One of the reasons I abandoned Windows was that I was sick of icons and names and places changing with every new release. I hadn't used a Mac in 10 years when I first started looking at them again (2 years ago), but in about 5 minutes I was back to feeling comfortable with it. So little has changed that you don't need to think about the OS at all. Things are where they are supposed to be, and they basically don't move.
The other approach I appreciate is that OSX doesn't ask for a pat on the head every time it does something right. It doesn't bother you unless something goes wrong, and even then, it is usually discreet. When I boot up Windows and one of those damn yellow bubbles comes up with that sickening little popping sound, I want to smash the screen. I can't take it anymore. I just want to turn on the computer, do my work, turn it off, and go play on my Xbox (the division of Microsoft that I do have to tip my hat to!). OSX enables that.
Yup. I switched a couple years ago because I looked at it and was like, "Well, yeah, it's a little more than a Windows/Linux laptop, but it is well made, it does look nice, and does a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less hassle than the others... Here's my money."
Maybe yes and maybe no. I'm a university professor and the increase in Apple logos I'm seeing facing me in class is going through the roof. I think it's over half in most classes now.
I've seen group projects get screwed up because although the Mac, which is the underdog, has had to learn to be super-compatible with everything else, the same can't be said of Windows. So you may be hearing the result of the network effects of everyone having Macs and her use of a different OS being a stumbling block to working together easily. I most certainly have seen that.
Don't chalk everything up to marketing. I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago, after 10 years of dismissing it as a pain in the ass. But since they've been on Intel, the amount of stuff you can do (easily) on them has really gone up. You can boot damn near any OS, and there is phenomenal virtual machine software so you don't even need to. Yes, this is only because Apple won't support their OS being used on off-the-shelf hardware, but I think a lot of people are just making the pragmatic decision that they don't really care.
I'm not saying you should buy the girl another new computer--we're all pretty susceptible to trends when we're freshmen in college and trying desperately to fit in--but that there might be more to it.
I live in Japan, and I see these electric-assist bikes all the time.
I have yet to see a male or anyone shy of 70 riding one. I use them to tease my wife: "Hey, hon, look! They have electric bikes on sale! You want one?"
Perhaps kdawson would like an electric wheelchair, too, rather than using his legs like a sucker?
Amen to that. Everyone's raving about the "effects" in Avatar, but there actually aren't any. It's a cartoon. That's the only reason it works; it looks unreal.
Think back to the first movie where we really started having entire scenes put together in CGI: The Matrix. That didn't look real, either, but that was the point: in the story, nothing was real. The kind of "well, this looks right, but something isn't..." feeling was used as an important part of the story.
Since then, we've moved to CGI everywhere and as a result, I just find movies a lot less interesting. I mean, if I'm going to watch a cartoon, I'll watch a cartoon. I have no problem with cartoons, because they have no pretense of being real. CGI scenes with actors, though... Meh.
I have it running on Ubuntu 9.10, OSX 10.6, and WinXP, and no, I have no problems whatsoever. Neither does anyone I know. Neither does anyone I've ever heard of, except for around here.
I can feel them, too. They aren't painful. In fact... Until today I didn't know that wasn't normal.
Now that I think of it, I don't think I feel them at the dentist. I wonder why...
I can also hear electronics when they break. It drives me crazy, because I'll hear a high-pitched squeal, at the very limit of my range of hearing, and I know that something is wrong. Also, there's a corner in Shimbashi (I live in Tokyo) that squeals, and I think it's the train track there. It's incredibly painful, but people are just walking around, not noticing anything. I was really happy when I found another person who heard the same thing at the same place.
So what I'm saying is that it is entirely possible for people to have differently-tuned physical sensations. There's nothing even slightly strange about pointing that out.
That is not to say that the guy in TFA isn't a nut. He clearly is. We're surrounded by radio waves all the time, and his next-door neighbor's WiFi is not really that strong. Does he have a cellphone? A wireless handset for his landline? A cordless keyboard? Come on.
Then you have no idea what is happening in Australia.
Weaker cultures/civilizations being replaced by stronger ones is exactly what has been happening in Australia, and North America, and South America, and that's only in the last couple centuries. It has happened countless times throughout history. It's normal. That's isn't an excuse to be dicks about it, but it happens to every culture eventually. We're sitting here typing in the language of the people who had their own fine and dandy language which was decimated by Nordic raiders who took over the northern parts of their island and started supplanting bits of their culture with their own, then came the Normans who enslaved them for 300 years and relegated some of their best words (fuck, shit) to the "dirty" category... Oh, and don't forget about the Romans...
We are the lucky benefactors of several waves of colonization. Just because our culture was the last to really go on a colonizing bender doesn't mean we were the first, or the last.
Reality check: We ARE glorified janitors and automobile mechanics.
Yup. It's not the 70s or 80s anymore. Computer skills are going the same place as TV repair. At one time it was like "Ooo! Techmanology!" but now it's just... TV repair.
True translation is nigh impossible for a human, and requires comprehensive knowledge of both the source and target cultures. Not just the patterns of sound/text that represent the languages used by those cultures. A computer will not provide human-level-quality translation at any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe before the end of my life, especially if I take a lot of vitamins (if I'm to believe Kurzweil, which I stopped doing years ago--the guy is a hack), but not anytime soon.
I'd love for computers to be able to put me out of a job. But I don't see it happening.
I'm not big on hand sanitizer, etc., because I understand that humans are animals meant to live outside. We don't need hospital-level sanitation all the time (just at the hospital, because it's full of people who are contagious and weak). I just had this argument this morning with my wife, who was boiling the colander she used to drain the oysters last night, after it had been washed and dried (and after we'd eaten the oysters!). She drives me crazy sometimes.
That being said, you might also just be lucky and have a stronger immune system, or aren't affected by the environment you live in. I grew up in Colorado and was rarely sick. However, I when I moved the much-more-humid Midwest for college, I was sick all the time (living in a dorm was a factor in that, I'm sure). Then I moved back to Colorado, and I was fine. Then I moved to Japan, which is very humid, and I was sick. Then I moved back to Colorado, fine. Then Japan, sick. Then San Diego (dry), fine. Now Japan, sick. --As in, I am sick right now as I am typing this.
I looked into my family history recently, and I found something that explains a lot. Do you know why both sides of my family ended up in Colorado? They were told in the 1800s to move to a dry climate because they were chronically ill! My great-grandfather came in from the East Coast; my grandfather on the other side from Missouri. So you might just be blessed with better genes.
I would like to suggest that your "don't play doctor" point is actually part of a much larger problem in our culture these days: a lack of respect/understanding of education/training. They look at you and think, "This just looks like some guy/girl. What makes him so special? I'm a precious snowflake." Well, what makes a physician special is tons of education and a license to practice medicine granted by experts in the field. Yes, experts. They exist. However, increasingly, it seems, we see people lacking even basic qualifications being elevated to high levels of power/responsibility (*cough* Sarah Palin *cough*). We see trained journalists losing out to "citizen journalists" like the hacks at Boing Boing.
We as a society have invested much of our history to devising ways to ensure that we have at least a basic meritocracy, that qualifications are clear and standard, but it seems that a lot of people just are turning their backs on that and thinking they can do better with Wikipedia. It's terrifying.
And to anyone else reading this: Most doctorates are very hard to get, and you don't get them without knowing a lot. Toss a license on there, as in the case of your physician, and these people are Better Than You. Get over it.
As an educator, reading the literature, don't freak if he kind of levels off later. Humans learn at highly individual rates and in pretty individual orders, and this is why a home-schooled kid with smart/well-read/well-educated parents will always kick the crap out of assembly-line-educated kids. Personal attention to individual differences. It also helps that your kid probably learns/thinks a lot like you and his mother do, so it's easier to relate.
My wife and I probably can't have kids (too old!), but if an unexpected package were to arrive, as an educator (my wife's a teacher, too) with a decent salary (university), yeah, that kid is gonna be home-schooled. I had way too much of my time wasted in K-12 to foist that upon my own progeny.
The US system has a lot of problems, but I think one of them that is important in this case is the idea of "grades" instead of "proficiency levels." It's very socially difficult to hold a kid back or skip him/her forward already, but if he/she is only different in one subject, what do you do about the other subjects? The kid will either be bored in everything while he catches up in math or whatever, or he will be in the right place for math and be struggling in reading... This idea that everything should come in a big package is crazy.
Anyway, keep on it, but don't worry if he ends up "just" above average.;-)
Hi there. I'm a language/linguistics professor at a major university.
Language is not really bound by external rules; the "rules" are really just patterns that we have noticed and have used to describe the features of language after the fact.
The simple fact of the matter is this: "Begging the question" has been used to mean "raising the question" for so long and by so many people that it is pointless to even suggest that they are not equal. They are. This belongs in the same bin as "don't end a sentence with a preposition." It's a rule that no one follows and which makes no real sense.
As a bit of "action research," I quizzed some of my colleagues on this. No one--and this is a group of people with advanced degrees in linguistics--knew that using "begging the question" to mean "raising the question" was, in fact, incorrect.
In fact, I just did a search of the Corpus of Contemporary English. Do you know how many instances of the so-called "correct" usage of this phrase I found? --In this 400+-million-word linguistic resource? Wanna guess?
I have a uniform already. It's called "collared shirt, no jeans, and a tie." Because, you know, I'm a grownup.
Most people have uniforms of some kind. Have you considered that maybe the IT department looks like crap? Too many stained anime t-shirts?
Also, to all the people asking, "what, do they think that we are blue-collar workers?": The answer is "yes," because that is what you are. You do not need a degree to do your job (my best-paid IT-industry friend dropped out of HIGH SCHOOL--no GED). You have a list of licenses and test qualifications. You are peons. Get used to it or get out.
And yes, I've done that job as well. I'm not saying it's fair to be viewed as peons, but that is indeed what they are. They are basically on the same level as janitors and food service. In the company but not of it.
Finally, how about this: It might not be so bad. Honestly, I'm thinking of changing careers, and if I do, the company I'll be at will require me to wear a polo shirt with a logo on it. There are a lot of styles available, and I'm stoked. I can go back to spending most of my clothes budget on clothes for playing instead of clothes for working! It's not all bad.
Um. The iPhone is the only phone I've ever had that I didn't want to grind into the pavement with my heel. It's the only phone that I haven't actively hated. It's the only phone that was honest about what it could do well and what it couldn't do well. It is a great phone. A great phone.
The iPod was the only MP3 player I've ever had that wasn't a total piece of cheapo plastic Chinese junk. For some reason Slashdot people seem to want to drag folders to their MP3 player, which is fine for them, I guess, but I, like most people, really like having a nice piece of software that facilitates syncing what I want where. This is especially important when I have multiple family members going off of the same library. Add a music store that is now great (having a good bitrate and no DRM), and I'm a happy camper.
Whenever I see these bah-humbug posts about Apple's innovation, I just can't get my head around them. This is a company that--yes--has developed very little from scratch, but that's not the point. They've taken the theory of others and put them into useful practice. This is much, much harder. The phone I had before my iPhone had a way longer feature list, but many of those features were either such a hassle to use that I never did, or whenever I tried to use them, it crashed. In the iPhone, Apple created a phone that actually worked. In fact, they created one that "Just Worked," in a market where working at all was hard to find.
It isn't fanboys who have propelled Apple to the top of the heap in the markets they've entered in recent years; it's average people who just know that their products work well and are easy to use. It's sad to say, but that right there is innovation in a world where companies often push garbage out the door that isn't really ready to go.
Rather than deride the leader for not being technologically innovative, I wish people would scrutinize those who are technologically innovative, yet somehow manage to have their collective rear ends handed to them time and again by a company that skips a lot of the technological aspect in favor of QA and testing. What is wrong with everyone else?
Save your beer money, because if you don't have this, you will be a social outcast.
I'd rather be a social outcast than someone so desperate for the approval of others that they'll buy a gadget just for the status it bestows.
See, I can never figure this sentiment out. Since I moved to the Mac about 2 years ago, I haven't noticed any particular rise in my social status. When I get my laptop out, it's not like girls sidle up to me and start cooing in my ear or anything. I just open it and start working/playing (instead of waiting for it to wake up, like with every other laptop I've had).
I think that someone opening a laptop running Linux has more of an "oooh" factor than a Mac. When students of mine who are running Linux open their computers in the classroom, people go, "Hey, what's that?" and gather around. But like half of the class is using Macs. It's just a computer.
I mean, thanks for thinking I'm higher status because I spent exactly the same amount of money as I would have buying the ThinkPad I was looking at at the time, but really, it's just a computer. I use it to do stuff.
Very nice. All of us get into things because of the people in our lives, and based on our own cognitive style, gravitate towards things we like more or are better at from the options we have in the people we know. I ended up being in language not because I loved language and literature, but because at my high school, the English department had the smartest, funniest, strictest teachers, and I liked and respected them. I wish it had been the math or science people, though, because in college I found that I hated literature, but because I was in language, I could move into linguistics and from there into psychometrics... It just took 20 years to get me into a math-heavy field, where I actually feel I belong.
I think the most important thing you can do with a kid is do as you say--show him what you think is cool. Maybe he'll agree; maybe he won't, but you will be planting seeds in his mind as to what is possible. Kids need to see a lot of different things and meet a lot of different people before they'll be able to express any actual, intentional interest in much of anything. You know, because they're people.
Any vodka is basically just pure grain alcohol mixed with mineral water. It's virtually impossible to get a hangover from it, aside from just drinking a lot of it.
"Brown goods" like whiskey are a lot more likely to leave you in a poorly state, and lower-quality ones have more junk in them that will mess you up. It is therefore true that drinking cheap crap will result in more hangovers, but it really doesn't apply to vodka, and anyway, Smirnoff is not even a bad vodka.
My brother (also in Colorado) has driven an old Saab for years, and I love borrowing it. Everything is so easy to reach and "in the right place"--like Apple designed the UI of that car. And yeah, getting around trucks on Berthoud Pass, and taking the switchbacks with speed and confidence. It is a great mountain car.
I looked at them a couple years ago when I was replacing our car, though, and was not impressed anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't been to China, have you? It's less beehive and more wild west.
One of the reasons I abandoned Windows was that I was sick of icons and names and places changing with every new release. I hadn't used a Mac in 10 years when I first started looking at them again (2 years ago), but in about 5 minutes I was back to feeling comfortable with it. So little has changed that you don't need to think about the OS at all. Things are where they are supposed to be, and they basically don't move.
The other approach I appreciate is that OSX doesn't ask for a pat on the head every time it does something right. It doesn't bother you unless something goes wrong, and even then, it is usually discreet. When I boot up Windows and one of those damn yellow bubbles comes up with that sickening little popping sound, I want to smash the screen. I can't take it anymore. I just want to turn on the computer, do my work, turn it off, and go play on my Xbox (the division of Microsoft that I do have to tip my hat to!). OSX enables that.
Yup. I switched a couple years ago because I looked at it and was like, "Well, yeah, it's a little more than a Windows/Linux laptop, but it is well made, it does look nice, and does a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less hassle than the others... Here's my money."
Haven't looked back.
Translation, status symbol.
Maybe yes and maybe no. I'm a university professor and the increase in Apple logos I'm seeing facing me in class is going through the roof. I think it's over half in most classes now.
I've seen group projects get screwed up because although the Mac, which is the underdog, has had to learn to be super-compatible with everything else, the same can't be said of Windows. So you may be hearing the result of the network effects of everyone having Macs and her use of a different OS being a stumbling block to working together easily. I most certainly have seen that.
Don't chalk everything up to marketing. I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago, after 10 years of dismissing it as a pain in the ass. But since they've been on Intel, the amount of stuff you can do (easily) on them has really gone up. You can boot damn near any OS, and there is phenomenal virtual machine software so you don't even need to. Yes, this is only because Apple won't support their OS being used on off-the-shelf hardware, but I think a lot of people are just making the pragmatic decision that they don't really care.
I'm not saying you should buy the girl another new computer--we're all pretty susceptible to trends when we're freshmen in college and trying desperately to fit in--but that there might be more to it.
I live in Japan, and I see these electric-assist bikes all the time.
I have yet to see a male or anyone shy of 70 riding one. I use them to tease my wife: "Hey, hon, look! They have electric bikes on sale! You want one?"
Perhaps kdawson would like an electric wheelchair, too, rather than using his legs like a sucker?
I have yet to see a believable CG scene period.
Amen to that. Everyone's raving about the "effects" in Avatar, but there actually aren't any. It's a cartoon. That's the only reason it works; it looks unreal.
Think back to the first movie where we really started having entire scenes put together in CGI: The Matrix. That didn't look real, either, but that was the point: in the story, nothing was real. The kind of "well, this looks right, but something isn't..." feeling was used as an important part of the story.
Since then, we've moved to CGI everywhere and as a result, I just find movies a lot less interesting. I mean, if I'm going to watch a cartoon, I'll watch a cartoon. I have no problem with cartoons, because they have no pretense of being real. CGI scenes with actors, though... Meh.
Give me miniatures and expert set design any day.
This approach still holds true in China, Russia...
I agree with the spirit of what you've written but...
[citation needed]
I have it running on Ubuntu 9.10, OSX 10.6, and WinXP, and no, I have no problems whatsoever. Neither does anyone I know. Neither does anyone I've ever heard of, except for around here.
I can feel them, too. They aren't painful. In fact... Until today I didn't know that wasn't normal.
Now that I think of it, I don't think I feel them at the dentist. I wonder why...
I can also hear electronics when they break. It drives me crazy, because I'll hear a high-pitched squeal, at the very limit of my range of hearing, and I know that something is wrong. Also, there's a corner in Shimbashi (I live in Tokyo) that squeals, and I think it's the train track there. It's incredibly painful, but people are just walking around, not noticing anything. I was really happy when I found another person who heard the same thing at the same place.
So what I'm saying is that it is entirely possible for people to have differently-tuned physical sensations. There's nothing even slightly strange about pointing that out.
That is not to say that the guy in TFA isn't a nut. He clearly is. We're surrounded by radio waves all the time, and his next-door neighbor's WiFi is not really that strong. Does he have a cellphone? A wireless handset for his landline? A cordless keyboard? Come on.
Then you have no idea what is happening in Australia.
Weaker cultures/civilizations being replaced by stronger ones is exactly what has been happening in Australia, and North America, and South America, and that's only in the last couple centuries. It has happened countless times throughout history. It's normal. That's isn't an excuse to be dicks about it, but it happens to every culture eventually. We're sitting here typing in the language of the people who had their own fine and dandy language which was decimated by Nordic raiders who took over the northern parts of their island and started supplanting bits of their culture with their own, then came the Normans who enslaved them for 300 years and relegated some of their best words (fuck, shit) to the "dirty" category... Oh, and don't forget about the Romans...
We are the lucky benefactors of several waves of colonization. Just because our culture was the last to really go on a colonizing bender doesn't mean we were the first, or the last.
That's what "natural" means.
Reality check: We ARE glorified janitors and automobile mechanics.
Yup. It's not the 70s or 80s anymore. Computer skills are going the same place as TV repair. At one time it was like "Ooo! Techmanology!" but now it's just... TV repair.
Like all of the Union auto workers making fat cash working in Detroit?
You mean the ones at Ford? Yeah. Toyota? Yeah. Honda? Yeah.
Basically the ones working anywhere but GM, which was run into the ground by poor management are doing just fine, as are the companies they work for.
As a linguist, let me tell you something:
True translation is nigh impossible for a human, and requires comprehensive knowledge of both the source and target cultures. Not just the patterns of sound/text that represent the languages used by those cultures. A computer will not provide human-level-quality translation at any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe before the end of my life, especially if I take a lot of vitamins (if I'm to believe Kurzweil, which I stopped doing years ago--the guy is a hack), but not anytime soon.
I'd love for computers to be able to put me out of a job. But I don't see it happening.
I'm not big on hand sanitizer, etc., because I understand that humans are animals meant to live outside. We don't need hospital-level sanitation all the time (just at the hospital, because it's full of people who are contagious and weak). I just had this argument this morning with my wife, who was boiling the colander she used to drain the oysters last night, after it had been washed and dried (and after we'd eaten the oysters!). She drives me crazy sometimes.
That being said, you might also just be lucky and have a stronger immune system, or aren't affected by the environment you live in. I grew up in Colorado and was rarely sick. However, I when I moved the much-more-humid Midwest for college, I was sick all the time (living in a dorm was a factor in that, I'm sure). Then I moved back to Colorado, and I was fine. Then I moved to Japan, which is very humid, and I was sick. Then I moved back to Colorado, fine. Then Japan, sick. Then San Diego (dry), fine. Now Japan, sick. --As in, I am sick right now as I am typing this.
I looked into my family history recently, and I found something that explains a lot. Do you know why both sides of my family ended up in Colorado? They were told in the 1800s to move to a dry climate because they were chronically ill! My great-grandfather came in from the East Coast; my grandfather on the other side from Missouri. So you might just be blessed with better genes.
Thank you for the great comment!
I would like to suggest that your "don't play doctor" point is actually part of a much larger problem in our culture these days: a lack of respect/understanding of education/training. They look at you and think, "This just looks like some guy/girl. What makes him so special? I'm a precious snowflake." Well, what makes a physician special is tons of education and a license to practice medicine granted by experts in the field. Yes, experts. They exist. However, increasingly, it seems, we see people lacking even basic qualifications being elevated to high levels of power/responsibility (*cough* Sarah Palin *cough*). We see trained journalists losing out to "citizen journalists" like the hacks at Boing Boing.
We as a society have invested much of our history to devising ways to ensure that we have at least a basic meritocracy, that qualifications are clear and standard, but it seems that a lot of people just are turning their backs on that and thinking they can do better with Wikipedia. It's terrifying.
And to anyone else reading this: Most doctorates are very hard to get, and you don't get them without knowing a lot. Toss a license on there, as in the case of your physician, and these people are Better Than You. Get over it.
As an educator, reading the literature, don't freak if he kind of levels off later. Humans learn at highly individual rates and in pretty individual orders, and this is why a home-schooled kid with smart/well-read/well-educated parents will always kick the crap out of assembly-line-educated kids. Personal attention to individual differences. It also helps that your kid probably learns/thinks a lot like you and his mother do, so it's easier to relate.
My wife and I probably can't have kids (too old!), but if an unexpected package were to arrive, as an educator (my wife's a teacher, too) with a decent salary (university), yeah, that kid is gonna be home-schooled. I had way too much of my time wasted in K-12 to foist that upon my own progeny.
The US system has a lot of problems, but I think one of them that is important in this case is the idea of "grades" instead of "proficiency levels." It's very socially difficult to hold a kid back or skip him/her forward already, but if he/she is only different in one subject, what do you do about the other subjects? The kid will either be bored in everything while he catches up in math or whatever, or he will be in the right place for math and be struggling in reading... This idea that everything should come in a big package is crazy.
Anyway, keep on it, but don't worry if he ends up "just" above average. ;-)
Hi there. I'm a language/linguistics professor at a major university.
Language is not really bound by external rules; the "rules" are really just patterns that we have noticed and have used to describe the features of language after the fact.
The simple fact of the matter is this: "Begging the question" has been used to mean "raising the question" for so long and by so many people that it is pointless to even suggest that they are not equal. They are. This belongs in the same bin as "don't end a sentence with a preposition." It's a rule that no one follows and which makes no real sense.
As a bit of "action research," I quizzed some of my colleagues on this. No one--and this is a group of people with advanced degrees in linguistics--knew that using "begging the question" to mean "raising the question" was, in fact, incorrect.
In fact, I just did a search of the Corpus of Contemporary English. Do you know how many instances of the so-called "correct" usage of this phrase I found? --In this 400+-million-word linguistic resource? Wanna guess?
Zero.
Hang it up. You have lost.
I have a uniform already. It's called "collared shirt, no jeans, and a tie." Because, you know, I'm a grownup.
Most people have uniforms of some kind. Have you considered that maybe the IT department looks like crap? Too many stained anime t-shirts?
Also, to all the people asking, "what, do they think that we are blue-collar workers?": The answer is "yes," because that is what you are. You do not need a degree to do your job (my best-paid IT-industry friend dropped out of HIGH SCHOOL--no GED). You have a list of licenses and test qualifications. You are peons. Get used to it or get out.
And yes, I've done that job as well. I'm not saying it's fair to be viewed as peons, but that is indeed what they are. They are basically on the same level as janitors and food service. In the company but not of it.
Finally, how about this: It might not be so bad. Honestly, I'm thinking of changing careers, and if I do, the company I'll be at will require me to wear a polo shirt with a logo on it. There are a lot of styles available, and I'm stoked. I can go back to spending most of my clothes budget on clothes for playing instead of clothes for working! It's not all bad.
Um. The iPhone is the only phone I've ever had that I didn't want to grind into the pavement with my heel. It's the only phone that I haven't actively hated. It's the only phone that was honest about what it could do well and what it couldn't do well. It is a great phone. A great phone.
The iPod was the only MP3 player I've ever had that wasn't a total piece of cheapo plastic Chinese junk. For some reason Slashdot people seem to want to drag folders to their MP3 player, which is fine for them, I guess, but I, like most people, really like having a nice piece of software that facilitates syncing what I want where. This is especially important when I have multiple family members going off of the same library. Add a music store that is now great (having a good bitrate and no DRM), and I'm a happy camper.
Whenever I see these bah-humbug posts about Apple's innovation, I just can't get my head around them. This is a company that--yes--has developed very little from scratch, but that's not the point. They've taken the theory of others and put them into useful practice. This is much, much harder. The phone I had before my iPhone had a way longer feature list, but many of those features were either such a hassle to use that I never did, or whenever I tried to use them, it crashed. In the iPhone, Apple created a phone that actually worked. In fact, they created one that "Just Worked," in a market where working at all was hard to find.
It isn't fanboys who have propelled Apple to the top of the heap in the markets they've entered in recent years; it's average people who just know that their products work well and are easy to use. It's sad to say, but that right there is innovation in a world where companies often push garbage out the door that isn't really ready to go.
Rather than deride the leader for not being technologically innovative, I wish people would scrutinize those who are technologically innovative, yet somehow manage to have their collective rear ends handed to them time and again by a company that skips a lot of the technological aspect in favor of QA and testing. What is wrong with everyone else?
I'd rather be a social outcast than someone so desperate for the approval of others that they'll buy a gadget just for the status it bestows.
See, I can never figure this sentiment out. Since I moved to the Mac about 2 years ago, I haven't noticed any particular rise in my social status. When I get my laptop out, it's not like girls sidle up to me and start cooing in my ear or anything. I just open it and start working/playing (instead of waiting for it to wake up, like with every other laptop I've had).
I think that someone opening a laptop running Linux has more of an "oooh" factor than a Mac. When students of mine who are running Linux open their computers in the classroom, people go, "Hey, what's that?" and gather around. But like half of the class is using Macs. It's just a computer.
I mean, thanks for thinking I'm higher status because I spent exactly the same amount of money as I would have buying the ThinkPad I was looking at at the time, but really, it's just a computer. I use it to do stuff.
Very nice. All of us get into things because of the people in our lives, and based on our own cognitive style, gravitate towards things we like more or are better at from the options we have in the people we know. I ended up being in language not because I loved language and literature, but because at my high school, the English department had the smartest, funniest, strictest teachers, and I liked and respected them. I wish it had been the math or science people, though, because in college I found that I hated literature, but because I was in language, I could move into linguistics and from there into psychometrics... It just took 20 years to get me into a math-heavy field, where I actually feel I belong.
I think the most important thing you can do with a kid is do as you say--show him what you think is cool. Maybe he'll agree; maybe he won't, but you will be planting seeds in his mind as to what is possible. Kids need to see a lot of different things and meet a lot of different people before they'll be able to express any actual, intentional interest in much of anything. You know, because they're people.
What junk are you drinking? Smirnoff?
Ahem:
A Humble Old Label Ices Its Rivals (January 26, 2005)
Any vodka is basically just pure grain alcohol mixed with mineral water. It's virtually impossible to get a hangover from it, aside from just drinking a lot of it.
"Brown goods" like whiskey are a lot more likely to leave you in a poorly state, and lower-quality ones have more junk in them that will mess you up. It is therefore true that drinking cheap crap will result in more hangovers, but it really doesn't apply to vodka, and anyway, Smirnoff is not even a bad vodka.
I don't think you see very much of that at all.
Perfect!
My brother (also in Colorado) has driven an old Saab for years, and I love borrowing it. Everything is so easy to reach and "in the right place"--like Apple designed the UI of that car. And yeah, getting around trucks on Berthoud Pass, and taking the switchbacks with speed and confidence. It is a great mountain car.
I looked at them a couple years ago when I was replacing our car, though, and was not impressed anymore.