fraction 3/4 simply means "3 divided by 4" and thus is equivalent to .75, then I have no problem with the use of a calculator. If a student was simply typing in 3/4 (or .75) and pressing the "F D" button to convert from one form to another, I would not allow their use, since the student has not demonstrated the conceptual mastery proving he "gets it".
From the summary, it sounds like the student found some hidden key combo that performed the conversion. This is the worst-case situation from my perspective - no conceptual understanding, and not even an appropriate use of the tool. It's a clever hack and a good observation, but it is invalid as a measure of their math mastery.
Cheers.
According to http://www.apple.com/support/store/postpurchase.ht ml you have 10 days.
And when they say 10 days, they mean it. I bought a G5 iMac *1* day outside the upgarde window for one of the new software suites (iLife 05, I think). Apple was unwilling to throw me a bone and give me the $20 upgrade price, either at the local Apple Store or over the phone with Apple themselves.
Check whatever rumor site you like, but bear in mind that deadlines are DEADLINES to Apple.