David Tennant has been a great doctor, definately.
However, I really wish he'd quit a year earlier, so that they could do a proper series instead of 4 specials - they had a great chance at the end of last series to get rid of him, and didn't take it.
in 1997 Star Trek: Starfleet academy was released, which sounds similar to this.
It was a space combat sim, that actually allowed quite a lot of control over various aspects of the ship, with some rather amazing (!) 3D graphics. It might have had joystick control too.
I never spent enough time playing it to finish it, but it made quite a nice cross between generic star trek game and first spaceship shooter.
At my school, in Reading, UK, the school spent several thousand pounds putting projectors in every classroom, and smartboards in many of these.
And how much are the used? Most about once or twice a year - does this really warrant £800 per classroom (we have 30 or 40) or taxpayers money.
The school also recently bought £800 laptops for all the teachers - decent core 2 duos with 2GB ram, large HDD, 17" screen - the real deal. What does a teacher do with 2.6GHz of dual core to-of-the range processing power? Online registers and MS Word - both highly resource intensive.
So yes, technology does change classrooms - by taking money from important areas of the curriculum and giving the teachers gaming class laptops which they can take home and use as they like.
"OSS people need only make the 90% solution, because that "90% @ free" is better than "100% @ big_money" according to many many people.When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch. Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that."
From my experience, it is a sad fact that people won't realise this - however much you try to suggest that there's no point paying £200 for an office suite when they only use the bits that come in the free one.
I use OpenOffice entirely, whereas the majority of everyone I know insist that they "need" MS Office. So I will try to say to them that for schoolwork/writing letters, OO.o has everything they need, but without the price tag. I will then go on to say that it can save the MSOffice formats, so there won't be any compatibility issues, and that there's barely any difference in the interface, so it's not like they've got to learn a new piece of software. yet somehow, they still end up spending £200 on MSOffice.
However, what is more interesting is that people will tend to try firefox over internet explorer, despite IE being free.
So maybe people do value that 10% they pay £200 for, even if they don't use it. Or do people just distrust free software, having had bad experiences of malware. Or is it just a large case of corporate brainwashing?
"Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially."
Yet again they've missed the point. Some of us developers don't develop for money - we develop for fun/to help the community/geek points. I'm not sure I'd actually want to get paid for the software I write - when something's a hobby, it can be enjoyed at whatever pace you like, but if I was getting paid for it, those who were paying me would feel annoyed if I went and watched a film in an evening instead of developing the software they now consider to have paid for. And there are many times I'd like to go out in an evening instead of sitting in front of my laptop watching GDB tell me I've segfaulted
It appears that yet again, Microsoft cannot look past the monetry value of people and software - for those who haven't read it, The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is a good read, and covers this precise point in great depth.
For those who have hellish hay fever, can they get flowering plants banned during the summer, or sue those who grow them?
And for those who are allergic to cats and dogs, can they get furry animals banned, or sue their owners?
I'm allergic to washing, but that doesn't stop people shouting at me to have a bath whenever I sit next to them on the train!
Just to start with, I'm 17, and the main reason I use a PVR/DVR is not to skip the ads, but so I can watch stuff I'd otherwise miss, due to there (rarely) being 2 programs on at the same time, or me being out of the house.
Sometimes when I watch the TV, it is essentially "background music", so I have something to look at whilst I'm compiling. Other times, the computer acts as background music until I find something interesting and end up missing the rest of the program. This "background music" is often something I still have on disk, and feel like vaguely watching.
It's times like those when I don't skip the ads.
However, on a Thursday and Friday, I catch up with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday's episodes of TNG once I get home from whatever I was doing, and will skip through the ads (I've just about got the hang of FFing at 32x, and not missing the first couple of seconds), taking 15 minutes out of the program. This is actually quite annoying though, as whe I watch them live, it takes me a couple of seconds to realise why it won't fast forward!
But to further complicate it, I actually find ad breaks quite useful - they give a couple of minutes in which I can use the loo or get a drink, and I'll often wait for a break, even if I can pause it.
That's my 2 pence, which probably goes to prove how erratic teenagers habits are.
I have also been learning to use blender recently, and would agree with you on the efficiency front, but not on the intuitive one - it took me ages to find a decent tutorial (I eventually used the noob to pro wikibook), and without one I was stumped.
The problems with the interface for beginners is that not much is apparent - for example, I could create a cube/cylinder/monkey, and with a bit of fiddling managed to make it red and clear, I could sometimes move random nodes. But this was essentially it.
The problem comes due to the heavy reliance upon keyboard shortcuts and unnamed icons, which once learned are certainly efficient and easy to use, but they don't facilitate easy learning.
Would you have actually complained about 5p for a text message before this was shown?
Pricing a text message at 5p makes sense, as it's small enough to seem negligible,and presumably enough that [your operator] can make a profit.
Furthermore, Hubble is presumably downloading lots and lots of megabytes of data, whereas a text is 140 bytes a go. As we've seen with most forms of data storage/transmission, price and size do not scale linearly - just as a 200GB hard disk does not cost twice as much as a 100GB one, a 1.4 kilobyte email does not cost 10 times as much as 10 140 byte texts.
It would be interesting to see how a mobile operator breaks down text pricing, and see how much goes on carrying the data
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Could we use this to turn kids into superkids by sending them caffeine or something? We could turn the schools into kid army barracks!
Remember what happened to the crablogger in thunderbirds...
David Tennant has been a great doctor, definately.
However, I really wish he'd quit a year earlier, so that they could do a proper series instead of 4 specials - they had a great chance at the end of last series to get rid of him, and didn't take it.
in 1997 Star Trek: Starfleet academy was released, which sounds similar to this.
It was a space combat sim, that actually allowed quite a lot of control over various aspects of the ship, with some rather amazing (!) 3D graphics. It might have had joystick control too.
I never spent enough time playing it to finish it, but it made quite a nice cross between generic star trek game and first spaceship shooter.
And how much are the used? Most about once or twice a year - does this really warrant £800 per classroom (we have 30 or 40) or taxpayers money.
The school also recently bought £800 laptops for all the teachers - decent core 2 duos with 2GB ram, large HDD, 17" screen - the real deal. What does a teacher do with 2.6GHz of dual core to-of-the range processing power? Online registers and MS Word - both highly resource intensive.
So yes, technology does change classrooms - by taking money from important areas of the curriculum and giving the teachers gaming class laptops which they can take home and use as they like.
And I can't find the 200MB "fair usage" limit anywhere!
"WAAGH! (Score:4, Informative)"
QED
"OSS people need only make the 90% solution, because that "90% @ free" is better than "100% @ big_money" according to many many people.When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch. Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that."
From my experience, it is a sad fact that people won't realise this - however much you try to suggest that there's no point paying £200 for an office suite when they only use the bits that come in the free one.
I use OpenOffice entirely, whereas the majority of everyone I know insist that they "need" MS Office. So I will try to say to them that for schoolwork/writing letters, OO.o has everything they need, but without the price tag. I will then go on to say that it can save the MSOffice formats, so there won't be any compatibility issues, and that there's barely any difference in the interface, so it's not like they've got to learn a new piece of software. yet somehow, they still end up spending £200 on MSOffice.
However, what is more interesting is that people will tend to try firefox over internet explorer, despite IE being free.
So maybe people do value that 10% they pay £200 for, even if they don't use it. Or do people just distrust free software, having had bad experiences of malware. Or is it just a large case of corporate brainwashing?
It cheats and actually shows the images. I WANT ASCII ART!
"Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially."
Yet again they've missed the point. Some of us developers don't develop for money - we develop for fun/to help the community/geek points. I'm not sure I'd actually want to get paid for the software I write - when something's a hobby, it can be enjoyed at whatever pace you like, but if I was getting paid for it, those who were paying me would feel annoyed if I went and watched a film in an evening instead of developing the software they now consider to have paid for. And there are many times I'd like to go out in an evening instead of sitting in front of my laptop watching GDB tell me I've segfaulted
It appears that yet again, Microsoft cannot look past the monetry value of people and software - for those who haven't read it, The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is a good read, and covers this precise point in great depth.
For those who have hellish hay fever, can they get flowering plants banned during the summer, or sue those who grow them? And for those who are allergic to cats and dogs, can they get furry animals banned, or sue their owners? I'm allergic to washing, but that doesn't stop people shouting at me to have a bath whenever I sit next to them on the train!
Just to start with, I'm 17, and the main reason I use a PVR/DVR is not to skip the ads, but so I can watch stuff I'd otherwise miss, due to there (rarely) being 2 programs on at the same time, or me being out of the house. Sometimes when I watch the TV, it is essentially "background music", so I have something to look at whilst I'm compiling. Other times, the computer acts as background music until I find something interesting and end up missing the rest of the program. This "background music" is often something I still have on disk, and feel like vaguely watching. It's times like those when I don't skip the ads. However, on a Thursday and Friday, I catch up with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday's episodes of TNG once I get home from whatever I was doing, and will skip through the ads (I've just about got the hang of FFing at 32x, and not missing the first couple of seconds), taking 15 minutes out of the program. This is actually quite annoying though, as whe I watch them live, it takes me a couple of seconds to realise why it won't fast forward! But to further complicate it, I actually find ad breaks quite useful - they give a couple of minutes in which I can use the loo or get a drink, and I'll often wait for a break, even if I can pause it. That's my 2 pence, which probably goes to prove how erratic teenagers habits are.
I have also been learning to use blender recently, and would agree with you on the efficiency front, but not on the intuitive one - it took me ages to find a decent tutorial (I eventually used the noob to pro wikibook), and without one I was stumped. The problems with the interface for beginners is that not much is apparent - for example, I could create a cube/cylinder/monkey, and with a bit of fiddling managed to make it red and clear, I could sometimes move random nodes. But this was essentially it. The problem comes due to the heavy reliance upon keyboard shortcuts and unnamed icons, which once learned are certainly efficient and easy to use, but they don't facilitate easy learning.
Would you have actually complained about 5p for a text message before this was shown? Pricing a text message at 5p makes sense, as it's small enough to seem negligible,and presumably enough that [your operator] can make a profit. Furthermore, Hubble is presumably downloading lots and lots of megabytes of data, whereas a text is 140 bytes a go. As we've seen with most forms of data storage/transmission, price and size do not scale linearly - just as a 200GB hard disk does not cost twice as much as a 100GB one, a 1.4 kilobyte email does not cost 10 times as much as 10 140 byte texts. It would be interesting to see how a mobile operator breaks down text pricing, and see how much goes on carrying the data
"Our good friend Firefox" - that would be friends in the the same way as the Jedi and the Sith I presume.