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.
I would think that the experienced human driver will outperform GPS when it comes to selecting optimal routes and alternates at various times of day, dependent on moment-by-moment assessment of traffic conditions. That's just a gut feeling, no cite to back it up.
Isn't that just natural supply and demand at work? You will get the equilibrium when the price of the cab fare is equal to the real cost of it. There are not 50k cabs, because there are just so many guests that want a cab. Or do I misunderstood you?
I basically always assumed that, in huge cities like NYC and London, because streets are a fixed resource, the only way to prevent severe congestion by cabs was by limiting the number of cabs available. In other words, that the natural economic supply-and-demand of cabs would be a number too large for the streets (or at least annoyingly large), thus the necessity of limiting them. But perhaps my assumption is wrong, and the limited number of NYC taxicab medallions has nothing to do with fear of taxi congestion.
Just think through your original proposition: "too many" taxis hit the streets thus making the job not pay a living wage, the natural consequence of this would be many people giving up driving taxis for precisely this reason. Now there are less taxis, and thus the price increases. Continue this cycling and eventually you reach equilibrium -- that's precisely how it works. Notice we don't need a limit on plumbers to make sure they make a living wage.
I think the idea was more: "too many" taxis hit the streets, and while they make a living wage, traffic doesn't move. In fact, as a taxi driver, with a time-based meter, traffic congestion may not decrease wages at all. Given the density of Manhattan, it wouldn't surprise me if there was more demand for taxis than the road system could support (I'm not saying that's true, I don't have the data, just that it's a third factor besides supply and demand).
> as a taxi driver, with a time-based meter, traffic congestion may not decrease wages at all.
Um, no. The initial value on the meter is set in such a way that cabbies make more money from picking up lots of fares that from picking up one and getting it hopelessly stuck in traffic.
Incidentally, private jitneys (where legal or tolerated) evolved a different rate system that's even better for consumers - the "rate card". Instead of a big, expensive, complicated piece of machinery, there's a map of the city divided into "zones" and a flat rate to travel within one "zone" or to cross X number of zones. The map might be printed on a sticker on the door (so you see it before you enter the cab) or on a playing card or business card the driver displays or hands you.
As a passenger, you then know the cabbie has no incentive at all to waste time in traffic and you know what the fare will be at the time you get in.
Regulators don't like that system because they can't reliably tax unmetered trips.
good point, I wasn't aware that congestion might be a problem. But there must be a better way than the medallion system. how about a toll at peak times?
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.
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.