Yes, you're quite right, he should have said "origins on a cosmic level" or something similar. And you're right, abiogenesis is really a separate thing from evolution. Although, despite terminilogy abuse, I think the grand-grandparent does have a point - when we are talking about origins, there is no certainty about where the universe in general and life in particular came from.
I find it interesting that at both the very big, and the very small, there is a great deal of uncertainty. I know I'm opening a can of worms here, but after reading a lot of these threads (and being very reluctant to wade in) the points that are raised by the Intelligent Design people are nothing to do with fossil links and everything to do with the very small, i.e. the contention that there are certain biochemical features of organisms for which it is very difficult to demonstrate a plausible mechanism of an evolutionary origin, let alone demonstrate that any such mechanism actually occured. (I feel the worms wriggling now...) At the very big end of things, it took a long time for the 'Big Bang' hypothesis to become scientific orthodoxy because it flew in the face of the generally accepted idea that the universe has no beginning and is infinite in time and space. It's now become accepted that the universe is expandind and has a definite beginning. I wonder whether the body of evidence will grow that our understanding of the origins of the very small is also flawed.
He said evolution on a cosmic level in other words, whatever we may think we know about the origins of life on Earth, there are billions of years of cosmic history that we can really only make educated guesses about. Biology has nothing to do with that.
In fact, we're not even sure about the origins of life on earth (note that I said origins, not development). All beginning of life experiments have failed, i.e. we have so far not been able to demonstrate the the emergence of the necessary proteins to form a simple cell in the projected conditions of the early Earth - all we have are the 'primordial soup' experiments which (outside of a sort of common folklore belief) really haven't shown how simple life can emerge from nonlife.
Thing is, I think those monks have some rights - it's all very well saying that GTK for windows and QT are maturing, but who's going to pay for the monks' pensions when they're "retired"?
No... the issue was that they brought out a new version of Windows with IE tied to the OS such that it was very difficult to uninstall (without 3rd party specialist software) and had it configured as the default browser. They also leant heavily on hardware vendors and cut them out of the best licensing deals if they shipped machines with Netscape configured as the default browser. These were unfair uses of monopoly powers.
To provide a competing product for free is quite a different situation, and isn't really anything to do with their monopoly powers, but more to do with their capital - they can afford to give it away as a loss-leader until the competition goes out of business and then choose to hike prices back up if they want to ("...to provide a better service to customers and invest in research and innovation the free version of Virtual Server will no longer be available...").
Both situations are obviously bad for the consumer, but the second situation is much harder to tackle (I presume) from a legal point of view.
"Just 'cause you're not paranoid, don't mean they're not after you."
I can't quite work out if you're intentionally mis-quoting but... its "just because you're paranoid" - the whole point of the lyric is that apparent paranoia doesn't necessary mean that the opinions held are incorrect. Someone with an apparently irrational fear of heights may still fall off a building.
Interesting... (and I'm aware we're getting OT here). What I was thinking of is the idea that if I trip over a loose paving slab and injure my foot, somebody somewhere ought to be paying me some money to make up for my injury. I think that's a very "Western" concept and so I was using it as an example (and clearly I wasn't specific enough!).
Here's another interesting one - I was talking with a doctor who works in one of the African nations who had another doctor who was due to be speaking at a conference that had been planned for months cancel the day before because his mother-in-law had come to visit. Note that she wasn't sick or in any kind of trouble, there were no family problems - she had just come to visit unexpectedly. The idea that family should come before other committments - even when there is no kind of emergency or pressing need - is quite "African" (and I'm sure other groups of cultures too). Just an example - not very well developed - but I find this kind of stuff very interesting.
Re:Meaning, for those who are curious.
on
Beginning Ubuntu Linux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Hmmm, well I'm not sure that you know what you're talking about. There are 11 national languages in South Africa, and some words do become quite universal, for instance "yebo" means both "yes" in the affirmative and also as a response to a greeting. Practically every South African would recognise it as such regardless of which language they speak. "Ubuntu" has been described as both a Zulu word and a Xhosa word - I suspect it's well-known in both languages and probably several others.
I do know what you're getting at, but the reality is that there are concepts that are fairly ubiquitous across most of Africa, so it's not unreasonable to describe a particular word or concept as "African" just as there are words and concepts that are particularly "European" despite the size of my continent (I'm British). In fact, there are concepts that are distinctly "Western" (covering, I suppose, Europe, North America and arguably Australia and NZ) for instance the idea that every bad event must be blamed on a named individual.
This is unlikely to be something that any government will recommend at this stage unless some amazing new medicines hit the market.
I'm a med student (will be a doctor by June!!) and I have a friend who has managed to get stuck by a needle a couple of times and taken ARVs as prophylaxis (prevention of infection). The side effects really can be quite nasty, and most treatment programs work by very close monitoring of those on treatment. It's great that this research is being done, but the kind of rollout that could affect the spread of HIV in high rick populations is years away.
Um... no! Many Linux distributions don't use sendmail as their default MTA, but practically every Linux - and I think most other Unices too - will have a sendmail compatibility wrapper which implements the functionality of sendmail as required by php, cgi, shellscripts etc. So when you type 'sendmail' at the command line or use it from a script you're not using the Sendmail package but a compatibility layer for whatever MTA you have installed which happens to emulate Sendmail since it's a fairly universal standard.
You're missing the point. The maxim about amps not volts is to do with how much current the power supply can source, which is the limiting factor. A 12V battery made from 8 1.5V AA dry cells is unlikely to do me any harm, even if it takes a fairly low resistance path through my body. The 12V lead acid battery in my car will give me a fairly hefty kick through the same path even though the resistance of my body hasn't changed.
This is the reason why it's a good idea to use a 1:1 isolating transformer when working on mains equipment - you can get seriously injured in the time it takes a fuse to blow, whereas the transformer will saturate and provides an absolute (and hopefully safe) limit to current flow.
Well -- I'm glad to hear you say that, because it annoys me when people say what the parent said -- but, of course, it depends on the definition.
It is perfectly possible for the majority of people to be above the mean [average] or modal [average] but impossible for the majority to be above the median [average].
Actually, you do have a point. There is definitely something broken about the XP wireless client, and there's surprisingly little about it that I've been able to google. Two years ago I was running a fairly large wireless network and bought a couple of Cisco access points. XP clients just would not stay connected - 5 minutes was about all you got before the connection was silently dropped. The AP log said "no longer authenticated". If I disabled the Windows wireless client and used e.g. the Netgear app supplied with the card, all was well, and all clients on other OSs worked fine. Last month I set up an XP box for a family member, installed all updates and tried to connect to the Cisco AP (which I now have at home) presuming that service packs and updates released in the past two years would have fixed it. Guess what - still disconnecting.
You can fight the battles, though. I'm in the UK; I suddenly received a letter from a debt collection agency earlier this year demanding money for a mobile phone contract that I cancelled nearly two years ago. I called the agency, listened to what they had to say, then politely asked for a written statement detailing what I allegedly owed money for.
It turns out that the phone company don't actually inform the collection agency what they're collecting for, just the total outstanding debt. The agency had to go back to the company and ask for details - I called a couple of times in the last four months because I hadn't heard anything, and eventually got a letter a week or so ago saying that the agency had returned my account to the mobile company because they had produced no information. I'm wasn't trying to get out of anything - I genuinely cannot recall owing any money on that account - but it goes to show that polite persistence can work. What's really funny is that the mobile company phoned to offer me an upgrade about two weeks ago - obviously they still think I'm a customer.
Have you tried Thunderbird mail? I used to use OE back when I actually touched Windows machines, but I now use Thunderbird exclusively and find it works very well. I think you'll find it does everything you like from OE without annoy Microsoftisms (like, I found OE sometimes 'paused' for several seconds at a time for now apparent reason) and nice features like built in spam filtering (if you like that, turn it off if you don't), server-side searching and filtering, and the warm fuzzy feeling of using Open Source software.
Actually, I tend to think that a consistent UI being important for inexperienced users is overrated. Yes - ideally users would be able to switch between different applications and pick up a new application and in a few minutes figure out how to use it. In reality, most end users make use of 2 or 3 applications, which they learn by rote, and the actual 'desktop' GUI is pretty meaningless to them save as a way to launch their 2 or 3 applications and display the wallpaper image of their children while the apps load.
A short case study: a friend of mine is a professional photographer and uses iPhoto on OS X to manage her shoots. Yesterday I showed her how to get to her photos with Finder and how to change to column view and select multiple files using shift+click. She's been using a Mac for over a year, and has never managed her image files outside of iPhoto (which has a user interface that bears little resemblance to the rest of OS X other than the colour scheme). When she wants to edit a text document she launches MS Word then opens files from there. As far as she's concerned, Word works one way, iPhoto works another way, iMail works differently again - but it doesn't matter because she learns each one to do the particular things she needs.
For end users, if the applications are written well and the UI is very suited to the task, the fact that a different UI has to be learnt for each app isn't a problem - in fact it may be better to have UIs that are very well suited to the task rather than completely consistent. Where HID/UI guidelines matter is when completely stupid UI decisions are made - like having 'page setup' on the 'file' menu in Word, rather than 'format...page' as it is in Openoffice, or when apps have toolbar icons that look very similar to something familiar (e.g. MS Office toolbar buttons) but actually do something subtly different. Can't think of an example right now but I'm sure I've seen a few, and it causes a lot of problems because inexperienced users think they know what will happen and are then surprised by the results.
You're right, the problem is (I'm speaking from the UK here) is that the company may continue to act as if you have an account with them, send you bigger and bigger bills with overdue charges etc., then sell your account to a debt collection agency who will ruin your credit record. I think the best policy by far if you think a company is likely to be trouble, is to send a recorded, signed for letter to the company to cancel the contract so that you've got proof if it goes to court.
I think the effect that the grandparent referred to was actually colour fringing effects, rather than 'chromatic aberration' in the strict sense.
Hooray! Thankyou... I'm obviously not nearly as knowledgable as some of the people posting here, but I'm not stoopid and I can't see for the life of me how a lens + analogue film could cause a red fringe around one side of an object and a cyan fringe around the other, as is clearly shown in the link I gave (ok, ok, this is Slashdot). Clearly I've been misusing a term... I'll try again: the interaction of chromatic abberation and the properties of the CCD causes colour fringing, in a way that doesn't happen with film cameras. OK, perhaps it's a minor point in photography in general, but I'm pedantic enough to care (and have had people flaming me!!).
Honestly, I read one photographic magazine and think I'm an expert, sheesh...
As for chomatic aberration, it is a lens property and nothing at all to do with interaction between lens and media.
From Amateur Photographer magazine, 30 July 2005: "edge fringing... is part and parcel of the digital experience... to give the maximum charge and therefore the clearest signal, tiny microlenses are positioned above each photosite and these microlenses can be partly responsible for causing chromatic aberration... when you use a film camera the emulsion is flat... can receive light from the rear of the lens at any angle... the microlenses on a sensor need to receive light directly... if the light does not hit them square on... then the result can be 'false color' (seen as fringing) and 'shading' (seen in the image as vignetting)."
I've cut lots of the detailed explanation out becuase it runs to three columns. I take the point that film is not immune to this - I obviously overstated that - but this is definitely an issue with digital cameras in the way it's not with film. The fact that light doesn't hit the medium at 90 degrees if its coming from near the edge of the lens is a property of the lens, but the way that it's handled by the media in the case of digital does lead to fringing.
I'm pretty new to the whole photography thing (not taking pictures of family birthdays and holidays - I mean Photography) but I'm pretty sure that film cameras aren't disappearing anytime soon. Sure, there won't be much in the way of compact point-and-shoot within a couple of years, but 35mm (especially slide/transparency) and medium format will still be with us in 10-20 years' time, just like the vinyl record is still the tool of choice for most creative DJs.
A friend of mine is a photojournalist, and she says that standard digital SLR is still not high resolution enough to be blown up to 6ft on the wall of an art gallery - for that, you need medium format or at a push 35mm slide film. Sure, resolutions will go up and up, but it's likely to be a few years before digital is good enough for artistic/professional photographers.
Digital cameras also have some limitations inherent to the format. One example is chromatic aberration or 'edge fringing' which is coloured fringes (typically cyan or red) around the border between different coloured objects near the edge of the lens. It's caused by an interraction between the lens' properties and the CCD, and does not happen with film. Guess what - artistic and professional photographers don't want to have to touch these up in Photoshop because it's losing detail.
Every format has its strengths and weaknessess, but as a very popular art form, traditional film photography is here to stay for a long time. As a consumer product, it's pretty much dead.
Yes, you're quite right - it was a brain error, I had meant to type 1280x1024, I already have a TFT that can to 1024x768. I've got a small desk and most of the graphics work I do is for web pages, so I don't need to be particularly colour accurate. I should have typed Gimp instead of Photoshop since Gimp has been the norm for the past year or so.
But they mean a different thing by "faster" than you do. You think they mean more GHz on the processor, more level 2 cache or faster memory modules. What they mean is: why does it take 5 minutes to boot the computer when I want to check a quick e-mail before leaving in the morning? Why does it take so long for Internet Explorer to load, or for that page to come up when I click on a PDF link on a web page?
A new computer does solve that problem to a certain extent, because (especially with Windows) a clean install can make the subjective speed much quicker. Plus the memory requirements for software tend to go up an aweful lot during the useful life of a machine. I bet you most of those friends and relatives (unless hardcore gamers) would be very satisfied if you took their machine and did a clean install of whatever OS they use (and if Windows make sure it's 2000 or XP) and increased the RAM to 512Mb.
I'm posting this from an Athlon 1GHz with 640Mb RAM which is mainly used with Ubuntu Linux and occasionally XP. It never feels slow, except when doing heavy Photoshop work. The only thing I'd really like is TFT that does 1024x768.
Actually, I think it was about 3 scripts... Doesn't sound like you have any experience running a network that's purely wireless with client machines that you have no direct control over. I did do that for 18 months, and never put the time in to write scripts like that - I had to log in to each access point, look at the signal strength to each client, scan through the logs to see if the connection was being dropped. I did all of that by typing a few simple commands at a prompt, but it was a pain in the a**.
I'm not sure why you think this guy's networking skills are poor, but you seem to have overlooked the fact that he *wrote* those scripts - so he invested some time to save himself some time - sounds like a pretty standard geek response to me. If I every ended up running community wireless again, I would definitely spend the first few weeks writing some simple maintenance scripts before letting the neighbourhood know that there's (nearly-)free wireless available.
A PC case with a breadmaker built in. Why should I have to fork out the money for a PC and a breadmaker? Surely Microsoft can use some of their hardware skills to channel the excess heat in the PC case to cook bread and small pastries.
Better keyboards. They've already got those buttons that launch the interweb and email thingy - why can't there be a key for each of the common words in the English language to speed up typing?
More colours from the monitor. It's stupid that it's limited to red, green and blue. Surely the technology is already there to emit ultra-violet and infra-red? Then I could get a tan whilst typing my college essays and the computer could control my VCR without needing to have a separate IR dongle.
A Microsoft OS motherboard. Why bother with flash memory cards or the positively archaic method of using hard disks. It's such a waste of time having installation disks that are used once then forgotten about in a drawer, and who wants to use any other OS, right? It would increase speed 1000 times if the OS was built into the motherboard, just like RISC OS on those Acorn machines that my 733t friend goes on about.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it interesting that at both the very big, and the very small, there is a great deal of uncertainty. I know I'm opening a can of worms here, but after reading a lot of these threads (and being very reluctant to wade in) the points that are raised by the Intelligent Design people are nothing to do with fossil links and everything to do with the very small, i.e. the contention that there are certain biochemical features of organisms for which it is very difficult to demonstrate a plausible mechanism of an evolutionary origin, let alone demonstrate that any such mechanism actually occured. (I feel the worms wriggling now...) At the very big end of things, it took a long time for the 'Big Bang' hypothesis to become scientific orthodoxy because it flew in the face of the generally accepted idea that the universe has no beginning and is infinite in time and space. It's now become accepted that the universe is expandind and has a definite beginning. I wonder whether the body of evidence will grow that our understanding of the origins of the very small is also flawed.
He said evolution on a cosmic level in other words, whatever we may think we know about the origins of life on Earth, there are billions of years of cosmic history that we can really only make educated guesses about. Biology has nothing to do with that.
In fact, we're not even sure about the origins of life on earth (note that I said origins, not development). All beginning of life experiments have failed, i.e. we have so far not been able to demonstrate the the emergence of the necessary proteins to form a simple cell in the projected conditions of the early Earth - all we have are the 'primordial soup' experiments which (outside of a sort of common folklore belief) really haven't shown how simple life can emerge from nonlife.
Thing is, I think those monks have some rights - it's all very well saying that GTK for windows and QT are maturing, but who's going to pay for the monks' pensions when they're "retired"?
To provide a competing product for free is quite a different situation, and isn't really anything to do with their monopoly powers, but more to do with their capital - they can afford to give it away as a loss-leader until the competition goes out of business and then choose to hike prices back up if they want to ("...to provide a better service to customers and invest in research and innovation the free version of Virtual Server will no longer be available...").
Both situations are obviously bad for the consumer, but the second situation is much harder to tackle (I presume) from a legal point of view.
Yes - in the pro video sector. Not DVD but DV - digital video [cassette].
I can't quite work out if you're intentionally mis-quoting but... its "just because you're paranoid" - the whole point of the lyric is that apparent paranoia doesn't necessary mean that the opinions held are incorrect. Someone with an apparently irrational fear of heights may still fall off a building.
Here's another interesting one - I was talking with a doctor who works in one of the African nations who had another doctor who was due to be speaking at a conference that had been planned for months cancel the day before because his mother-in-law had come to visit. Note that she wasn't sick or in any kind of trouble, there were no family problems - she had just come to visit unexpectedly. The idea that family should come before other committments - even when there is no kind of emergency or pressing need - is quite "African" (and I'm sure other groups of cultures too). Just an example - not very well developed - but I find this kind of stuff very interesting.
I do know what you're getting at, but the reality is that there are concepts that are fairly ubiquitous across most of Africa, so it's not unreasonable to describe a particular word or concept as "African" just as there are words and concepts that are particularly "European" despite the size of my continent (I'm British). In fact, there are concepts that are distinctly "Western" (covering, I suppose, Europe, North America and arguably Australia and NZ) for instance the idea that every bad event must be blamed on a named individual.
I'm a med student (will be a doctor by June!!) and I have a friend who has managed to get stuck by a needle a couple of times and taken ARVs as prophylaxis (prevention of infection). The side effects really can be quite nasty, and most treatment programs work by very close monitoring of those on treatment. It's great that this research is being done, but the kind of rollout that could affect the spread of HIV in high rick populations is years away.
Um... no! Many Linux distributions don't use sendmail as their default MTA, but practically every Linux - and I think most other Unices too - will have a sendmail compatibility wrapper which implements the functionality of sendmail as required by php, cgi, shellscripts etc. So when you type 'sendmail' at the command line or use it from a script you're not using the Sendmail package but a compatibility layer for whatever MTA you have installed which happens to emulate Sendmail since it's a fairly universal standard.
This is the reason why it's a good idea to use a 1:1 isolating transformer when working on mains equipment - you can get seriously injured in the time it takes a fuse to blow, whereas the transformer will saturate and provides an absolute (and hopefully safe) limit to current flow.
It is perfectly possible for the majority of people to be above the mean [average] or modal [average] but impossible for the majority to be above the median [average].
Actually, you do have a point. There is definitely something broken about the XP wireless client, and there's surprisingly little about it that I've been able to google. Two years ago I was running a fairly large wireless network and bought a couple of Cisco access points. XP clients just would not stay connected - 5 minutes was about all you got before the connection was silently dropped. The AP log said "no longer authenticated". If I disabled the Windows wireless client and used e.g. the Netgear app supplied with the card, all was well, and all clients on other OSs worked fine. Last month I set up an XP box for a family member, installed all updates and tried to connect to the Cisco AP (which I now have at home) presuming that service packs and updates released in the past two years would have fixed it. Guess what - still disconnecting.
It turns out that the phone company don't actually inform the collection agency what they're collecting for, just the total outstanding debt. The agency had to go back to the company and ask for details - I called a couple of times in the last four months because I hadn't heard anything, and eventually got a letter a week or so ago saying that the agency had returned my account to the mobile company because they had produced no information. I'm wasn't trying to get out of anything - I genuinely cannot recall owing any money on that account - but it goes to show that polite persistence can work. What's really funny is that the mobile company phoned to offer me an upgrade about two weeks ago - obviously they still think I'm a customer.
Have you tried Thunderbird mail? I used to use OE back when I actually touched Windows machines, but I now use Thunderbird exclusively and find it works very well. I think you'll find it does everything you like from OE without annoy Microsoftisms (like, I found OE sometimes 'paused' for several seconds at a time for now apparent reason) and nice features like built in spam filtering (if you like that, turn it off if you don't), server-side searching and filtering, and the warm fuzzy feeling of using Open Source software.
A short case study: a friend of mine is a professional photographer and uses iPhoto on OS X to manage her shoots. Yesterday I showed her how to get to her photos with Finder and how to change to column view and select multiple files using shift+click. She's been using a Mac for over a year, and has never managed her image files outside of iPhoto (which has a user interface that bears little resemblance to the rest of OS X other than the colour scheme). When she wants to edit a text document she launches MS Word then opens files from there. As far as she's concerned, Word works one way, iPhoto works another way, iMail works differently again - but it doesn't matter because she learns each one to do the particular things she needs.
For end users, if the applications are written well and the UI is very suited to the task, the fact that a different UI has to be learnt for each app isn't a problem - in fact it may be better to have UIs that are very well suited to the task rather than completely consistent. Where HID/UI guidelines matter is when completely stupid UI decisions are made - like having 'page setup' on the 'file' menu in Word, rather than 'format...page' as it is in Openoffice, or when apps have toolbar icons that look very similar to something familiar (e.g. MS Office toolbar buttons) but actually do something subtly different. Can't think of an example right now but I'm sure I've seen a few, and it causes a lot of problems because inexperienced users think they know what will happen and are then surprised by the results.
You're right, the problem is (I'm speaking from the UK here) is that the company may continue to act as if you have an account with them, send you bigger and bigger bills with overdue charges etc., then sell your account to a debt collection agency who will ruin your credit record. I think the best policy by far if you think a company is likely to be trouble, is to send a recorded, signed for letter to the company to cancel the contract so that you've got proof if it goes to court.
Hooray! Thankyou... I'm obviously not nearly as knowledgable as some of the people posting here, but I'm not stoopid and I can't see for the life of me how a lens + analogue film could cause a red fringe around one side of an object and a cyan fringe around the other, as is clearly shown in the link I gave (ok, ok, this is Slashdot). Clearly I've been misusing a term... I'll try again: the interaction of chromatic abberation and the properties of the CCD causes colour fringing, in a way that doesn't happen with film cameras. OK, perhaps it's a minor point in photography in general, but I'm pedantic enough to care (and have had people flaming me!!).
Honestly, I read one photographic magazine and think I'm an expert, sheesh...
From Amateur Photographer magazine, 30 July 2005: "edge fringing... is part and parcel of the digital experience... to give the maximum charge and therefore the clearest signal, tiny microlenses are positioned above each photosite and these microlenses can be partly responsible for causing chromatic aberration... when you use a film camera the emulsion is flat... can receive light from the rear of the lens at any angle... the microlenses on a sensor need to receive light directly... if the light does not hit them square on... then the result can be 'false color' (seen as fringing) and 'shading' (seen in the image as vignetting)."
I've cut lots of the detailed explanation out becuase it runs to three columns. I take the point that film is not immune to this - I obviously overstated that - but this is definitely an issue with digital cameras in the way it's not with film. The fact that light doesn't hit the medium at 90 degrees if its coming from near the edge of the lens is a property of the lens, but the way that it's handled by the media in the case of digital does lead to fringing.
A friend of mine is a photojournalist, and she says that standard digital SLR is still not high resolution enough to be blown up to 6ft on the wall of an art gallery - for that, you need medium format or at a push 35mm slide film. Sure, resolutions will go up and up, but it's likely to be a few years before digital is good enough for artistic/professional photographers.
Digital cameras also have some limitations inherent to the format. One example is chromatic aberration or 'edge fringing' which is coloured fringes (typically cyan or red) around the border between different coloured objects near the edge of the lens. It's caused by an interraction between the lens' properties and the CCD, and does not happen with film. Guess what - artistic and professional photographers don't want to have to touch these up in Photoshop because it's losing detail.
Every format has its strengths and weaknessess, but as a very popular art form, traditional film photography is here to stay for a long time. As a consumer product, it's pretty much dead.
Yes, you're quite right - it was a brain error, I had meant to type 1280x1024, I already have a TFT that can to 1024x768. I've got a small desk and most of the graphics work I do is for web pages, so I don't need to be particularly colour accurate. I should have typed Gimp instead of Photoshop since Gimp has been the norm for the past year or so.
A new computer does solve that problem to a certain extent, because (especially with Windows) a clean install can make the subjective speed much quicker. Plus the memory requirements for software tend to go up an aweful lot during the useful life of a machine. I bet you most of those friends and relatives (unless hardcore gamers) would be very satisfied if you took their machine and did a clean install of whatever OS they use (and if Windows make sure it's 2000 or XP) and increased the RAM to 512Mb.
I'm posting this from an Athlon 1GHz with 640Mb RAM which is mainly used with Ubuntu Linux and occasionally XP. It never feels slow, except when doing heavy Photoshop work. The only thing I'd really like is TFT that does 1024x768.
I'm not sure why you think this guy's networking skills are poor, but you seem to have overlooked the fact that he *wrote* those scripts - so he invested some time to save himself some time - sounds like a pretty standard geek response to me. If I every ended up running community wireless again, I would definitely spend the first few weeks writing some simple maintenance scripts before letting the neighbourhood know that there's (nearly-)free wireless available.
No, we don't. Correct.