Oh let's not go there ...
You'll have to pull my iPhone from my cold dead hand and I have a mac
in my lab- it's fine. But I also have ~7 PCs between lab, office and
home and I see little difference in reliability/useability. This
conversation goes nowhere fast!
Patrick
On Oct 26, 2009, at 9:30 AM, Marc Carter <[email protected]> wrote:
No answer, to your questions, but this prompted me to think of this
oldie but goodie:
What if Microsoft made cars?
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be
driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have
to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left-turn would
cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would
have to reinstall the engine.
4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just
accept this, restart and drive on.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought
'Car95' or 'CarNT', and then added more seats.
6. Apple would make a car powered by the sun, reliable, five times
as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five per
cent of the roads.
7. Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be
replaced by a single 'general car default' warning light.
8. New seats would force every-one to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag would say 'Are you sure?' before going off.
10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and
refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door
handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of
road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they
neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would
immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 per cent
or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the
Justice Department.
12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to
learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would
operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You would press the 'start' button to shut off the engine.
--
Marc Carter, PhD
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Psychology
College of Arts & Sciences
Baker University
--
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Schmier [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, October 24, 2009 6:25 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: [tips] Random Thought: Shelf Life
I've been toying with the idea of replacing my
computer. But, it's proving to be formidable and unnerving.
Everywhere I go and everything I read and everyone to whom I
talk indicate that all the files I've got backed up using
Windows XP will be read on Windows 7 or Mac, and all the
programs I'm running on XP will run on 7 or Mac even with
some convoluted tweaking, that the new won't speak or easily
speak to the old. They just aren't all that compatible. It
almost sounds like I'd be trying to listen to my old LPs on a
DVD player. Whether my fears are well founded or not, on
this soggy morning that, some stuff that happened--or did not
happen--in class yesterday, and some journals entries I've
read this past week all have gotten me to thinking and wondering.
What's the shelf life of all this information we
transmit, verse in, train for,
test, and grade? What's the shelf life of such attitudes
and habits and values as
trustworthiness, curiosity, commitment, perseverance,
endurance, imagination, compassion, service, self-discipline,
creativity, dedication, humility, respect, empathy, kindness,
courage, authenticity, honesty, responsibility, fairness, and
caring that we should be advocating, promoting, instilling,
and modeling?
Which will prove to be timely and which timeless in the
shaping of lives:
information or character?
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier
http://www.therandomthoughts.com Department of History
http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /\ /\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\\/ \/ \
/\/\__/\ \/\
/
\/ \_ \/ / \/ /\/ \ /\
//\/\/
/\ \_ /__/_/\_\ \_/__\
/\"If you
want to climb mountains,\ /\
_ / \ don't
practice on mole hills" -
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