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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.)
*"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."
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Once you enter your accounts, you see every transaction from yesterday aggregated in one place every morning. It's smart about categorizing expenditures, and presents you with a full portfolio. It predicts and notifies you of bills. It works with every financial account out there.
I've used the service for several years, with never an outage or a mistake. The UI steadily improves, version after version.
Most people use Yodlee's back end through one of its bank or brokerage partners, but using Yodlee directly and for free is definitely worth a try.
"... people who consume more omega-3 fatty acids enjoy lower rates of inflammatory gum disease (periodontitis).
"... the study linked moderate intake of fish-derived omega-3 DHA to a 20 percent reduced rate of periodontitis.
"Periodontitis is a common, chronic inflammatory disease characterized by gum tissue separation from the tooth – the so-called periodontal “pockets” that can lead to bone and tooth loss."
Naqvi AZ et al. n-3 Fatty Acids and Periodontitis in US Adults. J Am Diet Assoc. 2010 Nov. Volume 110, Issue 11, Pages 1669-1675. doi: 10.1016/j.jada.2010.08.009
In the US, recently a number of small overnight delivery services have consolidated into "regional" overnight carriers, thus offering delivery areas large enough to entice large shippers without requiring national coverage.
In California, for instance, there is Ontrac (http://www.ontrac.com/) which covers the six Western states, offering rates 40% below larger competitors. Amazon.com started using them last year, and has been steadily increasing usage. There are similar regional consolidations centered on New York and on Texas (http://www.ontrac.com/compprofileregionalcarriers.asp).
It appears that these were built by uniting a number of smaller local services by adding a "backbone" to them, don't know on what financial terms.
London certainly has a large number of very good delivery services operating within the M25, mostly on-demand (and fairly expensive). Some of these could perhaps be consolidated similarly, and likewise in other regions.
FWIW, my first-hand experience in the UK is that none of the national carriers (not even UPS and FedEx!) is nearly as good as UPS and FedEx in America; the Royal Mail is just about as bad as the wretched US Postal Service. So there is likely a business opportunity here.
Actually, UK buildings typically contain at least three different standard sockets and plugs--the big ugly ones (with a supply of four different fuses needed), a mini version of that design commonly used for table lamps and floor lamps, and a third design allowed in bathrooms so you can plug in an electric shaver (electrical sockets and even light switches are ordinarily barred from bathrooms). There are also many different kinds of lightbulbs (screw-in, push-in, push-and-turn-to-lock-two pins) in many different physical sizes (as well as different wattages). Running a family house requires a considerable stock of bulbs and fuses, which explains all the "electrical supplies" shops which are unknown in the US. Up until about 10 years ago, in my personal experience, UK small appliances, lamps, etc. were sold with bare AC wires and the householder was expected to add the needed style of plug; now everything comes with the huge plugs.
Contracts like you suggest are common and working today in other cities. When I bought a condo in central London, my contract with the association of all other owners in the building specifically forbade short-term sublets, and forbade any sublets without the written approval of the association. When one condo owner started renting out on weekends through web advertising, the association had its lawyer bring that clause to the owner's attention and the practice was stopped immediately. No law needed. (BTW, these contracts for UK condo property take the form of "leases" for hundreds of years, which can be sold like other property.)
This is really worth a look. My experience was very positive; it took only a few seconds to compute, and the decisions about what detail to suppress were made very insightfully. (This was for an address in San Francisco--streets were selected for all the approaches into the city, but very economically.) The result would be MUCH better to give someone than a standard Big or Google map. No bugs, no problems with silverlight. (From Bing Maps, I discovered, you find this feature by clicking on the "Map Apps" button at the bottom of the left column, and then choosing the app "Destination Maps".)
More than once, when I had a Lenovo ThinkPad that needed depot service for a hardware fault, Lenovo has told me to remove the HD and keep it; at the depot they insert a temporary freshly-imaged HD, complete the repair and battery of tests, and send the ThinkPad back to me empty, for me to replace my own HD. (If I were still to have a problem, then I could complete the repair myself by replacing the HD.) This has always worked flawlessly.