Cash stimulus packages are working (or at least helping) - they trick people into spending instead of saving, which means that local businesses still have an income and people keep their jobs. If everyone starts trying to save money at once, then local businesses' revenues drop like a stone and *everyone's* job is at risk. It's a downward spiral that causes a depression.
I thought the figures were out and the last round of cash handouts made a temporary and near insignificant increase in consumer spending. Many people who I talk to are simply saying its going on the credit card repayments, or the mortgage, or in the bank. The other thing is that money spent is going on superfluous bullshit so that most of that money goes offshore since its going on imported luxuries.
We have real hurt right now in the economy, people ARE losing jobs and this stimulus does nothing about it. Mining can't be helped, thats unfortunate but next in line is private development, do you have any idea of how much private property development is going belly up, not because the businesses are not sound, but because lending has dried up completely. Set up a government run non bank lender and throw the stimulus money behind that. Get these people out working again by compensating for the true deficiencies in the economy. That way when all is said and done at least the stimulus money is invested in assets, not spent on useless plastic crap.
Seriously, I know the economic trouble has come from offshore but it has hilighted real issues we have in the developed nations. Debt fuelled consumption is a stupid, stupid idea and sooner or later you are going to have to pay off the credit cards. That is really what this whole mess comes down to, too much money has been loaned out for absolutely no real economic gain. A correction has been on the cards for a long time now. The problem is that Rudd & Swan, like Howard and Costello, have absolutely NO background in economic theory, these guys, all of them, are glorified arts graduates and lawyers. They have no concept of economics. Only Keating has demonstrated any sort of interest in real economic theory in the past 30 years (probably much more) and even he has no real education in the area, we were just lucky that Keating turned out to be really quite a good economist despite this (this is fairly well accepted, not my own fanboyism).
With you all of the way there buddy, and as a die hard despiser of wannabe blue bloods myself, I'm so far very tempted to vote for the enemy next time (if and only if Turnbull is still leader). Why? Rudd is a cunt, a slimy arrogant ultraconservative cunt with less than no concept of economics and a dangerous penchant for signing blank cheques. Harsh? Well thats how I'm feeling right now, I am so mad with this useless excuse for a new government. The response to the Henson photos was inexcusable, and now this stimulus bull has just gone too far, $30 billion in the hole, 5 years of deficit budgets in one fell swoop, we've gone from having the strongest government balance sheet in the OECD to being doomed to years of deficit... and we're in recession anyway? For what? A few new DVD players and a whole lot dropped on the pokies? Fuck that! I've yet to meet one single person of any ideological background that agrees with this cash handout business, it scares the hell out of me...
Anyway, enough rant, this stuff tends to boil over once I start thinking about it.
Troll? WTF? I'm attempting to open a line of debate based on my experience as a long time firefox user who has become disillusioned. Disagree all you want but I'm not trolling.
That is interesting because firefox on my Ubuntu powered eee 901 is a useless pile of slow ass crap. It is unresponsive, laggy, buggy and tends to crash, it is also one of the only apps I use that still has rendering issues under compiz. I have to use flashblock just to make the damn thing work, and to me that is just ridiculous, I LIKE my flash content.
Thats the other argument thats being thrown around here a lot this whole nonsense about: "Firefox is fast if you use adblock, flashblock and noscript". So in other words it can match the speed of other browsers if you disable functionality? Who cares, Chrome is the fastest browser I've ever used and it can do it while rendering ads, javascript and flash.
Firefox's memory usage, test shows, is 1/2 that of Chrome or IE 8 with the same 10 tabs open.
And yet somehow it manages to run at half the speed of Chrome and IE8 with those same 10 tabs open, and frequently brings my computer to a grinding halt because it doesn't like some random bit of javascript that I can't identify and thus I need to close the entire thing to get it all going again. It is also responsible for a great deal of hard drive grinding on my Vista laptop...
Ram is cheap, I have lots of it, my browser is welcome to it, so long as it does not eat it up exponentially like firefox used to. Firefox has dropped the ball, and its time people started admitting it. Firefox is slow, its addons are overrated and often poorly coded and it has poor handling of javascript, to be gentle.
There is an IE8 story on slashdot right now. I know it probably wasn't there when you posted this, but seriously dude come on, you *really* thought slashdot wasn't going to post up that story??
As a web developer myself who used to use firebug, Chrome has turned out to be by far the better tool. The javascript console is a whole lot better than firebug. When you are in Chrome, click the little page menu icon, and in the menu there is a flyout called "Developer". They have actually built web development tools into the browser, screw half-assed bodgey addons, Chrome is the ducks nuts when it comes to web development.
I hate using firefox now that I've become accustomed to Chrome, on any system of any spec firefox is just slow as a dog, far slower than IE7 even which is embarrassing. What really gets to me about firefox is the linux build is near unusable in its slowness. I have it on my xubuntu eee pc, and its just about worthless as a web browser, especially in that limited environment.
Dude are you serious? Nokias have been able to cut and paste for years. My Ericsson W910i can cut and paste any piece of text I want, anywhere. It even does it with a decent UI, I merely open up my options menu, tell it I want to mark some text, click the start and the end of my desired text, and it copies it. then I can paste it wherever. Its a $100 phone with no keyboard! Its not 'smart' but I tell you what, it has HDMI, a web browser, a better camera than the iPhone that can take video, and its a decent mp3 player, and it can cut and paste with extreme ease, it even has a very similar predictive text system to the iPhone.
But its not an iPhone, its just a cheap ass middle of the road free on a basic plan thing that everybody has. So why, why does it have equal to or better features than the iPhone, a damn expensive premium product?
We're not far off the point where your TV will be hooked up to a small media center thing on your network that has internet and access to shared media on other computers. Actually most houses already have these: Playstation3 and XBox360 are exactly these kind of devices. All the big flatscreen TVs these days take dvi input, or even rgb some of them, and if you have ps3 and xbox then you have hdmi out anyway.
At my home I run a central fileserver with a pile of hard drives in it, we have a computer set up in the lounge room with a TV capture card that even has its own remote control. Vista media centre isn't even half bad at running a digital home theatre setup. Its the ultimate setup and I think it will become more popular to do things this way in the future. Me I would never go back now that I've got it like this, I know I'm a tech geek but seriously most people are becoming tech geeks as well, and the consoles are rapidly narrowing the divide in terms of networked home entertainment.
Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 1
When you see the movie, you will know what I'm talking about. In the comic, Rorschach takes on two cops with an improvised flame thrower and runs upstairs setting fire to the place. In the movie he takes on like 8 cops, burning 3 or 4 and beating the snot out of a few more. After he jumps out of the window he lands unscathed, jumps up and proceeds to beat the living snot out of another 6-8 cops before he is overwhelmed. Scenes like the prison scene where he burns the guy, they throw in a short fight first, etc. When the gang tries to mug them, they break arms and several legs in half, and send villains flying through the air with punches. There is boatloads of choreographed kung fu with wires and stuff.
It looks cool but missed the point, these guys are not meant to be super heroes, but they are basically portrayed as such. I think the way they did the Batman reboot was far better, the fighting was still brutal but there wasn't any of this punch a guy and send him flying twelve feet through the air, to hit a wall and send concrete bits flying everywhere, which basically never stops in watchmen. So yeah, I know there is some fighting in the watchmen comics, but when you see the movie you'll see when they are compared, there really isn't any fighting in the comics after all... not like this. I think it was probably the one aspect of the film that totally failed to capture the feel of the comics, the heroes don't seem vulnerable at all, they seem more like, well, spartans.
Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 1
There is loads of stuff that is not adequately explained in the movie, which is covered in detail in the book. The basic idea is that Manhattan, through his super powers has advanced science tremendously since he appeared, in fact there are even aspects of this left out of the movie like by the 80s all cars are electric due to his advances in battery technology.
Rorschach's mask is made of a special fabric designed by Manhattan, it contains two fluids between layers of latex that react to heat and pressure and don't mix. He makes it out of a dress as the other comment explains.
Also in the comic they are not amazing fighting machines at all, that was all Snyder. In the comic they barely even fight, for example Rorschach doesn't take on a dozen cops in the street, he just hits the ground, is injured by his fall and gets beaten. Owl guy and boob girl don't utterly destroy the entire gang in the street, they manage to beat them off but they are puffed out afterward. And so on.
You should read the comic, its really quite a good story, great atmosphere, great dialogue (most of the movie script is near word for word lifted from the comic).
If you read the comic, its abundantly obvious which scenes are intended to be like this, there are many instances of several frames showing more or less the same thing. The movie does a good job of reproducing stuff like that faithfully. Maybe you didn't like it, but it is how it should have been.
The form factor I've described would be a mind-bogglingly excellent little headless server for many homes and small businesses
Why?? What on earth does the Apple brand have that would make it any better than any other box for use as a server? Look I can understand (but not agree with) the idea that people want a nice white shiny thing on display in their office or living room, but precisely what advantage does a mac have as a server? (disclaimer: I actually use a G4 powermac as a server, because it was the best piece of junk I had lying around, but I run a linux server OS). Lets see, Intel chip: check, DDR3 RAM: check, HDD: check, Network card: check... does a server need anything else? You don't need a good video card. And OSX has got to be about the stupidest choice of server OS you can think of... I just do not get it.
Oh and a mac (not)mini that is higher specc'd than a mac mini... for the same price as a mac mini? Unlikely.
I can barely get Quicktime to do anything on my windows machines, ever. I'm amazed that itunes can play music! Oh and theres the MPEG encoding issues whereby anything with 64 bit tagging data will not be recognised in Quicktime, and thus itunes, and thus an ipod, despite this being a part of the MPEG standard (google quicktime 202 error). This has been an outstanding issue sine 2005.
Apple software on windows is buggy and inoperative without fail, and behaves like goddamn spyware the way each Apple product will try and install all of its friends.
Upfront disclaimer: I am a Vista user, a satisfied one, who is more than impressed with the handwriting recognition, to top it off I also own and use a genuine Tablet PC. Oh and I have a couple of Ubuntu machines too (for cred).
One thing I have read about Vistas handwriting recognition is that they put as much, if not more emphasis on stroke order and direction than the actual shape of the output. The other thing is that it learns your personal handwriting, and does this very well. It is by an extremely wide margin, the best handwriting recognition out there, but they do not produce a single decent application to take advantage of it! OneNote is terrible, terrible software, even though I primarily use it, Journal, while having excellent handwriting capabilities is completely devoid of features. There is no in between solution that I have been able to find, since OneNote is primarily a note taking platform for any sort of notes (typed really) it throws all your pen strokes into little note boxes, which move around sometimes. I do a lot of maths, and things like matrices and integral signs will never stay put, and this is unacceptable.
"the iPhone is a partner who tells you what you want, instead of someone who can offer anything you want."
Just like the macOS interface, as you say. You see the thing about apple UI methods is that they don't make sense to me and they don't make sense many other people, but anyone who finds they do make sense, and indeed Apple themselves, will vehemently deny this and defend their UI even though there is clear evidence here that it is not as clear as they would like to think. It puts me off. For example, the universal menu bar thing in OS(whatever), makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me, so apple is saying that a bar across the top of the screen, completely abstracted away from the app with focus, holds all that apps menus? and changes what is contained in it as focus changes? And that is supposed to be clear and intuitive?
The thing about UI design is that there is absolutely no way to design an interface that 'makes sense' to everyone. Everyone perceives and interprets things in a totally different way and therefore as far as I am concerned I would prefer to have multiple, configurable ways to do any one thing, since then I can make my UI work the way I think. Making this possible in a not so confusing manner to me, THAT is the essence of good interface design.
Computers are complex and powerful tools, you can't hide this by dumbing down an interface.
That is because elections are fought and won in the outer suburban belts of all cities in Australia, with a marginal amount of attention paid to the bush. Mostly the inner cities are of the died in the wool type.
Why do you think the only demographic that matters to the ruling class anymore (and for the last 10 years) is the "working family". God I want to tear my ears off every time I hear that phrase. I only hope petrol prices and food prices continue to destroy this abysmal curse upon our society.
I have 1 gig in the eee, and I run Xubuntu, the cpu IS low powered and the battery life is the best I've seen in a laptop. I can upgrade to 2GB easily and cheaply, and 4GB won't be far off the future. What is your point? Because my point is that even cheap, low end stuff these days is coming out with at least 1GB of ram as standard.
In my desktop PC which runs Vista (happily), and my other 2yr old laptop which also runs Vista happily, the requirements are met with ease and don't hurt my wallet. Yes Vista chews battery quicker than XP, a valid gripe, but on my high end machine it is not relevant.
What the hell has happened the nerds around here? You guys are getting *old*. My eee 901 comes with 1 gig of ram, 2 gigs of ram is not, I repeat NOT anything special. Its 2009 for gods sake! What is 2 gig these days? $30-40 worth of hardware? 80 gig hard drive? Can you even buy those anymore? I don't think, bar the atom, that there even exists a non dual core cpu on the market.
Jesus guys get with the program, this stuff is pretty much middle of the road.
Another happy eee owner here (901, love it) with Xubuntu and adams kernel from array.org. This is seriously the easiest and most well functioning linux install I've ever experienced. With the custom kernel more or less everything just worked straight away.
The only thing is to get the gsynaptics trackpad drivers going, the multitouch is top notch once they are working properly.
Microsoft is not responsible for writing drivers to run HP hardware. They ARE responsible for producing a working API and documentation for writing drivers to suit their OS, and given the amount of hardware out there that *does* simply work, I'd say they held up their end of the deal.
If your HP hardware does not work in Vista, go talk to HP about it, if they do nto fix it, return your defective device and get one that works. It should not be Microsoft's problem.
No, Vista completely changed its driver model. I'm not entirely clued up on how it goes but I am pretty sure that they gave most of the hardware companies a heads up on this through most of XP. The other thing they did (which is the more stupid decision) was to force hardware vendors to go through an expensive hoop jumping process to have drivers signed by MS. Only signed drivers will work. As a result, many hardware vendors said 'up yours' to MS and as a result you had the shitstorm we all witnessed.
There is one upside to this strict adherence to driver signing: Vista and Win7 have this wonderful feature whereby you can click "automatically download and install drivers" and you know what? it works. Yes I know XP could do this but it mostly did not work.
Now I'm sure I'm not exactly right on the details but its not entirely all Ms's fault. Really they were just trying to mimic Apple in yet another way. You can't blame em for being jealous.
Given that satellites travel at speeds measured in km/s and the paths of these satellites were something close to perpendicular to each other judging by the little animation that has been produced, I'd say that the probability that they were going to hit was immeasurably small, smaller than any error contained within any calculation that could be made. That is to say: entirely unpredictable. This is without a doubt a freak occurrence if you ask me, like shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet... by accident. Earth is a big place... orbit is an even bigger place.
That said I agree with you: The idea that this was Putin plotting away in some dark cave to 'test' Obama by shooting down a private satellite, well yeah thats a pretty far stretch.
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I thought the figures were out and the last round of cash handouts made a temporary and near insignificant increase in consumer spending. Many people who I talk to are simply saying its going on the credit card repayments, or the mortgage, or in the bank. The other thing is that money spent is going on superfluous bullshit so that most of that money goes offshore since its going on imported luxuries.
We have real hurt right now in the economy, people ARE losing jobs and this stimulus does nothing about it. Mining can't be helped, thats unfortunate but next in line is private development, do you have any idea of how much private property development is going belly up, not because the businesses are not sound, but because lending has dried up completely. Set up a government run non bank lender and throw the stimulus money behind that. Get these people out working again by compensating for the true deficiencies in the economy. That way when all is said and done at least the stimulus money is invested in assets, not spent on useless plastic crap.
Seriously, I know the economic trouble has come from offshore but it has hilighted real issues we have in the developed nations. Debt fuelled consumption is a stupid, stupid idea and sooner or later you are going to have to pay off the credit cards. That is really what this whole mess comes down to, too much money has been loaned out for absolutely no real economic gain. A correction has been on the cards for a long time now. The problem is that Rudd & Swan, like Howard and Costello, have absolutely NO background in economic theory, these guys, all of them, are glorified arts graduates and lawyers. They have no concept of economics. Only Keating has demonstrated any sort of interest in real economic theory in the past 30 years (probably much more) and even he has no real education in the area, we were just lucky that Keating turned out to be really quite a good economist despite this (this is fairly well accepted, not my own fanboyism).
With you all of the way there buddy, and as a die hard despiser of wannabe blue bloods myself, I'm so far very tempted to vote for the enemy next time (if and only if Turnbull is still leader). Why? Rudd is a cunt, a slimy arrogant ultraconservative cunt with less than no concept of economics and a dangerous penchant for signing blank cheques. Harsh? Well thats how I'm feeling right now, I am so mad with this useless excuse for a new government. The response to the Henson photos was inexcusable, and now this stimulus bull has just gone too far, $30 billion in the hole, 5 years of deficit budgets in one fell swoop, we've gone from having the strongest government balance sheet in the OECD to being doomed to years of deficit... and we're in recession anyway? For what? A few new DVD players and a whole lot dropped on the pokies? Fuck that! I've yet to meet one single person of any ideological background that agrees with this cash handout business, it scares the hell out of me...
Anyway, enough rant, this stuff tends to boil over once I start thinking about it.
Troll? WTF? I'm attempting to open a line of debate based on my experience as a long time firefox user who has become disillusioned. Disagree all you want but I'm not trolling.
Goddamn trigger happy mods...
That is interesting because firefox on my Ubuntu powered eee 901 is a useless pile of slow ass crap. It is unresponsive, laggy, buggy and tends to crash, it is also one of the only apps I use that still has rendering issues under compiz. I have to use flashblock just to make the damn thing work, and to me that is just ridiculous, I LIKE my flash content.
Thats the other argument thats being thrown around here a lot this whole nonsense about: "Firefox is fast if you use adblock, flashblock and noscript". So in other words it can match the speed of other browsers if you disable functionality? Who cares, Chrome is the fastest browser I've ever used and it can do it while rendering ads, javascript and flash.
And yet somehow it manages to run at half the speed of Chrome and IE8 with those same 10 tabs open, and frequently brings my computer to a grinding halt because it doesn't like some random bit of javascript that I can't identify and thus I need to close the entire thing to get it all going again. It is also responsible for a great deal of hard drive grinding on my Vista laptop...
Ram is cheap, I have lots of it, my browser is welcome to it, so long as it does not eat it up exponentially like firefox used to. Firefox has dropped the ball, and its time people started admitting it. Firefox is slow, its addons are overrated and often poorly coded and it has poor handling of javascript, to be gentle.
There is an IE8 story on slashdot right now. I know it probably wasn't there when you posted this, but seriously dude come on, you *really* thought slashdot wasn't going to post up that story??
As a web developer myself who used to use firebug, Chrome has turned out to be by far the better tool. The javascript console is a whole lot better than firebug. When you are in Chrome, click the little page menu icon, and in the menu there is a flyout called "Developer". They have actually built web development tools into the browser, screw half-assed bodgey addons, Chrome is the ducks nuts when it comes to web development.
I hate using firefox now that I've become accustomed to Chrome, on any system of any spec firefox is just slow as a dog, far slower than IE7 even which is embarrassing. What really gets to me about firefox is the linux build is near unusable in its slowness. I have it on my xubuntu eee pc, and its just about worthless as a web browser, especially in that limited environment.
LOL, ok I meant HSDPA... shit. Its damn early down here ok, I posted that at 6:30am...
Dude are you serious? Nokias have been able to cut and paste for years. My Ericsson W910i can cut and paste any piece of text I want, anywhere. It even does it with a decent UI, I merely open up my options menu, tell it I want to mark some text, click the start and the end of my desired text, and it copies it. then I can paste it wherever. Its a $100 phone with no keyboard! Its not 'smart' but I tell you what, it has HDMI, a web browser, a better camera than the iPhone that can take video, and its a decent mp3 player, and it can cut and paste with extreme ease, it even has a very similar predictive text system to the iPhone.
But its not an iPhone, its just a cheap ass middle of the road free on a basic plan thing that everybody has. So why, why does it have equal to or better features than the iPhone, a damn expensive premium product?
Um, yes you can, you just divide it into 1... duh dude.
We're not far off the point where your TV will be hooked up to a small media center thing on your network that has internet and access to shared media on other computers. Actually most houses already have these: Playstation3 and XBox360 are exactly these kind of devices. All the big flatscreen TVs these days take dvi input, or even rgb some of them, and if you have ps3 and xbox then you have hdmi out anyway.
At my home I run a central fileserver with a pile of hard drives in it, we have a computer set up in the lounge room with a TV capture card that even has its own remote control. Vista media centre isn't even half bad at running a digital home theatre setup. Its the ultimate setup and I think it will become more popular to do things this way in the future. Me I would never go back now that I've got it like this, I know I'm a tech geek but seriously most people are becoming tech geeks as well, and the consoles are rapidly narrowing the divide in terms of networked home entertainment.
When you see the movie, you will know what I'm talking about. In the comic, Rorschach takes on two cops with an improvised flame thrower and runs upstairs setting fire to the place. In the movie he takes on like 8 cops, burning 3 or 4 and beating the snot out of a few more. After he jumps out of the window he lands unscathed, jumps up and proceeds to beat the living snot out of another 6-8 cops before he is overwhelmed. Scenes like the prison scene where he burns the guy, they throw in a short fight first, etc. When the gang tries to mug them, they break arms and several legs in half, and send villains flying through the air with punches. There is boatloads of choreographed kung fu with wires and stuff.
It looks cool but missed the point, these guys are not meant to be super heroes, but they are basically portrayed as such. I think the way they did the Batman reboot was far better, the fighting was still brutal but there wasn't any of this punch a guy and send him flying twelve feet through the air, to hit a wall and send concrete bits flying everywhere, which basically never stops in watchmen. So yeah, I know there is some fighting in the watchmen comics, but when you see the movie you'll see when they are compared, there really isn't any fighting in the comics after all... not like this. I think it was probably the one aspect of the film that totally failed to capture the feel of the comics, the heroes don't seem vulnerable at all, they seem more like, well, spartans.
There is loads of stuff that is not adequately explained in the movie, which is covered in detail in the book. The basic idea is that Manhattan, through his super powers has advanced science tremendously since he appeared, in fact there are even aspects of this left out of the movie like by the 80s all cars are electric due to his advances in battery technology.
Rorschach's mask is made of a special fabric designed by Manhattan, it contains two fluids between layers of latex that react to heat and pressure and don't mix. He makes it out of a dress as the other comment explains.
Also in the comic they are not amazing fighting machines at all, that was all Snyder. In the comic they barely even fight, for example Rorschach doesn't take on a dozen cops in the street, he just hits the ground, is injured by his fall and gets beaten. Owl guy and boob girl don't utterly destroy the entire gang in the street, they manage to beat them off but they are puffed out afterward. And so on.
You should read the comic, its really quite a good story, great atmosphere, great dialogue (most of the movie script is near word for word lifted from the comic).
If you read the comic, its abundantly obvious which scenes are intended to be like this, there are many instances of several frames showing more or less the same thing. The movie does a good job of reproducing stuff like that faithfully. Maybe you didn't like it, but it is how it should have been.
Why?? What on earth does the Apple brand have that would make it any better than any other box for use as a server? Look I can understand (but not agree with) the idea that people want a nice white shiny thing on display in their office or living room, but precisely what advantage does a mac have as a server? (disclaimer: I actually use a G4 powermac as a server, because it was the best piece of junk I had lying around, but I run a linux server OS). Lets see, Intel chip: check, DDR3 RAM: check, HDD: check, Network card: check... does a server need anything else? You don't need a good video card. And OSX has got to be about the stupidest choice of server OS you can think of... I just do not get it.
Oh and a mac (not)mini that is higher specc'd than a mac mini... for the same price as a mac mini? Unlikely.
I can barely get Quicktime to do anything on my windows machines, ever. I'm amazed that itunes can play music! Oh and theres the MPEG encoding issues whereby anything with 64 bit tagging data will not be recognised in Quicktime, and thus itunes, and thus an ipod, despite this being a part of the MPEG standard (google quicktime 202 error). This has been an outstanding issue sine 2005.
Apple software on windows is buggy and inoperative without fail, and behaves like goddamn spyware the way each Apple product will try and install all of its friends.
Upfront disclaimer: I am a Vista user, a satisfied one, who is more than impressed with the handwriting recognition, to top it off I also own and use a genuine Tablet PC. Oh and I have a couple of Ubuntu machines too (for cred).
One thing I have read about Vistas handwriting recognition is that they put as much, if not more emphasis on stroke order and direction than the actual shape of the output. The other thing is that it learns your personal handwriting, and does this very well. It is by an extremely wide margin, the best handwriting recognition out there, but they do not produce a single decent application to take advantage of it! OneNote is terrible, terrible software, even though I primarily use it, Journal, while having excellent handwriting capabilities is completely devoid of features. There is no in between solution that I have been able to find, since OneNote is primarily a note taking platform for any sort of notes (typed really) it throws all your pen strokes into little note boxes, which move around sometimes. I do a lot of maths, and things like matrices and integral signs will never stay put, and this is unacceptable.
Anyway, enough rant.
Let me correct that for you:
"the iPhone is a partner who tells you what you want, instead of someone who can offer anything you want."
Just like the macOS interface, as you say. You see the thing about apple UI methods is that they don't make sense to me and they don't make sense many other people, but anyone who finds they do make sense, and indeed Apple themselves, will vehemently deny this and defend their UI even though there is clear evidence here that it is not as clear as they would like to think. It puts me off. For example, the universal menu bar thing in OS(whatever), makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me, so apple is saying that a bar across the top of the screen, completely abstracted away from the app with focus, holds all that apps menus? and changes what is contained in it as focus changes? And that is supposed to be clear and intuitive?
The thing about UI design is that there is absolutely no way to design an interface that 'makes sense' to everyone. Everyone perceives and interprets things in a totally different way and therefore as far as I am concerned I would prefer to have multiple, configurable ways to do any one thing, since then I can make my UI work the way I think. Making this possible in a not so confusing manner to me, THAT is the essence of good interface design.
Computers are complex and powerful tools, you can't hide this by dumbing down an interface.
That is because elections are fought and won in the outer suburban belts of all cities in Australia, with a marginal amount of attention paid to the bush. Mostly the inner cities are of the died in the wool type.
Why do you think the only demographic that matters to the ruling class anymore (and for the last 10 years) is the "working family". God I want to tear my ears off every time I hear that phrase. I only hope petrol prices and food prices continue to destroy this abysmal curse upon our society.
I have 1 gig in the eee, and I run Xubuntu, the cpu IS low powered and the battery life is the best I've seen in a laptop. I can upgrade to 2GB easily and cheaply, and 4GB won't be far off the future. What is your point? Because my point is that even cheap, low end stuff these days is coming out with at least 1GB of ram as standard.
In my desktop PC which runs Vista (happily), and my other 2yr old laptop which also runs Vista happily, the requirements are met with ease and don't hurt my wallet. Yes Vista chews battery quicker than XP, a valid gripe, but on my high end machine it is not relevant.
What the hell has happened the nerds around here? You guys are getting *old*. My eee 901 comes with 1 gig of ram, 2 gigs of ram is not, I repeat NOT anything special. Its 2009 for gods sake! What is 2 gig these days? $30-40 worth of hardware? 80 gig hard drive? Can you even buy those anymore? I don't think, bar the atom, that there even exists a non dual core cpu on the market.
Jesus guys get with the program, this stuff is pretty much middle of the road.
Another happy eee owner here (901, love it) with Xubuntu and adams kernel from array.org. This is seriously the easiest and most well functioning linux install I've ever experienced. With the custom kernel more or less everything just worked straight away.
The only thing is to get the gsynaptics trackpad drivers going, the multitouch is top notch once they are working properly.
Microsoft is not responsible for writing drivers to run HP hardware. They ARE responsible for producing a working API and documentation for writing drivers to suit their OS, and given the amount of hardware out there that *does* simply work, I'd say they held up their end of the deal.
If your HP hardware does not work in Vista, go talk to HP about it, if they do nto fix it, return your defective device and get one that works. It should not be Microsoft's problem.
No, Vista completely changed its driver model. I'm not entirely clued up on how it goes but I am pretty sure that they gave most of the hardware companies a heads up on this through most of XP. The other thing they did (which is the more stupid decision) was to force hardware vendors to go through an expensive hoop jumping process to have drivers signed by MS. Only signed drivers will work. As a result, many hardware vendors said 'up yours' to MS and as a result you had the shitstorm we all witnessed.
There is one upside to this strict adherence to driver signing: Vista and Win7 have this wonderful feature whereby you can click "automatically download and install drivers" and you know what? it works. Yes I know XP could do this but it mostly did not work.
Now I'm sure I'm not exactly right on the details but its not entirely all Ms's fault. Really they were just trying to mimic Apple in yet another way. You can't blame em for being jealous.
Given that satellites travel at speeds measured in km/s and the paths of these satellites were something close to perpendicular to each other judging by the little animation that has been produced, I'd say that the probability that they were going to hit was immeasurably small, smaller than any error contained within any calculation that could be made. That is to say: entirely unpredictable. This is without a doubt a freak occurrence if you ask me, like shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet... by accident. Earth is a big place... orbit is an even bigger place.
That said I agree with you: The idea that this was Putin plotting away in some dark cave to 'test' Obama by shooting down a private satellite, well yeah thats a pretty far stretch.