rg · HackerTrans

12 years agodiscuss

And the overhead projector was used in a lighted conference room, so that people could see the presenter and one another and consult papers, and black-on-white was easier to read.

The style of light-on-dark came from 35mm slides in 35mm projectors, almost always used in darkened rooms and easier to read in the dark.

When PowerPoint expanded from acetate overheads to also make 35mm slides, templates in both styles (dark-on-light, light-on-dark) were included. Both styles persist in today's electronic presentations, for use in appropriate surroundings, although it is easy for presenters to make a poor selection.

It was clearer when the rule was that a photocopied transparency measuring 8.5 x 11 inches should be dark-on-light, and a transparency measuring 24mmx36mm in a 2-inch square mount should be light-on-dark.

13 years agodiscuss

Classic Microsoft in its high-productivity period was strictly private offices for everyone, solid doors and almost all with outside windows, soundproofed so each office could have its own music without requiring headphones, with deskspace and network connections in each office for several computers and seating for at least three people in each office so that people could work together privately when they wanted to. If that standard has been eroded in recent years, then we might understand why MS is now relatively unproductive.

14 years agodiscuss

Such agents are common in the US, they are called "brokers". Brokers are especially good in negotiating with multiple dealers, and getting the exact car you want from the dealer with the lowest price by getting dealers to swap cars. Service can be very good; brokers will pick up the car from the dealer, truck it to you, and take away your old car. Brokers customarily arrange whatever financing the buyer wants. Brokers work around the stupid franchising laws by arranging the actual sale paperwork to be from the chosen dealer to the car buyer, with the broker collecting a commission. The nicest part of buying through an auto broker is that you never have to see or talk to a dealer salesperson.

14 years agodiscuss

Apple had an insoluble problem, and they failed to fit the iPad Mini into a man's suit, sportcoat, or blazer inside chest pocket.

  Apple iPad Mini width (Apple specs):   134.7 mm

  Man's jacket inside pocket (size 41R): 124.0 mm

  Google Nexus 7 width (Google specs):   120.0 mm

Result: the Nexus 7 with comfortable bezels fits very neatly in the pocket of any jacket I'm wearing (and I carry it there all the time invisibly);

The iPad Mini with troublesome bezel will not fit into any of those same jacket pockets.

Such a tiny difference, but it separates Nexus convenience from iPad Mini serious inconvenience (note that the thickness makes no difference here).

14 years agodiscuss

Also, Chrome on Nexus 7 has a lot of "accessibility" options, so you can size the default reflowable text to your comfort, which reduces any need to manually squeeze/expand. (Nexus 7 is dramatically superior to a New(3) iPad.)

14 years agodiscuss

Kindle Paperwhite newly implements two-finger pinch (smaller font size) and expand (bigger font size). On the way to carrying out the font size change, it pops up the font-size select window, then closes it. It's possible that you accidentally invoked this functionality.

14 years agodiscuss

No, that's not the right history. Caltrain is the remains of the old Southern Pacific commute lines; the SP brought people FROM the peninsula INTO San Francisco to work during the day, and back to their peninsula bedrooms in the evening. After WWII, San Francisco headed downward. By the 1960s and 1970s crime and disorder were so bad that only the very rich could live in San Francisco. Large employers moved their "back offices" to the suburbs, and in-commuting fell. Startups in the 1970s and 1980s had to be in Silicon Valley, because few decent engineers would have dreamed of living in the disgusting city, and they didn't want to commute to it either. Freeway traffic in the 1970s and 1980s was almost entirely INTO the city in the morning, back to the Peninsula in the evening; working in the Valley where one lived made that unnecessary. Only in the last few years has it become common to live in San Francisco and work in Silicon Valley, as San Francisco has recovered and become a vastly better place to live.

14 years agodiscuss

Non-competes are totally unenforceable in CA as a condition of employment. If you sell your startup to an acquirer, the contract can include a non-compete subject to fairly strict conditions of reasonableness.

14 years agodiscuss

"If anyone could drive a cab, the profession might only barely pay a living wage, ..."

That isn't the case in London, widely thought to have the best taxi service in the world. There, anyone can pass a demanding standard examination and having done so can drive a cab. Anyone can build a vehicle that meets a standard inspection, and once passed that vehicle can be used as a cab. No limit on the number of drivers, no limit on the number of taxis, both inspected but not limited. The result is that different drivers work different convenient hours, some full time and some part time, with larger numbers of cabs available at rush hours and other times of heavy demand. All the drivers know how to drive well, all the taxis are clean and in perfect shape, and there's always one available when you need it. This is what makes it truly possible to live better in central London without a car than with one.

All the schemes to forbid more competitors simply hand profits to taxi operators and produce poor service for taxi users. As usual, government regulations are captured by the regulated industry to exclude competitors.

15 years agodiscuss

Brooks particularly had in mind IBM's System 360. One of its goals was to have a single architecture span an extremely wide range of performance. So there were many models (e.g., 360-20, 360-65, 360-90) with a couple of orders of magnitude differences in cost and performance, but sharing a single architecture. Implementation teams built each model with attention to its specific required performance and cost constraints, leading to many different hardware designs. The system architects worked to define an architecture without constraining the possible implementations unnecessarily.

15 years agodiscuss

Spam, ignore.

15 years agodiscuss

Kindle app on Android phones also uses single tap to page; it's extremely convenient (compared to the old Kindle with physical buttons which I also use). Touch for paging is certainly no worse than the old buttons, and--really--the keyboard and cursor control on the old Kindle are just about useless. ("Up, up, up, left, down, down, up, ..." is hard to take after having a touch device.)

15 years agodiscuss

  *"The system knows that women generally favor stories 
  about Brad Pitt, but after some real-time analysis, it 
  can quickly realize that men are far more like to click 
  on a Brad Pitt story that involves a sports movie."*

This is like Michael Frayn's first comic novel "The Tin Men" (1965), about programming a computer to produce an "automated newspaper".

  "But people really preferred an air crash. ... What
  people enjoyed most was about 70 dead, with some 20
  survivors including children rescued after at least
  one night in open boats.  They liked it to be backed
  up with a story about a middle-aged housewife who had
  been booked to fly aboard the plane but who had 
  changed her mind at the last moment."

15 years agodiscuss

The website is exceedingly poor--sorting by distance doesn't work, bits of template text are not even filled in and it's obvious the information is generic. The website is the opposite of "love and passion for helping seniors".

15 years agodiscuss

Yes, but don't use the non-functional US postal service. UPS or FedEx work fine. There's a reason why knowledgeable shippers (such as Amazon) use the USPS only for rural parts of the US, and use private couriers exclusively for the coasts and large cities.

15 years agodiscuss

Google for "The editor authors the newspaper hired liked laughed."

15 years agodiscuss

Not so true about the UK. In my building in London, one unit was being quietly sublet for holiday-type use, in violation of the contract, and when complaints from the residents' association were not heeded a court order put an end to the illegal sublettings.

15 years agodiscuss

Windows Live Mail, included free in Windows 7, does a perfect job of backing up a Gmail account, including sent mail. Configure Win Live Mail to pick up via POP3 all Gmail every couple of hours and save it (copy 1), then every night backup the Live Mail message store to a local Windows Home Server (copy 2) and to a cloud backup service (copy 3). Has worked for me for five years.

16 years agodiscuss

Microsoft's Graphics Business Unit (1987-1992) built out a long and thin building at 2460 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, in this way, using central hallways; every person had a private office with a door and an outside window looking out at the hills around Stanford. Core areas were used for conference rooms and labs.

16 years agodiscuss

Here's a description of how MS Word and MS Excel were actually used to create 4,600 parameterized web pages, complete with samples of the Excel and Word documents used:

http://www.horniman.info/DOCUMNTS/HOWTO.HTM

Scroll down to section 6, "Webpages" for explanation of this topic.

The generated website is also live online at

http://www.horniman.info/

so the generated HTML can be easily inspected.

rg

Submissions

Influx of workers drives up rental rates in San Francisco and San Mateo County

USB Typewriter

Why I Do All This Walking ... (by Nassim Taleb)

Al Qaeda Failed. What About Us? Ten Questions.

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

Cool website startup idea: "How Famous Are You?"

BBC Ends Its Use of RealMedia for Streaming Audio

Needed for AIG and the TARP: Silicon Valley Compensation Schemes (Brad DeLong, UC)

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