They're trying for the next iPod. Wouldn't you?
on
The Cult of Kindle
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· Score: 3, Funny
The Kindle is perfect, and the Kindle 2.0 will be a little more perfect.
Amazon has been watching the iPod and iPhone phenomena, and it wants the same thing. What company wouldn't? Whatever you say about Apple, they know how to make stuff sell.
The quote above is exactly the fanboi-ism that Amazon is looking for: "This gadget has absolutely no flaws, except for whatever Amazon deems are flaws, and then we will curse those flaws after the fact."
I couldn't agree more with the parent's first sentence. As a teacher, I think teaching the concepts that underlie these programs is much, much more effective than having the students memorize icons and menus. It still ruffles my feathers when I see classes entitled "Learning Dreamweaver" instead of "Basic Web Site Design." Should we rename "Beginning Painting" to "Learning to Use the Silver Brush® Grand Prix(TM) Super Brush"?
If Google is intending this service for online storage of personal information, I don't think it's going to succeed... people use Facebook for that sort of thing.
That makes sense. Beyond the interface issues, of course, is the software that she uses most often; if she spends most of her time in Microsoft Office, then she shouldn't have much trouble with Office for Mac. Web browsers aren't too different to the casual user, so giving her Safari or Firefox shouldn't be a problem. The one sticking point might be e-mail... there is no Exchange client for the Mac; there's Outlook Express, which works okay for some people but I've heard people having trouble with it. If it were me, I'd try to switch her to Apple Mail, because it's pretty intuitive; I'm sure others here will disagree and recommend Eudora or something else. Of course, if she's got a web-based e-mail service like gMail, then that's not going to be an issue anyway.
Not knowing your mother, my guess is that the issue will be psychological (i.e., getting her to give the Mac a chance) more than technological; most people I've talked with who are at your Mom's level and who have switched from Windows to Mac get used to it after a very short time of using it and then find it pretty comfortable and intuitive. So the challenge is getting her to sit down and try it for a while. If she's genuinely interested in learning it, sitting by her side and helping her out for a few sessions -- so you can identify her specific frustrations ("why won't the menu come up?" "where's the close button?") and patiently help her with them -- will be beneficial for her getting used to the platform. When I'm doing this, I find it useful to take her side even when you think she's getting worked up over nothing: "Oh, you know, that is weird! I don't know why they don't do that differently. But here's what I figured out: if you drag the picture right into the message window, it attaches it that way."
My question for all of you is how, when I'm there at Christmas, do I make MacOS X more like Windows so that she's more comfortable with using the OS?
Install BootCamp with Windows XP.
However, if you're looking to keep her on MacOS because of the security or something else, then you'll need to figure out what specifically she's missing from Windows. Often, with casual users, it's just interface stuff that throws them for a loop, and that can be pretty easy to solve. Does she miss contextual menus (i.e., right-clicking in Windows?)? Get her a two-button mouse or show her the multi-touch trackpad capabilities (like two-fingered click = right-click). Does she miss the Start menu? Set up a folder in the dock with her favorite stuff.
Of course it may be that she just doesn't like using computers, and is using the MacOS/Windows thing as an excuse to avoid them...
I've got a reasonably unique name, and I decided a while back that using it as my online name is a good way to keep myself honest and avoiding the temptation to do something stupid.
I say "reasonably unique," of course... there is actually another person I know of with my same first and last name; he's the CEO of an RFID company in Kansas. I've always thought of contacting him, but I was actually born in Kansas (moved away when I was 3) and there's that tiny fear of finding out that he's me.
Playing Devil's advocate for a moment, though, the crime here is that they are stealing good grades instead of earning them, and the benefits of good grades are fairly far-reaching considering your college transcript follows you the rest of your life. Assuming that they got away with it, would it be fair to say that their criminal act could have potentially gotten them 20 years of success and $250,000 of salary over the long term?
My wife and I purchased a comforter set at Target that included the comforter, bed skirt, and two pillow shams... except after getting it home, opening it, and putting it on the bed (it's a queen-size bed, so getting the bedskirt on is not a quick and easy process) we realized that one of the shams was defective. I took the bad sham back to Target and asked the customer service drone if she (or I) could just replace it with one of the shams from another set. She was sympathetic, but explained that The System would not allow her to do that; that I would have to return the entire set and swap it out for a new one. I didn't bother to explain how much of a pain it would be to pull the bedskirt and everything off, repackage it, etc., etc., and how gee, it would sure be nice to buy something and have it actually meet a certain standard of quality, etc., etc., since I knew that I was not up against this drone but against The System.
So I told her I would be back in just a moment... I went to the shelf, pulled off a matching set, and went to customer service to pay for it (just for the pure thrill of having her witness the whole transaction). Took it out to my car, swapped out the shams, and brought it back to the customer service desk. "I'd like to return this comforter set--" I says to her, "it has a defective pillow sham." She refunded my money and I went home with my nice new, non-defective sham.
What!?!?!? Wait, you don't hear a "blam" sound when you bite something? Like, when you're eating toast, you know, and it's all, "Blam! Blam! Blam-blam! Blam!" Right? Slashdot, back me up on this...
Let me know when the Space Spore Zombies show up...
Um, okay, but you're going to need to give us an e-mail address or something.
I'm not saying they've shown up yet, I just want to be prepared. Because when they do show up, and everyone is going to be running around and freaking out and trying to shoot space spore zombies with hastily loaded rifles and everything, they're going to be thinking, "Aw, crap, that one guy on Slashdot asked us to let us know when this happens, and we totally are letting him down!" But not me, man. When those zombies start clawing on my door, first thing I'm gonna do: I am going to LET YOU KNOW.
I'll admit that I never really watched much of the original, but wasn't Speed Racer one of the few cartoons that actually used focus and blurring to delineate foregrounds, backgrounds, and, well, speed?
My first disc was Squeeze's Babylon and On, and the thing that first amazed me was not the sound quality but how soon you heard the music after pressing "play"... no tape leader to wait through.
Also, the first time I opened that Squeeze jewel case, the CD was rotated exactly correctly (so the text on the CD was oriented the right way) and thus, ever since, my slightly OCD self has always put CDs back in their jewel cases right side up. My wife gives me heck for this, and often threatens to go downstairs and start randomly rotating CDs when she wants to get under my skin.
But it's Ubuntu vs. Mac OS X, right? Not Ubuntu vs. Mac hardware. I know next to nothing about Ubuntu, but I'm assuming you can't run it from within Mac OS X...
The music signal generated from the genetic data can be used in a variety of consumer and industrial products and methods. For example, novelty products such as greeting cards, genetic music CDs, and the like can incorporate a person's individual music generated from their own sample of DNA.
I wrote a program quite a while back which converted text files (say, The Gettysburg Address) into standard MIDI files, and for the result to be anything even remotely playable I needed to do quite a bit of normalization as part of the translation.
So if anyone uses this for greeting cards, it's going to be 1% DNA source material and 99% pre-conceived structure. I'm sure they'll market it as "this is the music that is coursing through your veins!" when in reality it's just a really expensive random-number generator. And I'd be very interested to see what happens if you send the same DNA sample in twice, say a few months apart, and compare the results (which should be identical, right?)...
...their angry stock-holders will seize a time machine, go back to the 1920s, and convince Walt to never create his characters in the first place...
Walt was too much of a visionary to listen to these time-traveling nay-sayers. They'd have to send a nearly indestructible cyborg with an Austrian accent to hunt down his mother.
I didn't RTFA, but what if it wasn't a regular CD? What if it was an MP3 CD?
Uh, this is Dubya we're talking about. He probably had the CD up to his ear before one of his entourage put it in a discman for him.
The article doesn't mention that he can watch anyone's TV except for this one TV he calls the "boogeyman." When he is watching that TV, it can watch him too.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon has been watching the iPod and iPhone phenomena, and it wants the same thing. What company wouldn't? Whatever you say about Apple, they know how to make stuff sell.
The quote above is exactly the fanboi-ism that Amazon is looking for: "This gadget has absolutely no flaws, except for whatever Amazon deems are flaws, and then we will curse those flaws after the fact."
I couldn't agree more with the parent's first sentence. As a teacher, I think teaching the concepts that underlie these programs is much, much more effective than having the students memorize icons and menus. It still ruffles my feathers when I see classes entitled "Learning Dreamweaver" instead of "Basic Web Site Design." Should we rename "Beginning Painting" to "Learning to Use the Silver Brush® Grand Prix(TM) Super Brush"?
If Google is intending this service for online storage of personal information, I don't think it's going to succeed... people use Facebook for that sort of thing.
You are correct, of course. I know what the word means, but you caught me being lazy with my word selection.
I promise that I'm usually one of the guys trying to fix the mess we Yankees have made with your language...
That makes sense. Beyond the interface issues, of course, is the software that she uses most often; if she spends most of her time in Microsoft Office, then she shouldn't have much trouble with Office for Mac. Web browsers aren't too different to the casual user, so giving her Safari or Firefox shouldn't be a problem. The one sticking point might be e-mail... there is no Exchange client for the Mac; there's Outlook Express, which works okay for some people but I've heard people having trouble with it. If it were me, I'd try to switch her to Apple Mail, because it's pretty intuitive; I'm sure others here will disagree and recommend Eudora or something else. Of course, if she's got a web-based e-mail service like gMail, then that's not going to be an issue anyway.
Not knowing your mother, my guess is that the issue will be psychological (i.e., getting her to give the Mac a chance) more than technological; most people I've talked with who are at your Mom's level and who have switched from Windows to Mac get used to it after a very short time of using it and then find it pretty comfortable and intuitive. So the challenge is getting her to sit down and try it for a while. If she's genuinely interested in learning it, sitting by her side and helping her out for a few sessions -- so you can identify her specific frustrations ("why won't the menu come up?" "where's the close button?") and patiently help her with them -- will be beneficial for her getting used to the platform. When I'm doing this, I find it useful to take her side even when you think she's getting worked up over nothing: "Oh, you know, that is weird! I don't know why they don't do that differently. But here's what I figured out: if you drag the picture right into the message window, it attaches it that way."
Hope this helps...
Install BootCamp with Windows XP.
However, if you're looking to keep her on MacOS because of the security or something else, then you'll need to figure out what specifically she's missing from Windows. Often, with casual users, it's just interface stuff that throws them for a loop, and that can be pretty easy to solve. Does she miss contextual menus (i.e., right-clicking in Windows?)? Get her a two-button mouse or show her the multi-touch trackpad capabilities (like two-fingered click = right-click). Does she miss the Start menu? Set up a folder in the dock with her favorite stuff.
Of course it may be that she just doesn't like using computers, and is using the MacOS/Windows thing as an excuse to avoid them...
I've got a reasonably unique name, and I decided a while back that using it as my online name is a good way to keep myself honest and avoiding the temptation to do something stupid.
I say "reasonably unique," of course... there is actually another person I know of with my same first and last name; he's the CEO of an RFID company in Kansas. I've always thought of contacting him, but I was actually born in Kansas (moved away when I was 3) and there's that tiny fear of finding out that he's me.
Playing Devil's advocate for a moment, though, the crime here is that they are stealing good grades instead of earning them, and the benefits of good grades are fairly far-reaching considering your college transcript follows you the rest of your life. Assuming that they got away with it, would it be fair to say that their criminal act could have potentially gotten them 20 years of success and $250,000 of salary over the long term?
I think it's absolutely fantastic that the parent was modded Insightful.
My wife and I purchased a comforter set at Target that included the comforter, bed skirt, and two pillow shams... except after getting it home, opening it, and putting it on the bed (it's a queen-size bed, so getting the bedskirt on is not a quick and easy process) we realized that one of the shams was defective. I took the bad sham back to Target and asked the customer service drone if she (or I) could just replace it with one of the shams from another set. She was sympathetic, but explained that The System would not allow her to do that; that I would have to return the entire set and swap it out for a new one. I didn't bother to explain how much of a pain it would be to pull the bedskirt and everything off, repackage it, etc., etc., and how gee, it would sure be nice to buy something and have it actually meet a certain standard of quality, etc., etc., since I knew that I was not up against this drone but against The System.
So I told her I would be back in just a moment... I went to the shelf, pulled off a matching set, and went to customer service to pay for it (just for the pure thrill of having her witness the whole transaction). Took it out to my car, swapped out the shams, and brought it back to the customer service desk. "I'd like to return this comforter set--" I says to her, "it has a defective pillow sham." She refunded my money and I went home with my nice new, non-defective sham.
BLAM -> BITES??
What!?!?!? Wait, you don't hear a "blam" sound when you bite something? Like, when you're eating toast, you know, and it's all, "Blam! Blam! Blam-blam! Blam!" Right? Slashdot, back me up on this...
Um, okay, but you're going to need to give us an e-mail address or something.
I'm not saying they've shown up yet, I just want to be prepared. Because when they do show up, and everyone is going to be running around and freaking out and trying to shoot space spore zombies with hastily loaded rifles and everything, they're going to be thinking, "Aw, crap, that one guy on Slashdot asked us to let us know when this happens, and we totally are letting him down!" But not me, man. When those zombies start clawing on my door, first thing I'm gonna do: I am going to LET YOU KNOW.
Wow. I had never thought of it, and apparently neither did Asimov, but there it is:
4. A robot is never allowed in the bathroom.
Aw, dang, you're right. Sorry about that! I keep forgetting Web 3.0 is bacon-free.
and B, as usual, represents the amount of bacon involved.
I'll admit that I never really watched much of the original, but wasn't Speed Racer one of the few cartoons that actually used focus and blurring to delineate foregrounds, backgrounds, and, well, speed?
My first disc was Squeeze's Babylon and On, and the thing that first amazed me was not the sound quality but how soon you heard the music after pressing "play"... no tape leader to wait through.
Also, the first time I opened that Squeeze jewel case, the CD was rotated exactly correctly (so the text on the CD was oriented the right way) and thus, ever since, my slightly OCD self has always put CDs back in their jewel cases right side up. My wife gives me heck for this, and often threatens to go downstairs and start randomly rotating CDs when she wants to get under my skin.
If you ever do find out a way to un-discover that, would you let me know?
But it's Ubuntu vs. Mac OS X, right? Not Ubuntu vs. Mac hardware. I know next to nothing about Ubuntu, but I'm assuming you can't run it from within Mac OS X...
I wrote a program quite a while back which converted text files (say, The Gettysburg Address) into standard MIDI files, and for the result to be anything even remotely playable I needed to do quite a bit of normalization as part of the translation.
So if anyone uses this for greeting cards, it's going to be 1% DNA source material and 99% pre-conceived structure. I'm sure they'll market it as "this is the music that is coursing through your veins!" when in reality it's just a really expensive random-number generator. And I'd be very interested to see what happens if you send the same DNA sample in twice, say a few months apart, and compare the results (which should be identical, right?)...
Uh, this is Dubya we're talking about. He probably had the CD up to his ear before one of his entourage put it in a discman for him.
The article doesn't mention that he can watch anyone's TV except for this one TV he calls the "boogeyman." When he is watching that TV, it can watch him too.