I think a good language for kids would be Autohotkey. (unfortunately, it's Windows-only as far as I know) While many projects just consist of a script, they can use loops and variables and other elements of real programming languages. Best of all, they can see it in action and they have a good understanding of what its capabilities are: it can do what they do with the mouse and keyboard (and more, but that's no big deal).
So it seems there are quite a few bugs. Maybe it's really not the "shining example" that I thought. I'm curious what I should tell people when they ask me if a better spreadsheet app exists. What do you recommend over Excel?
Please don't say (I love OSS dearly, but I have to be blunt here):
calc - UI is no better than Excel's and performance is far worse. gnumeric - great at what it does, but rather featureless. kspread - good example of a steaming pile. Koffice 2.0 should be a big step forward, though.
and as far as battery issues are concerned there is just no comparison
Until I read this, I thought "true" was as true as any statement could be. You have constructed a statement that I evaluate to be much truer than just "true." In addition, you've provided evidence that depth is orthogonal to truth.
Gran might have to call her credit card company or something. While automated voice-comprehension technology has been implemented in a few systems, touch-tone menus are pretty ubiquitous.
You're a troll or ignoramus. Try this on for size: an occasional two-hour phone-call to a family member (parent, sibling) is not evidence of dysfunction. Your comment is textbook internet idiocy:
1. read comment/post/submission. 2. interpret it. IMPORTANT: ignore whether your interpretation makes sense!
--WAIT: if your interpretation suggests something negative about the poster, you may continue--
3. compose an inflammatory reply. 4. submit. 5. chuckle at own superiority.
Why is this behavior so common? Please, people, if your first thought is "wow, how could anyone be so messed up," try to find another explanation for what you see.
Be realistic. At least a few MS products are superior to all competitors. If nothing else, you can hold up Excel as a shining example of excellence in software. Many people say the same thing about Visual Studio (I haven't worked with it).
They're monopolists and their ideas about systems programming are at best ill-conceived, but you'll be more credible if you give credit where credit is due.
MS would do very well to clone a few of the OSS utility apps that are totally user-friendly. Kolourpaint, for instance, as a replacement for Paint. It might not make a big splash, but the millions of people upgrading to Vista would be pleasantly surprised by the fact that their bundled bmp editor had become more usable without losing approachability. (the grabbies that resize the canvas would be large enough for easy use on screens with resolution higher than 800x600, you could zoom to 300% in addition to 200% and 400%, you could zoom out, you could add text while zoomed in,.....Paint is seriously deficient.)
Years ago, I used pirated music to cultivate a sense of aesthetic taste, which I used to impress girls. One of them became my girlfriend, which boosted my confidence. With my confident outlook, I was able to land a good job with a consulting firm. Hence, I am able to earn much more money because I pirated some music off on Napster. I hope they don't come for me.
I know you didn't mean that seriously, but I think you might be surprised how thin the foil has to be for light to pass through it.
The quantity of interest is "skin depth". You can calculate it with the formula here, which uses several constants that are pretty easy to find:
frequency of visible light: 600 THz (source)
conductivity of aluminum: 3.8 x 10^7 siemens per meter (source)
permeability of free space: 1.3 x 10^(-7) weber per ampere meter (source)
I calculated that the skin depth of aluminum is 8 nanometers. This means that the thickness of aluminum needed to stop 99.9% of the light is one 400,000th of an inch. For comparison, this is 10,000 times thinner than the thinnest aluminum foil available from McMaster-Carr (it's a company that sells materials for scientific research, among other things). Since the atomic radius of aluminum is 125 pm, this foil would be only 250 atoms thick, and would still block 99.9% of the light.
By the way, if you've never used it, you should check out Google's calculator. It handles units for you, so it makes calculations like this really fast.
This issue is one of the reasons it's important to fight vendor lock-in. If there were no vendor lock-in, your former customers would have taken their business elsewhere. They must be locked in if they're putting up with incompetent representatives.
It might be FUD even if they gave a list. Without a list, it's the perfect prototypical example of FUD. Nothing could possibly be more FUDly than this assertion with the number "235".
I hope you realize that there's a catch-22 preventing me from sympathizing with you, because it's impossible for IBM to have victimized you without repercussion. If IBM was wrong to let you go (i.e. if the $16/hour guy does a lousy job) then they'll hurt for it (a repercussion). If they were right to let you go, and your job can be done for $16/hour, then they haven't victimized you, they've just been responded to a force in the market.
That said, I hope you find a good new job, and I hope they didn't try to screw you out of part of your severence package.
It's disingenuous for the commentator to strip the hyperlinks from the sections he quotes. I don't think it's at all inappropriate that the entry on mitochondrial DNA should assume that the reader knows what mitochondria are. By tucking extraneous background information away in linked pages, hypertext can be very concise.
Regarding compression artifacts on the two samples, I wonder why they used a jpg at all. When will people get the message, jpg is *only for photographs*.
This kind of reminds me of Microsoft's comparison of font rendering with and without cleartype, where they use italics so that un-anti-aliased fonts look bad. At least they made it a minimal comparison, though, keeping the same font and text.
There are a few programs that work that way in windows. In the FLOSS domain, there's Gobolinux, which does exactly what you request: it puts all the files for a given program in one folder, so that you can remove it by deleting that folder.
..."Why can't I have a flying creature?" "Why does my creature have to be symmetrical?" "How come it's attacking by biting when it could swing those mace-like appendages?"
I think what we'll find is that the engineering component of this game is lacking. In the demos, there are meters on the right-hand side of the screen when you build the creature, indicating various properties (they mentioned running speed. I imagine others include hit points and attack damage). I suspect that apart from looks, anything with roughly the same properties on those scales will play about the same.
I'm also concerned about the arcade portions at the beginning. It would be good if a challenging difficulty level were included. The worst thing would be for this game to wind up looking like a re-packaged Sims.
The Princeton Sound Lab has created a bunch of tools for just this. You can "bow" the touchpad, for instance. There's a Mac-laptop exclusive utility that generates sounds based on the motion of the laptop (using the internal gyros or accelerometers or whatever).
Slashdot Mirror
I think a good language for kids would be Autohotkey. (unfortunately, it's Windows-only as far as I know) While many projects just consist of a script, they can use loops and variables and other elements of real programming languages. Best of all, they can see it in action and they have a good understanding of what its capabilities are: it can do what they do with the mouse and keyboard (and more, but that's no big deal).
So it seems there are quite a few bugs. Maybe it's really not the "shining example" that I thought. I'm curious what I should tell people when they ask me if a better spreadsheet app exists. What do you recommend over Excel?
Please don't say (I love OSS dearly, but I have to be blunt here):
calc - UI is no better than Excel's and performance is far worse.
gnumeric - great at what it does, but rather featureless.
kspread - good example of a steaming pile. Koffice 2.0 should be a big step forward, though.
and as far as battery issues are concerned there is just no comparison
Until I read this, I thought "true" was as true as any statement could be. You have constructed a statement that I evaluate to be much truer than just "true." In addition, you've provided evidence that depth is orthogonal to truth.
Gran might have to call her credit card company or something. While automated voice-comprehension technology has been implemented in a few systems, touch-tone menus are pretty ubiquitous.
Show me someone who can speak at 0 Hz and I'll show you someone who will make an amazing trumpet-player.
You're a troll or ignoramus. Try this on for size: an occasional two-hour phone-call to a family member (parent, sibling) is not evidence of dysfunction. Your comment is textbook internet idiocy:
1. read comment/post/submission.
2. interpret it. IMPORTANT: ignore whether your interpretation makes sense!
--WAIT: if your interpretation suggests something negative about the poster, you may continue--
3. compose an inflammatory reply.
4. submit.
5. chuckle at own superiority.
Why is this behavior so common? Please, people, if your first thought is "wow, how could anyone be so messed up," try to find another explanation for what you see.
Be realistic. At least a few MS products are superior to all competitors. If nothing else, you can hold up Excel as a shining example of excellence in software. Many people say the same thing about Visual Studio (I haven't worked with it).
.....Paint is seriously deficient.)
They're monopolists and their ideas about systems programming are at best ill-conceived, but you'll be more credible if you give credit where credit is due.
MS would do very well to clone a few of the OSS utility apps that are totally user-friendly. Kolourpaint, for instance, as a replacement for Paint. It might not make a big splash, but the millions of people upgrading to Vista would be pleasantly surprised by the fact that their bundled bmp editor had become more usable without losing approachability. (the grabbies that resize the canvas would be large enough for easy use on screens with resolution higher than 800x600, you could zoom to 300% in addition to 200% and 400%, you could zoom out, you could add text while zoomed in,
Years ago, I used pirated music to cultivate a sense of aesthetic taste, which I used to impress girls. One of them became my girlfriend, which boosted my confidence. With my confident outlook, I was able to land a good job with a consulting firm. Hence, I am able to earn much more money because I pirated some music off on Napster. I hope they don't come for me.
I know you didn't mean that seriously, but I think you might be surprised how thin the foil has to be for light to pass through it. The quantity of interest is "skin depth". You can calculate it with the formula here, which uses several constants that are pretty easy to find:
frequency of visible light: 600 THz (source)
conductivity of aluminum: 3.8 x 10^7 siemens per meter (source)
permeability of free space: 1.3 x 10^(-7) weber per ampere meter (source)
I calculated that the skin depth of aluminum is 8 nanometers. This means that the thickness of aluminum needed to stop 99.9% of the light is one 400,000th of an inch. For comparison, this is 10,000 times thinner than the thinnest aluminum foil available from McMaster-Carr (it's a company that sells materials for scientific research, among other things). Since the atomic radius of aluminum is 125 pm, this foil would be only 250 atoms thick, and would still block 99.9% of the light.
By the way, if you've never used it, you should check out Google's calculator. It handles units for you, so it makes calculations like this really fast.
This issue is one of the reasons it's important to fight vendor lock-in. If there were no vendor lock-in, your former customers would have taken their business elsewhere. They must be locked in if they're putting up with incompetent representatives.
It might be FUD even if they gave a list. Without a list, it's the perfect prototypical example of FUD. Nothing could possibly be more FUDly than this assertion with the number "235".
If you're a corporation with deep pockets, you also have to make sure you haven't been infringing on any software patents.
(This is what bothers me most about our current patent laws: there is no burden on the patent holder to apprise possible infringers of the situation.)
I hope you realize that there's a catch-22 preventing me from sympathizing with you, because it's impossible for IBM to have victimized you without repercussion. If IBM was wrong to let you go (i.e. if the $16/hour guy does a lousy job) then they'll hurt for it (a repercussion). If they were right to let you go, and your job can be done for $16/hour, then they haven't victimized you, they've just been responded to a force in the market.
That said, I hope you find a good new job, and I hope they didn't try to screw you out of part of your severence package.
It's disingenuous for the commentator to strip the hyperlinks from the sections he quotes. I don't think it's at all inappropriate that the entry on mitochondrial DNA should assume that the reader knows what mitochondria are. By tucking extraneous background information away in linked pages, hypertext can be very concise.
from TFA: ...each time the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel...
If it's the president, his punctuation is as bad as his oration.
Regarding compression artifacts on the two samples, I wonder why they used a jpg at all. When will people get the message, jpg is *only for photographs* .
This kind of reminds me of Microsoft's comparison of font rendering with and without cleartype, where they use italics so that un-anti-aliased fonts look bad. At least they made it a minimal comparison, though, keeping the same font and text.
...to manage digital rights.
:)
I could be wrong, but I think the management is supposed to be digital, not the rights.
There are a few programs that work that way in windows. In the FLOSS domain, there's Gobolinux, which does exactly what you request: it puts all the files for a given program in one folder, so that you can remove it by deleting that folder.
..."Why can't I have a flying creature?" "Why does my creature have to be symmetrical?" "How come it's attacking by biting when it could swing those mace-like appendages?"
I think what we'll find is that the engineering component of this game is lacking. In the demos, there are meters on the right-hand side of the screen when you build the creature, indicating various properties (they mentioned running speed. I imagine others include hit points and attack damage). I suspect that apart from looks, anything with roughly the same properties on those scales will play about the same.
I'm also concerned about the arcade portions at the beginning. It would be good if a challenging difficulty level were included. The worst thing would be for this game to wind up looking like a re-packaged Sims.
My first reaction was "who gave him the authority to outlaw genetic discrimination?"
Keyboard and mouse are hardware. They're cheap peripherals, but they're still hardware.
They can't be "wildly overrated." At least, they aren't around here. People say that FF7 was the last one to be better than the ones before it.
The others are regarded as pretty disappointing.
(or however high you need to go to get past the ones implicit in this decision)
I think you mean "complicit."
What's "Open Office"? Is it related to OpenOffice.org?
The Princeton Sound Lab has created a bunch of tools for just this. You can "bow" the touchpad, for instance. There's a Mac-laptop exclusive utility that generates sounds based on the motion of the laptop (using the internal gyros or accelerometers or whatever).