Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Sacha,
it’s like telephones being attached to the wall #notnatural
Recently at MOTAT I tried to show my kids how to use a dial telephone. It was HARD.
Also, my kids are very used to me staring intently at a screenful of indecipherable scrolling text, followed by tapping out weird hieroglyphics. Cue disbelieving, slightly distasteful looks: "Dad, why do you always make the computer do that?"
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I'm trying to remember what model we had at home during my late Dad's brief stint as editor of the New Zealand Model Railway Journal - one of the early beige PowerPC separates I think. And I dearly loved the ancient ex-VUW Color Classic I had as a student - coming from my Mum's animal physiology lab, it was preloaded with all sorts of useful early-90's dataviz software. My assignments had a distinct retro feel.
But as much as I admire Macs and respect their technical and design prowess, I can't imagine ever buying one nowdays - I'm too used to getting my software for free, and being able to do what I want with it. But then I'm hardly their target market (in fact any company for whom I am a target market would go down the tubes pretty quickly).
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A great Macromedia technology called Flash
Heh.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Sacha,
Do you reckon we’re any different in person? Just curious.
I talked to you for, like, 30 seconds at the OGB, so I can't really comment :-) I didn't go around introducing myself much, but those few I chatted to were unfailingly friendly and polite - I don't know if that was a large enough sample to make predictions.
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We're not even 3/4 of the way through yet!
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m not even sure if we’re arguing at all.
Heh. On PAS people often agree so furiously, and disagree so politely, that it can be hard to tell the difference.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Russell Brown,
So long as I’ve ridden long enough to get through the sore legs phase, I’m often full of beans after a ride
Aerobic vs. anaerobic exercise perhaps?
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
What about those Lawn Bows eh? or Ten Pin Bowling?
Well Bowls is clearly not a ball sport, but a bowl sport. And in ten-pin bowling you're still trying to get the ball to the opponent's end, if you consider your "opponents" to be the pins (sneaky bastards, always jumping out of the way when no-one's watching).
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to BenWilson,
Right, but that goes to demand for your services. The higher they can sell your services/products, the higher your demand is. What would lower it would be many other people willing and capable of doing the same job as you. It doesn’t matter how clear the connection is. There’s an easily measured value of the toilet cleaner to the contracting company too. But there’s millions of people who can clean a toilet in this country.
Yuh-huh, I think we're arguing past each other. My question is (I think, but I'm starting to confuse myself), is this the best measure of the "worth" of a job that we can come up with? There's a good argument that if money is the end goal of labour, then the thing which most efficiently arranges the transfer of money (which, I'll concede, is what free markets are good at) is probably the best we can do. But money is just the mechanism we have to transform our labour into life, then the question is more complicated. I'd be just as happy breaking the correlation between money and the things that make up a life as that between the scarcity of labour and money; it's just that the former is so deeply ingrained in our culture (and a very successful culture it is, by any material measure) that I'm not sure if it's possible to do anything about it.
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Hard News: I have a feast for you, in reply to Lyndon Hood,
Veritably!