First of all, don't worry about it just yet -- the kid's only about 4 month old after all:-)
My kids are 2 and 4 and yes they play with the computer sometimes. But only sometimes. And while we parents still have some control over them, we don't plan to let them sit at the computer for hours and hours on end! Computer fun is an exception for them. TV fun is a bit more regular, but also not too frequent. And when we say no, it is no.
Well I tried it again, and for me it *again* comes up with 9 pounds for Thief of Time. After advertising it for 8.49.
What country are you in? Perhaps they differentiate by country? Which is rather unfair because you already pay a different shipping rate for international.
I selected "Netherlands" as country.
Your observation that they don't lie to you about their prices makes me extra pissed about them. Good thing I found more honest online merchants!
Their real prices + cost of shipping where still cheaper than if I would have had to buy the book in an actual store, at least an actual store here in the Netherlands. If I would have had to buy the books in a store in the UK it might not be cheaper.
But cheaper or not, if a shop tries to trick me like that, I rather pay more elsewhere than do any more business with them. (As it was, I managed to find a better deal elsewhere. I don't think I would have looked around for better deals if they hadn't been deceptive.)
Yesterday I wanted to order some books online. My first place to go was amazon.co.uk. They had the books I wanted and cheaper than in the retail store. They advertised 8.49 UKPound for the one book (Thief of time, from Terry Pratchett) and 13.59 UKPound for the other book (The Truth, also from Terry Pratchett). I proceeded to the checkout and...
Hey, that ain't right, suddenly the first book is 9.00 UKPound and the 2nd is 14.41 UKPound. I opened a new window and checked the prices. Sure as hell, they're advertised for one price, but actually sold for a higher price.
I decided to take my business elsewhere.
I went to uk.bol.com and they had the same books for 8.50 and 11.89, so I ended up cheaper, plus paying less for shipping. And they didn't try to sneak a more expensive price past my nose.
It will be a while before I look at amazon.com again, if at all. This is not the way to profitability for them.
This leaves one concern unanswered: What about the needed kernel support? For DRI, kernel support is added to the Linux 2.4 kernel.
So to make use of DRI in XF86Free 4.0, what do you do when you have FreeBSD or Linux 2.2? or OS/2? Or any of the other OSes on which XFree runs?
The module loader might be completely OS-independant, and the modules might be written for complete OS-independance, but there _are_ OS dependancies somewhere or they wouldn't be extending the Linux kernel for DRI.
I have a problem with the built-in PS/2 mouse / touchpad of my laptop as well, with all the 2.2.x and 2.3.x kernels. The mouse just plain doesn't work: the kernel refuses to detect it.
However, there's a workaround for that by modifying a line in your kernel source code to fake the detection of the mouse; if you don't feel like editing the kernel code and recompiling it you have to fall back on the 2.0.x kernel for now.
I have seen other mouse problems like the ones mentioned here, but not anymore since I started using gpm for the mouse, and set up X to use the gpmdata device instead of the straight mouse device. Since gpm manages all my mouse stuff now in both console and X, there's no problems and no conflicts, and gpm is better at getting my 3 button mouse to actually be 3 button:-)
Anyway, the patch to the 2.2 kernel to get your PS/2 mouse working if it doesn't work at all, is:
--- drivers/char/pc_keyb.c~ Tue Aug 10 22:17:55 1999 +++ drivers/char/pc_keyb.c Wed Aug 18 21:52:22 1999 @@ -966,7 +966,7 @@
static int __init psaux_init(void) { - if (!detect_auxiliary_port()) + if (1 || !detect_auxiliary_port()) return -EIO;
I've come to the conclusion that user-friendliness is not and should not be the holy grail of computing. Why should computers be so easy to understand that anyone can turn them on and instantly be proficient? The only reason for that is improper training of the potential users.
Really, face it: We have to learn a lot of very complicated things in order to be able to function properly in our society. Reading and writing are complicated tasks. Don't underestimate how difficult writing is, let alone proper spelling! Driving a car is complicated, especially when there's a lot of other traffic on the road.
If you want your computer to do anything more sophicistated than what a PlayStation can do, then need to sit down and _learn_ how to operate the machine, and you have to get some basic understanding of how the machine works. That is more than knowing what icons to click to open MS-Word: If you know a bit more about the basic principles behind the operation of the computer, a smart person can infer a lot of those details from his/her background knowledge.
Of course, training might have to start at a rather early age, so that all this becomes part of a persons 'native' background knowledge, just like reading/writing is automatic for most people nowadays.
Over time, this will happen and the 'stupid luser' syndrom will disappear.
However, what I just said doesn't mean that I think all talk about user-friendliness is utter crap: Things like a consistent user-interface across a range of programs is a very good thing, imho. Not identical, but at least consistent. Not all cars have identical dashboard, but at least there's a huge amount of consistency across models. Inconsistencies in the various pieces of M$ software are a nightmare imho.
But the 'dumbing down' of users is not desirable and is not really what 'user friendliness' is all about, I think. Instead of 'dumbing down' the users they should be educated. If you design your computer in such a way that fools can use them, you will end up with even more foolish people and your computer needs to be redesigned for even more foolish people!
'Tech' and 'User Friendly' need to meet each other in the middle where you don't have to go in and wire up the computer manually, but where full control over the system and complete insight in it's working is still available. Somebody gave the example of a car with a locked-up engine: Car designers don't do that. When something goes wrong with the car, a techie can come in, take everything apart, fix the problem and put the whole lot back together.
They DON'T replace your car and they DON'T replace your whole engine when something like a carburator needs cleaning! All the parts are accessible and serviceable to the knowledgeable engineer. The complexities of a car are hidden away behind the controls, but a car is not 'dumbed down' to the degree an OS from M$ is...
(Okay, I managed to get in my opinions on computer-use and I managed to get in some anti-M$ advocacy as well;-)
(I hope I didn't mess up before by just hitting 'enter' after typing the subject... I might have submitted an empty comment;-)
A couple of things stood out to me and one was that most developers don't seem to know what the toolkits for GUI development are. From this I can draw the conclusion that they are mostly windows-developers, and that shouldn't be much of a surprise since most of Borland's products are windows only at the moment.
However, since KDE is pretty much a default environment in most distro's I'm not surprised to see many developers say that they use KDE and want to develop for it. But being windows developers, they don't yet realize that this means Qt development: They have no clue about the toolkits underlying Unix GUI development. ("What, that's just a class-library, isn't it?")
Another very interesting point was, imho, that most developers wanted: Easy porting of Linux -> Windows, rather than win->linux.
In other words: They want to develop primarily on Linux, and then port that to windows as a secondary development platform. Could it be that application development for Unix/Linux is really that much easier than windows app. development?;-)
Is windoze being replaced as a primary, preferred development environment?;-)
Anyway, I hope that Borland comes out with something nice and sweet!:-)
E 0.14.x was an absolute PIG for me, but then I downloaded/installed the Debian (potatoe) E 15.5 packages with -nosound.
A beauty, and fast. Disabling sound support was the key for me:-) I just had to get used to a few peculiarities and bugs with some themes, and with the desktops flipping away.
Now I'm updating from CVS on a daily basis and since E installed uses only 1Mb of diskspace if you remove all the themes you don't want, I'm going to put it on my laptop too:-)
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First of all, don't worry about it just yet -- the kid's only about 4 month old after all :-)
My kids are 2 and 4 and yes they play with the computer sometimes. But only sometimes.
And while we parents still have some control over them, we don't plan to let them sit at the computer for hours and hours on end!
Computer fun is an exception for them. TV fun is a bit more regular, but also not too frequent.
And when we say no, it is no.
cheers and have a great time with your kids,
--Tim
Well I tried it again, and for me it *again* comes up with 9 pounds for Thief of Time. After advertising it for 8.49.
What country are you in? Perhaps they differentiate by country? Which is rather unfair because you already pay a different shipping rate for international.
I selected "Netherlands" as country.
Your observation that they don't lie to you about their prices makes me extra pissed about them. Good thing I found more honest online merchants!
--Tim
BTW,
Their real prices + cost of shipping where still cheaper than if I would have had to buy the book in an actual store, at least an actual store here in the Netherlands. If I would have had to buy the books in a store in the UK it might not be cheaper.
But cheaper or not, if a shop tries to trick me like that, I rather pay more elsewhere than do any more business with them. (As it was, I managed to find a better deal elsewhere. I don't think I would have looked around for better deals if they hadn't been deceptive.)
--Tim
Yesterday I wanted to order some books online. My first place to go was amazon.co.uk. They had the books I wanted and cheaper than in the retail store. They advertised 8.49 UKPound for the one book (Thief of time, from Terry Pratchett) and 13.59 UKPound for the other book (The Truth, also from Terry Pratchett). I proceeded to the checkout and ...
Hey, that ain't right, suddenly the first book is 9.00 UKPound and the 2nd is 14.41 UKPound. I opened a new window and checked the prices. Sure as hell, they're advertised for one price, but actually sold for a higher price.
I decided to take my business elsewhere.
I went to uk.bol.com and they had the same books for 8.50 and 11.89, so I ended up cheaper, plus paying less for shipping. And they didn't try to sneak a more expensive price past my nose.
It will be a while before I look at amazon.com again, if at all. This is not the way to profitability for them.
--Tim
This leaves one concern unanswered:
:-)
What about the needed kernel support? For DRI, kernel support is added to the Linux 2.4 kernel.
So to make use of DRI in XF86Free 4.0, what do you do when you have FreeBSD or Linux 2.2? or OS/2? Or any of the other OSes on which XFree runs?
The module loader might be completely OS-independant, and the modules might be written for complete OS-independance, but there _are_ OS dependancies somewhere or they wouldn't be extending the Linux kernel for DRI.
So what do you do on the other OSes?
I'd like to know too
I have a problem with the built-in PS/2 mouse / touchpad of my laptop as well, with all the 2.2.x and 2.3.x kernels. The mouse just plain doesn't work: the kernel refuses to detect it.
:-)
However, there's a workaround for that by modifying a line in your kernel source code to fake the detection of the mouse; if you don't feel like editing the kernel code and recompiling it you have to fall back on the 2.0.x kernel for now.
I have seen other mouse problems like the ones mentioned here, but not anymore since I started using gpm for the mouse, and set up X to use the gpmdata device instead of the straight mouse device. Since gpm manages all my mouse stuff now in both console and X, there's no problems and no conflicts, and gpm is better at getting my 3 button mouse to actually be 3 button
Anyway, the patch to the 2.2 kernel to get your PS/2 mouse working if it doesn't work at all, is:
--- drivers/char/pc_keyb.c~ Tue Aug 10 22:17:55 1999
+++ drivers/char/pc_keyb.c Wed Aug 18 21:52:22 1999
@@ -966,7 +966,7 @@
static int __init psaux_init(void)
{
- if (!detect_auxiliary_port())
+ if (1 || !detect_auxiliary_port())
return -EIO;
misc_register(&psaux_mouse);
This should work against all 2.2 kernels.
--Tim
I've come to the conclusion that user-friendliness is not and should not be the holy grail of computing.
;-)
Why should computers be so easy to understand that anyone can turn them on and instantly be proficient?
The only reason for that is improper training of the potential users.
Really, face it: We have to learn a lot of very complicated things in order to be able to function properly in our society.
Reading and writing are complicated tasks. Don't underestimate how difficult writing is, let alone proper spelling!
Driving a car is complicated, especially when there's a lot of other traffic on the road.
If you want your computer to do anything more sophicistated than what a PlayStation can do, then need to sit down and _learn_ how to operate the machine, and you have to get some basic understanding of how the machine works. That is more than knowing what icons to click to open MS-Word: If you know a bit more about the basic principles behind the operation of the computer, a smart person can infer a lot of those details from his/her background knowledge.
Of course, training might have to start at a rather early age, so that all this becomes part of a persons 'native' background knowledge, just like reading/writing is automatic for most people nowadays.
Over time, this will happen and the 'stupid luser' syndrom will disappear.
However, what I just said doesn't mean that I think all talk about user-friendliness is utter crap: Things like a consistent user-interface across a range of programs is a very good thing, imho. Not identical, but at least consistent. Not all cars have identical dashboard, but at least there's a huge amount of consistency across models. Inconsistencies in the various pieces of M$ software are a nightmare imho.
But the 'dumbing down' of users is not desirable and is not really what 'user friendliness' is all about, I think.
Instead of 'dumbing down' the users they should be educated.
If you design your computer in such a way that fools can use them, you will end up with even more foolish people and your computer needs to be redesigned for even more foolish people!
'Tech' and 'User Friendly' need to meet each other in the middle where you don't have to go in and wire up the computer manually, but where full control over the system and complete insight in it's working is still available.
Somebody gave the example of a car with a locked-up engine: Car designers don't do that. When something goes wrong with the car, a techie can come in, take everything apart, fix the problem and put the whole lot back together.
They DON'T replace your car and they DON'T replace your whole engine when something like a carburator needs cleaning! All the parts are accessible and serviceable to the knowledgeable engineer. The complexities of a car are hidden away behind the controls, but a car is not 'dumbed down' to the degree an OS from M$ is...
(Okay, I managed to get in my opinions on computer-use and I managed to get in some anti-M$ advocacy as well
--Tim
(I hope I didn't mess up before by just hitting 'enter' after typing the subject... I might have submitted an empty comment ;-)
;-)
;-)
:-)
A couple of things stood out to me and one was that most developers don't seem to know what the toolkits for GUI development are.
From this I can draw the conclusion that they are mostly windows-developers, and that shouldn't be much of a surprise since most of Borland's products are windows only at the moment.
However, since KDE is pretty much a default environment in most distro's I'm not surprised to see many developers say that they use KDE and want to develop for it.
But being windows developers, they don't yet realize that this means Qt development: They have no clue about the toolkits underlying Unix GUI development.
("What, that's just a class-library, isn't it?")
Another very interesting point was, imho, that most developers wanted: Easy porting of Linux -> Windows, rather than win->linux.
In other words: They want to develop primarily on Linux, and then port that to windows as a secondary development platform.
Could it be that application development for Unix/Linux is really that much easier than windows app. development?
Is windoze being replaced as a primary, preferred development environment?
Anyway, I hope that Borland comes out with something nice and sweet!
--Tim
RoboWars are very cool but BBC did the same thing about a year ago - and I think they were not even the first to have a show like that on TV ! :-)
--Tim
E 0.14.x was an absolute PIG for me, but then I downloaded/installed the Debian (potatoe) E 15.5 packages with -nosound.
:-) I just had to get used to a few peculiarities and bugs with some themes, and with the desktops flipping away.
:-)
A beauty, and fast. Disabling sound support was the key for me
Now I'm updating from CVS on a daily basis and since E installed uses only 1Mb of diskspace if you remove all the themes you don't want, I'm going to put it on my laptop too
--Tim