I'm in the same boat. I used to love Mac hardware from ~2004 (PowerPC) until around ~2010. Then it started to get really bad. MacOS went from a UNIX workstation OS to some sort of media consumer / music player thing (useless to me as I can't stand music) and it's clear Apple wants to make their products fancy televisions.
Huh? As a dev my use case primarily involves zsh, Emacs, Erlang, and PostgreSQL and all that's running just fine on MacOS thanks. I'm really curious what your use case is? I mean, you make it sound like you've maximized the iTunes window and don't know how to quit the application.
I couldn't agree more. As you point out, the keys are in the right place; I'll add that they've got a hell of a lifespan: one of mine is 19 years old and still going strong.
Respectfully, I disagree. There are many interesting problems that have cut and paste answers. "Compare Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's attitude toward divine justice as it changes throughout the course of the play." To a sixth grader, it's an assignment requiring critical thinking but also a task that lends itself to a quick search for an easily paraphrased response. It's not a new concern (Cliff Notes!) but it's easy to see how training the young to search first and think later might lead to undesirable outcomes.
My gut feeling is that cutting and pasting answers (programming related or otherwise) from the internet doesn't really help develop critical thinking skills except in the cases where a student is motivated to deconstruct the found answer in order to understand it and then makes a judgement call on its suitability to address the problem at hand. If students are engaged in that whole process, I agree with you that searching for answers might be a valuable technique (not unlike schlepping off to the library). If it's a cut-n-paste job to finish an assignment, there seems to be minimal educational value.
Exactly the same holds with professional programmers using StackOverflow: writing a program that appears to work without understanding why isn't really great programming and does not make one a competent programmer (but might make one a competent employee which I find to be indescribably sad but that's a different topic).
I'm not an educator, so take this with a grain of salt.
Well for SM'ing, the bigger screen is a real win: I (but perhaps not others) really need to see two pages at a time when running a show and the current iPad lineup's screens are too small for that. Combine that sized screen with the stylus and iAnnotate (or the like) I can finally see moving away from printed scripts for relatively cheap money.
As for lighting: your line "it's just wireless" is pretty funny to someone who's debugged DMX perched 25' up on a ladder, alone, in the early hours of the morning. I'll grant you that the larger "pro" factor is not a must have for that use case but the elision of wireless computer control with a traditional fader board form factor is pretty exciting when it comes time to write cues (or run an unscripted show live).
Do you believe that USB --> DMX is somehow preferable to wifi --> DMX via Art-Net? Every place I've worked (including the venue I own) has either made this transition or would dearly like to make it. Granted, large installations probably have other concerns but for small spaces (figure 50 instruments, 300 cues, and one or two tech folks) Art-Net kind of rocks.
Dead on. As an engineer (or whatever) the OP should realize that even in -- or *especially in* -- engineering circles his "experience" (what, a few years?) wouldn't be fawned over by his so-called peers.
As a long time Erlang proponent I'm finding that Elixir is an easier sell (admitting to liking Erlang's syntax can bring conversation to a standstill) and no less useful. Really a delightful language to work in.
+1 to emotionally attached. I briefly tried contacts about twenty years ago and discovered that (a) I feel undressed without glasses on, (b) I put my finger into my eye more often than I like to admit while trying to push my (non-existent) glasses up, and (c) I *like* not being able to see things -- not all the time, mind you, but there are occasions when I'm pretty happy when the world's a giant blur.
Plus "elective surgery on a vital organ" is like "jumping out of a perfectly good airplane"... fine for other people.
Seriously though, in addition to the use cases others have mentioned I get a lot of mileage out of starting a REPL in a screen (or now, tmux) session and just letting it run -- it's easy then to re-attach and occasionally debug issues or upgrade code. I've had some Erlang jobs running for years like that.
The storage is one nicety that Classic brings to the table. The other real benefits -- depending on your use case -- are the interface and software. I've *never* had an iPod Classic crash; this isn't true of the iPod Touch (at least the early generations). Out on the highway on the motorcycle it's damn inconvenient to have the sound just stop. But also, having real push buttons on the Classic means that I can throw the unit in a tank bag and pause/play on the fly.
(Yeah, I get that there are probably all sorts of other ways to listen to music while riding but the Classic + Etymotic earbuds has been a cheap and reliable solution for going on a decade now. No bluetooth nonsense or fancy adaptors; just plug in and go.)
Finally! The LRB is woefully underrepresented in this thread. Although UK centric -- to some degree -- its coverage of economics and the Middle East is really excellent and informative for a US reader too. (Plus, of course, the book reviews.) Perhaps a little stuck in its ways but always interesting.
Here's a New Orleans take on the issue from an alternative periodical. Your supposition seems to be substantiated by the article: the issue's not just the money but the culture. (I don't claim it's the best article ever, but it's not the voice of "the man" either.) The points here are compelling and not out of line with what I'm seeing in my neighborhood.
The question's an interesting one; it has an analogue in the deaf community with regard to cochlear implants. There's a brief paragraph on wikipedia about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but isn't particularly nuanced. My point being that questions like that aren't cut and dry: there's a lot -- the identity of self -- at stake there, as there is with the whole marriage thing.
Gosh -- liberal, no dress codes, too numerous to count food choices, good weather, a few negatives -- that sounds a lot like here in New Orleans. Except, right, we work 35 hour weeks (from home though: we most certainly do not have high tech companies), take Friday afternoons off, have $5 beer & a shot happy hours, and dirt cheap expenses.
In all honesty I'm glad you like where you live, that's cool. In a world with fast pipes though there are lots and lots of options and the Bay Area culture seems from this distance to be one dedicated to working, not living.
So if it's not in the library it hasn't been censored, it's just drivel.
That's certainly not something I said or implied. In my experience librarians have always gone out of their way to acquire any material that's been asked for. Further, they get really pissed off when parents and school boards and the like start to dictate what can and cannot be on the library shelves -- for instance, it's the ALA who sponsor Banned Books Week and is mighty vocal about censorship in any library. Remember too that this is the cohort who stood up to the g-men demanding patrons' borrowing records.
They do curate a collection: obviously they can't choose to stock every book and have to decide what to put on the shelves. I don't see an elementary school librarian not selecting, say, Kingsley Amis's _Lucky Jim_ as a form of censorship (and it's certainly not drivel). It would be an inappropriate read for most elementary school kids though, boring to them, and a waste of valuable shelf space. If you see that as censorship I'd posit that you have a very broad definition of that term.
There are, no doubt, librarians who do censor and do exert an agenda. Fortunately they seem to be in a minority.
What librarians are very good at is knowing what books are going to be appealing to kids. If you really liked The Phantom Tollbooth they're the people who are then able to nudge you towards A Wrinkle in Time. I think asking a fourth grader to surf the 'net and select his next book without guidance is fraught with issues.
I hate to say it but at the Elementary level the research part of library just does not have a high priority to me. I am thinking about reading Swiss Family Robinson when I was a kid and dreaming about living in a tree house and fighting pirates.
I hope I didn't imply that there shouldn't be whimsical books. By "research" I mean reading about dinosaurs and then looking them up in a Childcraft encyclopedia or perhaps finding a second book about dinosaurs or planning a dinosaur costume. Knowing the mechanics of research (how to use a table of contents, an index, a catalogue -- hell, the kik-step) makes these activities more fun and natural. I think a good school librarian should be teaching kids how to do more than click. Having known more than one university librarian who talked about having to teach college age students how to use a ToC, an index, a catalogue it's pretty clear that we're not doing enough when these kids are young.
Modern technology is ancillary at best in an elementary school library and probably more distracting than useful. The above mentioned dinosaurs don't have to move, they don't have to sing dinosaur songs, and they certainly don't need to be advertising dinosaur treats to the under-9 set.
Woah. That's crazy talk. I don't think kids are allowed to learn stuff that's not on The Standardized Test. Next you'll be suggesting that older teens from the local high school could be library interns or something. Where will the madness end?
In truth, of course, I'm wholeheartedly in favor of such schemes. We provide an outlet for sports and music and theater (and so on); it's important to provide a place for kids who are bookish to be bookish -- and to acknowledge that reading a book or looking something up, &c. is as noteworthy an accomplishment as scoring a goal or even creating something tangible, i.e., that the reading of the book is the point not merely a means to some other end. But then I also think that there should be industrial arts and home economics, even for young kids.
The other must have for a library is a librarian. Honestly, at the elementary school level libraries are no less relevant than they've ever been -- research is research and learning how to do it, even with a crappy old encyclopedia and out of date dictionary is a vital skill. So if your school's library is irrelevant it's time to find a new librarian because there's your problem.
Librarians are also pretty skilled at finding and purchasing the right materials, recommending age-appropriate books, fighting censorship, and -- at least when I was a kid -- being an non-teacher/non-parent adult confidant. Parents, even involved, educated ones, can't fill the same role.
Eh. I couldn't imagine being unfortunate enough to have to trade 2-3 hours a day [*] sitting in a car for a yard to take care of when there's a well maintained city park across the street -- not to mention all the other amenities the city provides. I'm sincerely glad what you have is working for you but don't believe that city dwellers all feel "stuck."
[*] 2 hours/day x 5 days/week x 45 weeks/year x 10 years is 4500 hours, pretty much a full 1/2 year of dead time in the period you're talking about. Even if my public transportation commute were that long, I'd have been able to read, say, 450 books in that time.
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I'm in the same boat. I used to love Mac hardware from ~2004 (PowerPC) until around ~2010. Then it started to get really bad. MacOS went from a UNIX workstation OS to some sort of media consumer / music player thing (useless to me as I can't stand music) and it's clear Apple wants to make their products fancy televisions.
Huh? As a dev my use case primarily involves zsh, Emacs, Erlang, and PostgreSQL and all that's running just fine on MacOS thanks. I'm really curious what your use case is? I mean, you make it sound like you've maximized the iTunes window and don't know how to quit the application.
I couldn't agree more. As you point out, the keys are in the right place; I'll add that they've got a hell of a lifespan: one of mine is 19 years old and still going strong.
That's a great anecdote and a nice reminder that problems are often well solved obliquely. Thanks for sharing.
Respectfully, I disagree. There are many interesting problems that have cut and paste answers. "Compare Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's attitude toward divine justice as it changes throughout the course of the play." To a sixth grader, it's an assignment requiring critical thinking but also a task that lends itself to a quick search for an easily paraphrased response. It's not a new concern (Cliff Notes!) but it's easy to see how training the young to search first and think later might lead to undesirable outcomes.
My gut feeling is that cutting and pasting answers (programming related or otherwise) from the internet doesn't really help develop critical thinking skills except in the cases where a student is motivated to deconstruct the found answer in order to understand it and then makes a judgement call on its suitability to address the problem at hand. If students are engaged in that whole process, I agree with you that searching for answers might be a valuable technique (not unlike schlepping off to the library). If it's a cut-n-paste job to finish an assignment, there seems to be minimal educational value.
Exactly the same holds with professional programmers using StackOverflow: writing a program that appears to work without understanding why isn't really great programming and does not make one a competent programmer (but might make one a competent employee which I find to be indescribably sad but that's a different topic).
I'm not an educator, so take this with a grain of salt.
Well for SM'ing, the bigger screen is a real win: I (but perhaps not others) really need to see two pages at a time when running a show and the current iPad lineup's screens are too small for that. Combine that sized screen with the stylus and iAnnotate (or the like) I can finally see moving away from printed scripts for relatively cheap money.
As for lighting: your line "it's just wireless" is pretty funny to someone who's debugged DMX perched 25' up on a ladder, alone, in the early hours of the morning. I'll grant you that the larger "pro" factor is not a must have for that use case but the elision of wireless computer control with a traditional fader board form factor is pretty exciting when it comes time to write cues (or run an unscripted show live).
Do you believe that USB --> DMX is somehow preferable to wifi --> DMX via Art-Net? Every place I've worked (including the venue I own) has either made this transition or would dearly like to make it. Granted, large installations probably have other concerns but for small spaces (figure 50 instruments, 300 cues, and one or two tech folks) Art-Net kind of rocks.
Perhaps it depends what profession you're in. As a stage manager and lighting tech, this is a pretty excellent development.
Dead on. As an engineer (or whatever) the OP should realize that even in -- or *especially in* -- engineering circles his "experience" (what, a few years?) wouldn't be fawned over by his so-called peers.
... of course. Now the federales will even know what floor I'm on. Handy!
I don't think "orders of magnitude" means what you think it does.
As a long time Erlang proponent I'm finding that Elixir is an easier sell (admitting to liking Erlang's syntax can bring conversation to a standstill) and no less useful. Really a delightful language to work in.
+1 to emotionally attached. I briefly tried contacts about twenty years ago and discovered that (a) I feel undressed without glasses on, (b) I put my finger into my eye more often than I like to admit while trying to push my (non-existent) glasses up, and (c) I *like* not being able to see things -- not all the time, mind you, but there are occasions when I'm pretty happy when the world's a giant blur.
Plus "elective surgery on a vital organ" is like "jumping out of a perfectly good airplane" ... fine for other people.
WTF is this "button" you speak of?
Seriously though, in addition to the use cases others have mentioned I get a lot of mileage out of starting a REPL in a screen (or now, tmux) session and just letting it run -- it's easy then to re-attach and occasionally debug issues or upgrade code. I've had some Erlang jobs running for years like that.
The storage is one nicety that Classic brings to the table. The other real benefits -- depending on your use case -- are the interface and software. I've *never* had an iPod Classic crash; this isn't true of the iPod Touch (at least the early generations). Out on the highway on the motorcycle it's damn inconvenient to have the sound just stop. But also, having real push buttons on the Classic means that I can throw the unit in a tank bag and pause/play on the fly.
(Yeah, I get that there are probably all sorts of other ways to listen to music while riding but the Classic + Etymotic earbuds has been a cheap and reliable solution for going on a decade now. No bluetooth nonsense or fancy adaptors; just plug in and go.)
Finally! The LRB is woefully underrepresented in this thread. Although UK centric -- to some degree -- its coverage of economics and the Middle East is really excellent and informative for a US reader too. (Plus, of course, the book reviews.) Perhaps a little stuck in its ways but always interesting.
This is an excellent suggestion. I'd go one step further and make election day April 16.
Here's a New Orleans take on the issue from an alternative periodical. Your supposition seems to be substantiated by the article: the issue's not just the money but the culture. (I don't claim it's the best article ever, but it's not the voice of "the man" either.) The points here are compelling and not out of line with what I'm seeing in my neighborhood.
http://www.antigravitymagazine...
The question's an interesting one; it has an analogue in the deaf community with regard to cochlear implants. There's a brief paragraph on wikipedia about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but isn't particularly nuanced. My point being that questions like that aren't cut and dry: there's a lot -- the identity of self -- at stake there, as there is with the whole marriage thing.
Gosh -- liberal, no dress codes, too numerous to count food choices, good weather, a few negatives -- that sounds a lot like here in New Orleans. Except, right, we work 35 hour weeks (from home though: we most certainly do not have high tech companies), take Friday afternoons off, have $5 beer & a shot happy hours, and dirt cheap expenses.
In all honesty I'm glad you like where you live, that's cool. In a world with fast pipes though there are lots and lots of options and the Bay Area culture seems from this distance to be one dedicated to working, not living.
So if it's not in the library it hasn't been censored, it's just drivel.
That's certainly not something I said or implied. In my experience librarians have always gone out of their way to acquire any material that's been asked for. Further, they get really pissed off when parents and school boards and the like start to dictate what can and cannot be on the library shelves -- for instance, it's the ALA who sponsor Banned Books Week and is mighty vocal about censorship in any library. Remember too that this is the cohort who stood up to the g-men demanding patrons' borrowing records.
They do curate a collection: obviously they can't choose to stock every book and have to decide what to put on the shelves. I don't see an elementary school librarian not selecting, say, Kingsley Amis's _Lucky Jim_ as a form of censorship (and it's certainly not drivel). It would be an inappropriate read for most elementary school kids though, boring to them, and a waste of valuable shelf space. If you see that as censorship I'd posit that you have a very broad definition of that term.
There are, no doubt, librarians who do censor and do exert an agenda. Fortunately they seem to be in a minority.
What librarians are very good at is knowing what books are going to be appealing to kids. If you really liked The Phantom Tollbooth they're the people who are then able to nudge you towards A Wrinkle in Time. I think asking a fourth grader to surf the 'net and select his next book without guidance is fraught with issues.
I hate to say it but at the Elementary level the research part of library just does not have a high priority to me. I am thinking about reading Swiss Family Robinson when I was a kid and dreaming about living in a tree house and fighting pirates.
I hope I didn't imply that there shouldn't be whimsical books. By "research" I mean reading about dinosaurs and then looking them up in a Childcraft encyclopedia or perhaps finding a second book about dinosaurs or planning a dinosaur costume. Knowing the mechanics of research (how to use a table of contents, an index, a catalogue -- hell, the kik-step) makes these activities more fun and natural. I think a good school librarian should be teaching kids how to do more than click. Having known more than one university librarian who talked about having to teach college age students how to use a ToC, an index, a catalogue it's pretty clear that we're not doing enough when these kids are young.
Modern technology is ancillary at best in an elementary school library and probably more distracting than useful. The above mentioned dinosaurs don't have to move, they don't have to sing dinosaur songs, and they certainly don't need to be advertising dinosaur treats to the under-9 set.
Woah. That's crazy talk. I don't think kids are allowed to learn stuff that's not on The Standardized Test. Next you'll be suggesting that older teens from the local high school could be library interns or something. Where will the madness end?
In truth, of course, I'm wholeheartedly in favor of such schemes. We provide an outlet for sports and music and theater (and so on); it's important to provide a place for kids who are bookish to be bookish -- and to acknowledge that reading a book or looking something up, &c. is as noteworthy an accomplishment as scoring a goal or even creating something tangible, i.e., that the reading of the book is the point not merely a means to some other end. But then I also think that there should be industrial arts and home economics, even for young kids.
I was wondering when someone would mention books.
The other must have for a library is a librarian. Honestly, at the elementary school level libraries are no less relevant than they've ever been -- research is research and learning how to do it, even with a crappy old encyclopedia and out of date dictionary is a vital skill. So if your school's library is irrelevant it's time to find a new librarian because there's your problem.
Librarians are also pretty skilled at finding and purchasing the right materials, recommending age-appropriate books, fighting censorship, and -- at least when I was a kid -- being an non-teacher/non-parent adult confidant. Parents, even involved, educated ones, can't fill the same role.
The property we bought for retirement is in downtown New Orleans, so probably -- in the most literal sense -- "underwater."
Eh. I couldn't imagine being unfortunate enough to have to trade 2-3 hours a day [*] sitting in a car for a yard to take care of when there's a well maintained city park across the street -- not to mention all the other amenities the city provides. I'm sincerely glad what you have is working for you but don't believe that city dwellers all feel "stuck."
[*] 2 hours/day x 5 days/week x 45 weeks/year x 10 years is 4500 hours, pretty much a full 1/2 year of dead time in the period you're talking about. Even if my public transportation commute were that long, I'd have been able to read, say, 450 books in that time.