There was discussion on the mailing list recently about making the few changes required to make Numpy work on 2.6. I think those may be done already (maybe only in SVN right now though?). But it sounded like 3.0 support is still a ways off.
Ever since Dell outsourced their customer service they've never been the same company. Every niggling little thing they push back on customers to do, every endless phone menu you have to take time to navigate, takes a little of the value away from their product.
Don't use the phone to contact Dell. Don't use email either. Use their web-chat interface. You get a written transcript just like email, but unlike email someone actually responds right away. Whatever you do when dealing with Dell tech support you're going to have to jump through all the hoops on their checklist. So just do it. Whenever you talk to a new rep, they'll probably ask you a lot of the same questions. You have a transcript, so just copy-n-paste from it till the new rep is satisfied. You can read your email or cruise Slashdot while you're waiting for responses from the rep. Far far better than waiting on the phone.
That's my 2c. I had some faulty memory. I'm in Japan but it's a US-bought Dell laptop. I tried email first. No response. Then I tried the chat interface. Much better.
Of course, using the chat interface requires you have access to a working computer, which you may not if you're in Afghanistan waiting for them to deliver the blasted thing to you.
Maybe they actually want to be able to read what's on the screen while walking across the college campus under the bright noon-day sun.
I'd really like to get one of these e-ink things, but it still just feels like its too early. The current devices remind me of that MP3 player I bought with 32MB of compact flash memory and a crappy little 1-line red LED display. The e-ink readers are still very pricey and lacking in basic features like that. Crappy support for viewing PDFs, inability to display multiple languages, super-slow refresh rates.
If you're going to go this route, Alice is probably a better choice, since it was basically designed as a tool to teach programming with 3D graphics.
As opposed to Blender, which well, wasn't actually designed at all.:-P (kidding -- Blender is great, but as a way to teach programming... the phrase "now you've got TWO problems" comes to mind.)
I think it's simple as how many people are interested in watching, the movie, tv-series, sporting event or the math battle(?).
Exactly! Mod this man up.
The large sums of money in pro-sports all come from viewers pockets at the end of the day, in one way or another. Even the advertising dollars, in a round-about way. There just aren't as many people who can appreciate a great math answer as can a flying slam dunk from the free-throw line. I don't think there's any way to change that.
It's simple supply and demand. Top-quality athletes have a much smaller supply than teachers.
Hogwash. Top-quality teachers are probably just as hard if not harder to find than top-quality athletes.
The difference is that amazing athletic ability is something that something like 90% of the population will gladly pay to see, or will at least sit and watch so that someone else can sell advertising on their eye-ball time.
Great teachers have a harder time drumming up those kind of audiences. There simply aren't as many consumers interested in the product they are offering.
So, it's all about supply and demand, yes, but you picked the wrong side of that equation. The supplies aren't that different. It's the difference in demand for watching athletes jump up and down vs demand for listening to educational lectures from skilled teachers.
Yeh, as pointed out by some pundit somewhere, the supposed problems with Vista are not things that you encounter just playing around with it for 10 minutes like they did in the "Mojave Experiment". The problems begin later when you start trying to actually do work. So the "Mojave experiment" proves nothing really.
That said, I haven't found too many problems with Vista on my new Dell XPS 1330 yet. Aside from the frequent blue screens and apps quitting randomly that is. Ok that was very annoying. But thankfully that seems to have gone away. I think maybe Windows Update installed a new video driver or something that fixed it. I did hear rumors that the initial NVIDIA drivers were buggy.
I always ran XP with the "Windows Classic" theme. I gave it a try in Vista, but the problem is that the dialogs that have been redesigned for Vista don't look very good in classic mode. You don't get the classic Explorer when you change that setting, you get Vista's Explorer drawn without the fancy color gradients, and the different components aren't visually distinct enough.
As for the default Vista look, it's thankfully much more bearable than XP's default look. XP's interface looked like it was targeted at kindergardeners. Vista's looks more like it's targeted at 12-year old boys. Here's hoping Windows 7 will finally look like it's targeting adults. Link in TFS got Slashdotted or something, so I'll have to wait to find out.
The Zip archiver built into Windows (XP and Vista) is horribly HORRIBLY slow compared to WinRAR. Probably most mom and pop users get along fine with it, but if you work with big archives a lot, it starts to get annoying fast. Also Windows only supports zip by default. If you've got to open a.gz.bz2.7z.rar.lzo or.lzh then it's no use.
That said, I haven't used WinZip in a long time. The interface on that thing was wretched. Worse than 7zip's even, so you might as well go with 7zip in that case. WinRAR's UI is pretty good compared to those two.
I haven't tried Vista either, but I can still hate it for the fact that Microsoft tried to use it as an excuse to kill OpenGL (oh, it's just too hard to make it work boo hoo). Fortunately the backlash was enough to convince them to change that strategy. But still they ended up making Vista a forced upgrade in order to use Direct3D 10. What's up with that? A graphics API requires upgrading your entire operating system?? Either something is really wrong with the internal architecture of Windows/Direct3D or MS is just being dishonest claiming that it can't be made available for XP. Anyway, my new Vista laptop is on order now. Hopefully they still have the "Classic Windows" option in the Display control panel.
Wasn't the Segway scooter already supposed to be "changing not just cars but cities, industries, energy, and - by removing dependence on foreign oil -- even wars."
Well, maybe Dean Kamen can get involved in this one too, and maybe this time it really can be a product that will change the world.
Ok, so the Segway was way over hyped, but I certainly can't knock him for his recent work on the brain controlled robotic prostheses. That really will change the world for anyone who needs one of those.
Agreed! I think graphics are a great way to get young folks interested in programming. They were the thing that captured my interest the most anyway. I can still remember trying to figure out some Apple BASIC code that made a little blip bounce around the screen back when I barely knew what a less than sign meant. But if making things move around on the screen doesn't motivate your kid, then find out what does. Other projects I remember working on early on were tools to make D&D characters, because I liked playing D&D but thought the process of re-rolling the dice a thousand times till I got the stats I wanted for a character was too laborious:-) Also my friends and I tried to create a computer version of the BattleTech board game. We had know idea what we were doing, and never got anything even close to playable, but I still learned a lot from it, and over the subsequent years as I learned knew tricks and techniques I always could recognize them as something useful, as something that would have helped us get over one hurdle or another I faced on those early projects.
These days I think maybe young folks might be more motivated by web stuff that they can show their friends. Hey check out my web page! (Which would suggest javascript or java as the first language) We didn't have a modem till I was in high school so those things weren't really an option back when I was learning. It looks like a lot of kids are writing silly plugins for Firefox too.
But still I think graphics is good, because before long you start to see that you need to learn some math to do more interesting things with it.
... and numerous surgical instruments bear his name
Doctor: Ahh, a new surgical instrument. Wonderful. What's it called, nurse? Nurse: A "Michael" Doctor: That's going to cause a bit of confusion, mind if we call it a Debakey?
I think the OP was tricked into thinking that the crappy software that came with the camera was actually required to use the camera. The instructions that come with these cameras do tend to make it sound like installing the software is a mandatory step, and fail to mention that you can just access the pictures using Explorer. I guess they want to get their little bit of AdWare on your system. Or maybe they really are worried that Aunt Tillie doesn't know how to use Explorer.
I thought this was the whole purpose of reviews. You read some reviews before you go shopping and then you simply don't buy it if everyone says it sucks.
Really, I don't understand why you think you should be able to return a game just because it sucks. I can't return a book if it turns out to have a lame ending. I can't return a movie if the director turns out to be a talentless hack. If the game is crashing every 30 minutes, ok, but just because you didn't find the game entertaining enough is not enough of a reason. Stores with a liberal return policy are doing you a favor -- there is no constitutional right to return merchandise for a full refund at your whim.
When NVIDIA sues ATI over patent infringement, ATI just turns around and says "oh yeh, well you're violating all these patents of ours". But the beauty of being a patent troll is that you can't be in violation of the defendant's technology patents if you don't make anything.
This really ought to be made illegal. If you cannot show that you are at least actively pursuing creation of a product based on your patent after X number of years, then your claims to the patent should be considered abandoned, or at least claims for damages should be nullified. It may be difficult to define what "active pursuit" of a product would be, but let the jury decide. It's also difficult to define when "risque" becomes "obscene", or when "borrowing ideas" becomes "copyright infringement", but we let judges and juries decide these things too.
The D programming language has nested functions. I think maybe I heard C++0x was going to get them too. I hope so. They're just too darn useful not to have.
Thunderbird sync would be great not just for contacts, but also for the newsreader. I'm sick of having to look over all the same usenet articles again to figure out what I've read and what I haven't when I go from home to work and back.
I know this is Slashdot but there are still a few people out there using Windows, y'know. And GTK on Windows is just so-so at best. It looks and acts un-natural. Don't know about Mac, but I suspect wx is ahead of GTK in terms of not sticking out like a sore thumb there too.
Slashdot Mirror
2.6 != 3.0rc3
There was discussion on the mailing list recently about making the few changes required to make Numpy work on 2.6. I think those may be done already (maybe only in SVN right now though?). But it sounded like 3.0 support is still a ways off.
Ever since Dell outsourced their customer service they've never been the same company. Every niggling little thing they push back on customers to do, every endless phone menu you have to take time to navigate, takes a little of the value away from their product.
Don't use the phone to contact Dell. Don't use email either. Use their web-chat interface. You get a written transcript just like email, but unlike email someone actually responds right away. Whatever you do when dealing with Dell tech support you're going to have to jump through all the hoops on their checklist. So just do it. Whenever you talk to a new rep, they'll probably ask you a lot of the same questions. You have a transcript, so just copy-n-paste from it till the new rep is satisfied. You can read your email or cruise Slashdot while you're waiting for responses from the rep. Far far better than waiting on the phone.
That's my 2c. I had some faulty memory. I'm in Japan but it's a US-bought Dell laptop. I tried email first. No response. Then I tried the chat interface. Much better.
Of course, using the chat interface requires you have access to a working computer, which you may not if you're in Afghanistan waiting for them to deliver the blasted thing to you.
Maybe they actually want to be able to read what's on the screen while walking across the college campus under the bright noon-day sun.
I'd really like to get one of these e-ink things, but it still just feels like its too early. The current devices remind me of that MP3 player I bought with 32MB of compact flash memory and a crappy little 1-line red LED display. The e-ink readers are still very pricey and lacking in basic features like that. Crappy support for viewing PDFs, inability to display multiple languages, super-slow refresh rates.
The question wasn't about applying for a new patent. The grandparent said you needed to do a due diligence search just to make a product.
If you're going to go this route, Alice is probably a better choice, since it was basically designed as a tool to teach programming with 3D graphics.
As opposed to Blender, which well, wasn't actually designed at all. :-P
(kidding -- Blender is great, but as a way to teach programming... the phrase "now you've got TWO problems" comes to mind.)
I think it's simple as how many people are interested in watching, the movie, tv-series, sporting event or the math battle(?).
Exactly! Mod this man up.
The large sums of money in pro-sports all come from viewers pockets at the end of the day, in one way or another.
Even the advertising dollars, in a round-about way. There just aren't as many people who can appreciate a great math answer as can a flying slam dunk from the free-throw line. I don't think there's any way to change that.
It's simple supply and demand. Top-quality athletes have a much smaller supply than teachers.
Hogwash. Top-quality teachers are probably just as hard if not harder to find than top-quality athletes.
The difference is that amazing athletic ability is something that something like 90% of the population will gladly pay to see, or will at least sit and watch so that someone else can sell advertising on their eye-ball time.
Great teachers have a harder time drumming up those kind of audiences. There simply aren't as many consumers interested in the product they are offering.
So, it's all about supply and demand, yes, but you picked the wrong side of that equation. The supplies aren't that different. It's the difference in demand for watching athletes jump up and down vs demand for listening to educational lectures from skilled teachers.
Yeh, as pointed out by some pundit somewhere, the supposed problems with Vista are not things that you encounter just playing around with it for 10 minutes like they did in the "Mojave Experiment". The problems begin later when you start trying to actually do work. So the "Mojave experiment" proves nothing really.
That said, I haven't found too many problems with Vista on my new Dell XPS 1330 yet. Aside from the frequent blue screens and apps quitting randomly that is. Ok that was very annoying. But thankfully that seems to have gone away. I think maybe Windows Update installed a new video driver or something that fixed it. I did hear rumors that the initial NVIDIA drivers were buggy.
I always ran XP with the "Windows Classic" theme. I gave it a try in Vista, but the problem is that the dialogs that have been redesigned for Vista don't look very good in classic mode. You don't get the classic Explorer when you change that setting, you get Vista's Explorer drawn without the fancy color gradients, and the different components aren't visually distinct enough.
As for the default Vista look, it's thankfully much more bearable than XP's default look. XP's interface looked like it was targeted at kindergardeners. Vista's looks more like it's targeted at 12-year old boys. Here's hoping Windows 7 will finally look like it's targeting adults. Link in TFS got Slashdotted or something, so I'll have to wait to find out.
The Zip archiver built into Windows (XP and Vista) is horribly HORRIBLY slow compared to WinRAR. .gz .bz2 .7z .rar .lzo or .lzh then it's no use.
Probably most mom and pop users get along fine with it, but if you work with big archives a lot, it starts to get annoying fast. Also Windows only supports zip by default. If you've got to open a
That said, I haven't used WinZip in a long time. The interface on that thing was wretched. Worse than 7zip's even, so you might as well go with 7zip in that case. WinRAR's UI is pretty good compared to those two.
What you say!? Oh noes! Hardware companies are reluctant to act against their own interests?! I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
I haven't tried Vista either, but I can still hate it for the fact that Microsoft tried to use it as an excuse to kill OpenGL (oh, it's just too hard to make it work boo hoo). Fortunately the backlash was enough to convince them to change that strategy. But still they ended up making Vista a forced upgrade in order to use Direct3D 10. What's up with that? A graphics API requires upgrading your entire operating system?? Either something is really wrong with the internal architecture of Windows/Direct3D or MS is just being dishonest claiming that it can't be made available for XP. Anyway, my new Vista laptop is on order now. Hopefully they still have the "Classic Windows" option in the Display control panel.
Wasn't the Segway scooter already supposed to be "changing not just cars but cities, industries, energy, and - by removing dependence on foreign oil -- even wars."
Well, maybe Dean Kamen can get involved in this one too, and maybe this time it really can be a product that will change the world.
Ok, so the Segway was way over hyped, but I certainly can't knock him for his recent work on the brain controlled robotic prostheses. That really will change the world for anyone who needs one of those.
Agreed! I think graphics are a great way to get young folks interested in programming. They were the thing that captured my interest the most anyway. I can still remember trying to figure out some Apple BASIC code that made a little blip bounce around the screen back when I barely knew what a less than sign meant. But if making things move around on the screen doesn't motivate your kid, then find out what does. Other projects I remember working on early on were tools to make D&D characters, because I liked playing D&D but thought the process of re-rolling the dice a thousand times till I got the stats I wanted for a character was too laborious :-) Also my friends and I tried to create a computer version of the BattleTech board game. We had know idea what we were doing, and never got anything even close to playable, but I still learned a lot from it, and over the subsequent years as I learned knew tricks and techniques I always could recognize them as something useful, as something that would have helped us get over one hurdle or another I faced on those early projects.
These days I think maybe young folks might be more motivated by web stuff that they can show their friends. Hey check out my web page! (Which would suggest javascript or java as the first language) We didn't have a modem till I was in high school so those things weren't really an option back when I was learning. It looks like a lot of kids are writing silly plugins for Firefox too.
But still I think graphics is good, because before long you start to see that you need to learn some math to do more interesting things with it.
For the Monty-Python impaired:
http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/bruces.htm
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA
... and numerous surgical instruments bear his name
Doctor: Ahh, a new surgical instrument. Wonderful. What's it called, nurse?
Nurse: A "Michael"
Doctor: That's going to cause a bit of confusion, mind if we call it a Debakey?
I think the OP was tricked into thinking that the crappy software that came with the camera was actually required to use the camera. The instructions that come with these cameras do tend to make it sound like installing the software is a mandatory step, and fail to mention that you can just access the pictures using Explorer. I guess they want to get their little bit of AdWare on your system. Or maybe they really are worried that Aunt Tillie doesn't know how to use Explorer.
I thought this was the whole purpose of reviews. You read some reviews before you go shopping and then you simply don't buy it if everyone says it sucks.
Really, I don't understand why you think you should be able to return a game just because it sucks. I can't return a book if it turns out to have a lame ending. I can't return a movie if the director turns out to be a talentless hack. If the game is crashing every 30 minutes, ok, but just because you didn't find the game entertaining enough is not enough of a reason. Stores with a liberal return policy are doing you a favor -- there is no constitutional right to return merchandise for a full refund at your whim.
Crashes a lot for me too (WinXP).
Hopefully 3.1 will be better thanks to all the crash reports I've sent 'em!
Or 5/9 even.
When NVIDIA sues ATI over patent infringement, ATI just turns around and says "oh yeh, well you're violating all these patents of ours". But the beauty of being a patent troll is that you can't be in violation of the defendant's technology patents if you don't make anything.
This really ought to be made illegal. If you cannot show that you are at least actively pursuing creation of a product based on your patent after X number of years, then your claims to the patent should be considered abandoned, or at least claims for damages should be nullified. It may be difficult to define what "active pursuit" of a product would be, but let the jury decide. It's also difficult to define when "risque" becomes "obscene", or when "borrowing ideas" becomes "copyright infringement", but we let judges and juries decide these things too.
The D programming language has nested functions. I think maybe I heard C++0x was going to get them too. I hope so. They're just too darn useful not to have.
Most of his rebuttal over the Jar Jar fiasco was basically "These movies are for kids -- they've always been for kids. You just grew up."
:-)
I think it's a load of hooey, but I can believe that he believes that.
So I think he doesn't mind if the average slashdot reader doesn't like what he's made as long as "the kids" find it entertaining.
But nice Karnaugh map of the Lucas psyche, anyway.
Mod this up! Email your congressman even!
Thunderbird sync would be great not just for contacts, but also for the newsreader. I'm sick of having to look over all the same usenet articles again to figure out what I've read and what I haven't when I go from home to work and back.
I know this is Slashdot but there are still a few people out there using Windows, y'know. And GTK on Windows is just so-so at best. It looks and acts un-natural. Don't know about Mac, but I suspect wx is ahead of GTK in terms of not sticking out like a sore thumb there too.