The ISO paper size concept

In the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1). In other words, the width and the height of a page relate to each other like the side and the diagonal of a square. This aspect ratio is especially convenient for a paper size. If you put two such pages next to each other, or equivalently cut one parallel to its shorter side into two equal pieces, then the resulting page will have again the same width/height ratio.

Wow. Thats as logical and rational as the metric system. Totally unAmerican and unacceptable!

A4 paper format / International standard paper sizes

Plans for an Indian tech support center have been scrapped. A cautionary tale

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has long had a thing for India. After work- ing at game developer Atari (ATAR ) in the mid-'70s, Jobs took a break and backpacked around the subcontinent in search of spiritual enlightenment. Upon his return to the U.S., his more capitalistic instincts took over, and he and Steve Wozniak launched Apple. Today, of course, the seeker-turned- billionaire enjoys a reputation as one of the most successful entrepreneurs and savviest marketing minds on the planet.

I can hire Java guys Bangalore with 3-5 years of experience for $3K a month, and that includes facilities, a PC, network, etc. He may not be brilliant, but he is cheap. Cost of employment there is $36,000 a year. Cost of employment on his American equivalent would be well over $100,000 a year. Most every article I see on outsourcing skews these numbers horribly. Its as though they've never gotten an actual quote in researching their articles. You can hire graduates for $700 a month, if you've got an office. The problem with direct hiring is retaining people. A guy will leave you for $800 a month with zero notice.

Apple's problems would be a little different as they were creating a call center. In my opinion, outsourcing call centers is a TERRIBLE idea. Culture matters in customer service, and giving a guy named Ganesh the name George and forbidding him from giving out his real name is hardly the equivalent of actual cross-cultural education.

Call centers in India are for companies that don't give a shit about customer service. Development centers are not neccessarily this way. The fact that the Apple Service tech I talk to is intimately familiar with technology because he's been a computer dork since age 5 and that he is acclimated to the Western hemisphere matters in whether I recieve satisfactory customer service. Not that customer service for an IT company is a dream job, but in the states people have options and so this job attracts a certain type of person.

A person that is well suited to the job. In India, where opportunity is limited and jobs affording entry to the middle class are not very diverse, this is not the case. If you're from the right city, and you can't become a doctor or a software engineer by getting a CS degree or any engineering degree and then becoming an indentured servant in exchange for training, you try to work at a call center. This being the case, odds are you are not suited to this work, and cultural barriers aside, will suck at it.

It is ironic that 'high value' activities like software development can be successfully outsourced, but 'low value' activities like customer service cannot.

In engineering, your American domain experts can act as quality assurance personnel, ensuring that code from Indian engineers who may not have a perfect grasp of the problem you're trying t... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

India: Why Apple Walked Away

The rapture has become somewhat en vogue recently, due in large part to the inept, poorly-written, mind-bogglingly popular Left Behind series of books.

Okay, so it's old but I just found it and about spit my water out laughing unexpectedly on his rapture rant.

~Heathyr

MC Hawking's Crib

Got a couple of minutes? Want to get started with 3D modeling? These quick tutorials will teach you how to model in SketchUp and placing your work in Google Earth. For best performance, please make sure your browser is up-to-date.

Sketchup is neat.

SketchUp - Tutorials

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- More than 2 million gay men, lesbians and transvestites waving rainbow flags and dressed in lavish Carnival costumes paraded Saturday to celebrate gay pride and demand an end to homophobia.

Wow.

Gay parade draws 2.4 million - Jun 17, 2006 - CNN.com

This is an outline of Edward Tufte's pioneering work on the use of graphics to display quantitative information. It mainly consists of text and ideas taken from his three books on the subject along with some additional material of my own. This page is in text only format: in order to understand the concepts you need to read the books because the concepts cannot really be grasped without the illustrations, and current video monitor technology is too low in resolution to do them justice. His work has been described as "a visual Strunk and White" (here is a German translation of this article).

Throughout this outline I have included references to the illustrations in his books that are labeled with the abbreviations VD-pp, VE-pp, and EI-pp, where "pp" is a page number and:

* VD is "the Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
* VE is "Visual Explanations"
* EI is "Envisioning Information"

Clift's Notes on Edward Tufte.

Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte's Principles

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Multimedia Games, Inc. | Network

There's no excuse for violence against MacBooks, but the SmackBook virtual desktop changer sure made it tempting.

Now you can get all the benefits and incur none of the bad karma. With a wave of your hand, you can get precisely the same effect one achieves with SmackBook.

The new implementation appears to rely on the ambient light sensor located under the left speaker grille. No software releases have been announced, though it looks like the user in the video runs a command from the Terminal prior to the demonstration. The author's page indicates a software release is imminent.

I'd rather smack than wave, but some people aren't as violent?

The Cult of Mac Blog

Back in the late 1600's, the Dutch invented the two-sheet mold. The average maximum stretch of an experienced vatman's arms was 44". Many molds at that time were around 17" front to back because the laid lines and watermarks had to run from left to right. Sounds big?...well to maximize the efficiency of paper making, a sheet this big was made, and then quartered, forming four 8.5" x 11" pieces.

This was well before paper machines dominated hand made paper labor. A couple centuries later when machines dominated the trade (although many hand made paper makers still existed), and the United States decided on a standard paper size, they stuck with the same size so as to keep the hand made paper makers in business.

Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.

The U.S. Standard Paper Size | AF&PA

[Q] From Marty Robinson: “Last week you quoted Sir Christopher Wren as referring to ‘The Ailes, from whence arise Bows or Flying Buttresses to the Walls of the Navis.’ I’m sorry to learn that Sir Christopher used the redundancy from whence.”

[A] This is another of those grammatical shibboleths, like avoiding a plural verb with none or not splitting one’s infinitives, that are open to linguistic debate, to put it mildly. The argument against this form is that whence already includes the idea of coming from some place, so that including from makes it tautological.

The debate is complicated by the fact that whence is not that common a word these days, being rather literary; I had trouble finding a modern example that wasn’t prefixed by from. This is from Newsday of 11 November 2004: “He is a legendary figure in his native England, whence I have just returned.” That’s a good example of the “proper” use.

Questions & Answers: From whence