Oh great idea... Let's add a nuclear explosive device to the mix of radiation sources we have to shield from.
Doesn't really matter what propulsion mechanism you use, they are all going to look like explosions.
If you manage to get to the speed of light, it's going to take some 15 years just to make it to the nearest star...
Antimatter-matter propulsion can in theory reach near the speed of light and Gliese 581 with a confirmed set of exoplanets in the habitable zone would then be reacheable in >22 years (speed of light limit).
Human life is NOT going to survive the radiation exposure over that length of time.
Travelling near the speed of light also would make it more probable that small particle collisions head on would shower energy like in the LHC, so we'd need good enginneering. Radiation is just high energy particles. Some have positive or negative charges and could be deflected by a magnetic field. Others that are neutral you'd want to make it so that they don't head your way (and instead out into space) or find a process that does not produce them.
I wouldn't blame the GP entirely though. Scientists are so bad at actually relaying information to regular folks that it partially ends up in the domain of moneyed cranks that can afford to pay for good animations and pseudo-documentaries. Also, it doesn't help that many of the politicians and influential business people are old and don't care what happens in 50 years time.
Perhaps edit the HOSTS file so that facebook.com is sent to 127.0.0.1...It's already blocked at the firewall. I'm also aware of the about:config settings.
Oh yeah. Well where I work it is blocked at the firewall, in the hosts file redirect to 127.0.0.1 on both the client computer and Internet cache computer, in both group policy and GPP that refreshes every 5 seconds, and a keylogger checks for typing the word "facebook" which then sends an electric shock to the chair of the person who typed it. Beat that!
I think the parent was talking about quantum theory applied to electromagnetism (weak nuclear forces are combined too) and what you describe are the classical/relativistic equations of Maxwell.
I seem to remember that there actually is a reason why monopoles should exist with a unified theory of electromagnetism/weak force/quantum menchanics/relativity to describe a particular phenominon to the greatest degree of numerical accuracy, but unfortunately I just can't remember what that is. I seem to remember that possibility of a magnetic monopole, whilst not allowed in "classical" non-discrete physics because the potential at 1/x^2 goes to infinity at x=0, is allowed in quantum field theory because it sets up space as a very fine grid, allowing for different phsyics on the really small scale. Sorry, been out of physics for some years and I suppose it shows.
I think mars was doomed from the beginning but I wonder if Venus could be terraformed with some kind of aerosol cloud to shade it and reduce the thermal input.
I think that an answer to that requires some background. Venus has already lost most of its water to space due to a combination of things. Atmospheric sputtering due to the small magnetic field because of slow rotation rate (thought to be caused by an early collision with a proto planet early on) continues to carry along with the solar wind away lighter molecules like water and helium. Venus being closer to the sun doesn't help it either.
This documentary shows how the earth was formed and also gives the current leading theory on how the water got here (and on venus and mars) -- that is that as jupiter and saturn were finding a stable orbit around the sun they caused many far out icy asteroids to come in a collision course with the inner planet in a bombardment that carried water to the surface of these planets.
So we would need to speed up the rotation of venus or smack it with big highly magnetic rocks from space to simulate a magnetic field, as well as causing icy asteroids to smash into it to make up for the lost water before we could try fun things like GM bacteria that eat sulphur. Any light compound in the atmosphere would be stripped away from a coronal outburst of solar activity and wouldn't last that long.
There is no way that the Australian Labor Party could be considered Centre Right, not in a million years.
This being a worldly site (albeit with a US focus), the Australian Labour Party is now a mainly centre-right party with an occasional centre-left policy. This was not always the case and is often confused because the main opposition, the Australian Liberal Party is the opposite party to the Liberal party in the US. It started as a workers and unions party with links to the country and gradually morphed to a centre-right party in recent times in the hopes to attract popular votes. To politicians the country is now a liberal voting block (except the indigineous areas, although that may be changing) and it's all a bit dishevelled because there are right and left factions in the Labour party that oscillate between periods of dominance. The state Australian Labour parties are easier to see examples of a move to centre-right in recent times.
Whether or not a robot does your next jab you might consider drinking water an hour or so beforehand to get fully hydrated. This will help a lot in case you haven't been doing this and you can drink water even if you need to fast.
I remember that I got a copy from a friend in high school on a collection of ripped CD's that I might just as easily have not gotten my hands on. It is the single-most inspiring series of lectures many people will ever hear in physics for the target audience of entry level university physics progressing towards graduate physics (save maybe the early lecture on how to take a derivative of displacement, which showed the time of the series). About damn time that it is freely available to the general public.
...you're an intelligent person on the business side, you'll realize that the gains in goodwill you'll see by not offshoring support is much greater than the additional margin you may see by offshoring.
Surely if you're an "intelligent person on the business side" that'd make you more likely to outsource, save every penny in the short term to go to your pay packet and up and go when things start collapsing around you to another country where you can do it all over again or go on nice holidays.
This very different new theme and the window button changes don't seem to serve any purpose other than to make new visual changes for a new release.
Ubuntu might do better if they kept a better measure of consistency in the look-and-feel and user interface between versions.
For example, the shut down and log out buttons were separated in 9.10 and there is no longer any good way to have a single button that can simply shut down, standby, hibernate, and log out. There was no real need to change this and not provide a way of doing what was possible before.
Also, the volume control was merged into the notification area (to improve usability no doubt). The problem with this for me is when I watch a fullscreen something on my primary monitor, I cannot simply place a volume control applet on the other and scroll up and down to change the volume like I could before without making the primary notification area sit on the second monitor.
Change for the sake of change just doesn't seem like the way to promote a good Operating System. There will always be detractors, but Ubuntu should aim to have the level of consistency it needs for people to identify it (over a period of time longer than 6 months) as a particular brand.
Additionally, I personally would hate to see the old human theme disappear over time because a newer Macintosh-like theme takes some artist's fancy. I think the old human theme really captured the essence of the term "Ubuntu" (and the icons looked easier to associate with the tasks and didn't take so much space).
So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.
No, energy can't be transmitted instantly... you apparently still need the classical channel in order to know what measurement to perform in the receiving end, just like in good old quantum teleportation.
Yes. However, that is for one measurement. To really know what speed you are limited to before you can get surplus energy out on one end (eaten on the other of course), you also need to know how many possibilities there are for measurement, and how much energy you would lose in measuring the "wrong" variable.
For instance, you could set up, say 100 such entanglements in parallel and then measure at random whether some spin is up or down at some time of some particle or whatever would be necessary at random. Chances maybe good that you get the extra energy out on, say 2 of these 10 measurements and end up coming out on top. If this were possible, you might be able to beat the classical channel speed limit all together (albeit with somewhat diminished output) over large distances.
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with the first paragraph, I take issue with the second:
You can make a machine smarter, but people keep getting dumber all the time. At some point you just have to say to those people forget it, you're not going to learn, you're not worth trying to explain it to. Here's your Etch-a-Sketch.
From the context of an article on malware, are the users really getting dumber with time? Who really wants to learn about antivirus/security practises? This is the job of the techies, not something to foist on unsuspecting users. You cock this up it's your problem.
I hope you are not one of those people in tech-support who says to me to click on something I've already clicked on several times, then continues with the line that they would have to be sitting in front of the machine because it is "too hard" for me to understand, and who is a general waste of time to call with a computer problem.
The good ones almost always will solve a problem over the phone efficiently, be a pleasure to converse with, and not overtly insult their clients intelligence. They may even teach the average user something in the process (the user is unlikely to learn through doing if all they get is looked down on). You should ask yourself how would you like to be treated if you asked what's happening on the screen, and someone's running a quantum physics simulation.
Show something colorful/educational about computing on computer display terminals. However, make sure that when the kid get too close or touches the screen, he/she gets a good zap. That'll make them think twice about damaging the equipment.
(In case you are a moderator, I am of course joking, and not trying to give informative advice here).
A real problem with long variable names and strict formatting (spacing, line width, etc.) can come about when moderately difficult mathematical formulas have to be coded (and lots of them sometimes). I wouldn't want to read variable names longer than x,y,z, v (or maybe vel), etc. and function names longer than sin, cos, etc. in an actual formula. Nor would I want a single line of code split over 10 lines or for that line to be completely unaligned mathematically.
Sorry if I am falling into the same trap as many others here, as well as the the author of the article, and generalizing too much.
Seems to be. Although Compiz has some window related plugins that ought to be able to be configured to do the same thing.
Of course, the dragging with the mouse works in Metacity and Compiz, and is probably the easiest way to solve the problem (even for maximized windows).
Bullshit. There's no such thing as zero emissions unless you're knee deep in shit in the middle of the wilderness, burning wood for heat. Killing wild animals with your bare hands or tools you hobbled together yourself. Living in a hut made of shrubs down by the river.
You insensitive clod. You can go live knee deep in shit in the wilderness if you want to, hippie. I don't have to, as I travel by clean and green foot-power, ala Fred Flintstone.
I remember reading that GNOME 2.30 was going to be relabelled GNOME 3.00, or something like that. Where did all these ideas to change (read stuff up as per KDE rivals) a perfectly workable base desktop environment suddenly come from?
Why not focus on improving the 2.x series, and maybe add in some extra features for a 3.x release?
I would be very happy with a GNOME desktop that:
Made it possible to resize icons to any pixel width/height (SVG graphics) - so that the panel quick launchers/menu size can be more configurable.
The menu be easier to edit items. Also, maybe more features could be added to right/middle click on items.
Distro specific changes to menus could be more easily changed -- e.g. "Applications/Places/System" on Ubuntu could be replaced with whatever the user wants.
Icons would show up before clicking okay on a folder when setting them.
Screensavers become more configurable -- just add the "advanced" tab already damn it.
The quick launch bar could have icons moved around/ordered, added to, hidden, etc.
Nautilius have an extra list display that scrolls horizontally with vertical listings.
Maybe add a way of combining panel applets vertically in the one panel to save space (e.g. for the system monitors (provessor/memory/network/heat) and vertically list virtual desktops,etc.
Fix up bugs - e.g. make sure all applets do not move around on some logins and the system monitor does not sometimes reduces to one pixel vertically, etc.
Keep it looking and feeling normal; experiment only when old stuff is still made selectable (at least for a bit).
If GNOME developers did at least some of this kind of stuff, I'd be a very happy person indeed. They've made an excellent desktop so far and really doesn't need much more than polishing in my view.
Apple's development model, for years, has been to perpetually tweak and improve on their existing operating system code.
Seriously, don't bullshit me. I bought into the whole OS X is so superior, it's Unix, blah-de-da at one point and I found out it's a pile of shit when I tried it... It's people like you who end up causing good people who value their time greatly to waste their time and money on absolute shit... I have a problem when people like you start spouting lies and half truths.
Seeing as I don't really like Macs, I'm surprised to find myself thinking "what a whinger," when reading the parent post. What a bothersome tirade. The OP is saying that Apple tries to improve their software over time -- hardly an Earth shattering claim.
With regards to stability, we've probably all seen problems with the Operating System we use. Both with code and just generally.
Myself, I have seen code not work on one of Linux/Windows because of forward slash/backslash differences, "pause" and other basic features not working quite the same in C code, threading not working as intended because of different compilers doing different things, etc.
I've seen the video card driver lock Linux systems so bad that unplugging was the only option when rendering too much data at once, Windows 2000/XP not respond for many minutes when a network path could not be found or you mistakenly clikced "open with," Windows virus effects (graphics plain crash for no apparent reason when left idle too long, copy/paste feature removed, etc), problems of slowness/usability in Vista (reordering everything "for dummies"), Macintosh refuse to log in and just have the spinning wheel go on forever, etc, etc.
I think most people have had problems with whatever Operating System they run. It's like they have come out of their infancy, only to become little kids that have to be monitored and assisted to get out of trouble all the time. Problems are all part of the computer experience -- no Operating System has a monopoly on this (even Macs) or is free of them.
Casual gamers will generally see hardcore games as needlessly complicated. Hardcore gamers will generally see casual games as overly simple and thus boring. And thus, a divide was born.
Let me give a possible alternative explanation for these terms and the divide from a I-have-no-idea-what-type-of-gamer-I-am sort of a guy.
I think marketing types are to blame for all the overuse of stereotypes and general innovation killing in gaming-land of today.
It's possible that some time ago the people for whose job it is to increase profits probably decided that they were only selling their company's games to boys. Hence they could more than double their profits if they sold equally to girls, and then some more to older folks.
How to sell games though to this new audience with little previous exposure - pretty the games up, make them simpler, and have a "hold-your-hand" button.
The games were made much simpler, at the same time cheap RAM began to be made use of, by adding more and more save features+extra lives - ostensibly so that one didn't have to repeat things ad nauseam. This simplification removed a lot of the sense of satisfaction about beating a new challenge in a game. It also removed a feeling of fine control over the character, as it wasn't really necessary to acquire this over time to complete anything (for both developers and players).
So the games became simpler, more shallow, and less time was spent actually controlling the (now nicely rendered) character/object.
This I think is where the casual gamer/hard core gamer labelling comes in. Some people still wanted games with difficult to obtain objectives and gameplay. So, based on stereotypes of the day, the marketing types decided large amounts of button pressing (where it had to be the right buttons you mashed in order to progress) and enemies with huge health points would satisfy this. I am of course talking about first person shooters of the "hard-core" type. The rest of the games with lower difficulty were to also be sold to girls/older folk, and became "casual" games.
This divide between casual/hard-core seems to have happened over time though. It's as if all the good game developers jumped one-by-one into a big hole at different times, and are slowly trying to climb back towards the light.
I'll at least be happy if this game and others like it bring back that fine sense of control, innovative and varied game design, whilst keeping the possibility to die and have to redo things to get that bigger sense of achievement when completing something. Who cares what it is labelled by the media if the enjoyment you can get out of it is longer-lived, so much that it is really worth your while to play. I want to see more games that aren't about cheap, never ending victories, and actually challenging gameplay made fun.
Sorry if that all reads like a rant. I'm not usually up this early in the morning.
Okay. However, if they make the rules too annoying, some clever bastard in languages is bound to write the character limited section in Classsical Chinese... and the word limited section in humongous German words.
> But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation......then the computer on which the simulation is running must exist in a universe.
But this would make many things much easier to explain.
For instance, general relativity -> floating point bug; black holes -> program bug not picked up in testing, slowly patched out of existence; quantum double slit pattern -> performance optimization applied when no one is looking; time's arrow -> step simulation; big bang -> start time of simulation; expansion of the universe -> higher dimensional being that runs the simulation is on the hardware upgrade treadmill.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh great idea... Let's add a nuclear explosive device to the mix of radiation sources we have to shield from.
Doesn't really matter what propulsion mechanism you use, they are all going to look like explosions.
If you manage to get to the speed of light, it's going to take some 15 years just to make it to the nearest star...
Antimatter-matter propulsion can in theory reach near the speed of light and Gliese 581 with a confirmed set of exoplanets in the habitable zone would then be reacheable in >22 years (speed of light limit).
Human life is NOT going to survive the radiation exposure over that length of time.
Travelling near the speed of light also would make it more probable that small particle collisions head on would shower energy like in the LHC, so we'd need good enginneering. Radiation is just high energy particles. Some have positive or negative charges and could be deflected by a magnetic field. Others that are neutral you'd want to make it so that they don't head your way (and instead out into space) or find a process that does not produce them.
And then you can compare the butterfly diagrams posted by the parent to the surface temperature readings from the last 130 years. The Earth is undergoing significant climate change.
I wouldn't blame the GP entirely though. Scientists are so bad at actually relaying information to regular folks that it partially ends up in the domain of moneyed cranks that can afford to pay for good animations and pseudo-documentaries. Also, it doesn't help that many of the politicians and influential business people are old and don't care what happens in 50 years time.
Perhaps edit the HOSTS file so that facebook.com is sent to 127.0.0.1...It's already blocked at the firewall. I'm also aware of the about:config settings.
Oh yeah. Well where I work it is blocked at the firewall, in the hosts file redirect to 127.0.0.1 on both the client computer and Internet cache computer, in both group policy and GPP that refreshes every 5 seconds, and a keylogger checks for typing the word "facebook" which then sends an electric shock to the chair of the person who typed it. Beat that!
I think the parent was talking about quantum theory applied to electromagnetism (weak nuclear forces are combined too) and what you describe are the classical/relativistic equations of Maxwell.
I seem to remember that there actually is a reason why monopoles should exist with a unified theory of electromagnetism/weak force/quantum menchanics/relativity to describe a particular phenominon to the greatest degree of numerical accuracy, but unfortunately I just can't remember what that is. I seem to remember that possibility of a magnetic monopole, whilst not allowed in "classical" non-discrete physics because the potential at 1/x^2 goes to infinity at x=0, is allowed in quantum field theory because it sets up space as a very fine grid, allowing for different phsyics on the really small scale. Sorry, been out of physics for some years and I suppose it shows.
I think mars was doomed from the beginning but I wonder if Venus could be terraformed with some kind of aerosol cloud to shade it and reduce the thermal input.
I think that an answer to that requires some background. Venus has already lost most of its water to space due to a combination of things. Atmospheric sputtering due to the small magnetic field because of slow rotation rate (thought to be caused by an early collision with a proto planet early on) continues to carry along with the solar wind away lighter molecules like water and helium. Venus being closer to the sun doesn't help it either.
This documentary shows how the earth was formed and also gives the current leading theory on how the water got here (and on venus and mars) -- that is that as jupiter and saturn were finding a stable orbit around the sun they caused many far out icy asteroids to come in a collision course with the inner planet in a bombardment that carried water to the surface of these planets.
So we would need to speed up the rotation of venus or smack it with big highly magnetic rocks from space to simulate a magnetic field, as well as causing icy asteroids to smash into it to make up for the lost water before we could try fun things like GM bacteria that eat sulphur. Any light compound in the atmosphere would be stripped away from a coronal outburst of solar activity and wouldn't last that long.
There is no way that the Australian Labor Party could be considered Centre Right, not in a million years.
This being a worldly site (albeit with a US focus), the Australian Labour Party is now a mainly centre-right party with an occasional centre-left policy. This was not always the case and is often confused because the main opposition, the Australian Liberal Party is the opposite party to the Liberal party in the US. It started as a workers and unions party with links to the country and gradually morphed to a centre-right party in recent times in the hopes to attract popular votes. To politicians the country is now a liberal voting block (except the indigineous areas, although that may be changing) and it's all a bit dishevelled because there are right and left factions in the Labour party that oscillate between periods of dominance. The state Australian Labour parties are easier to see examples of a move to centre-right in recent times.
Whether or not a robot does your next jab you might consider drinking water an hour or so beforehand to get fully hydrated. This will help a lot in case you haven't been doing this and you can drink water even if you need to fast.
I remember that I got a copy from a friend in high school on a collection of ripped CD's that I might just as easily have not gotten my hands on. It is the single-most inspiring series of lectures many people will ever hear in physics for the target audience of entry level university physics progressing towards graduate physics (save maybe the early lecture on how to take a derivative of displacement, which showed the time of the series). About damn time that it is freely available to the general public.
...you're an intelligent person on the business side, you'll realize that the gains in goodwill you'll see by not offshoring support is much greater than the additional margin you may see by offshoring.
Surely if you're an "intelligent person on the business side" that'd make you more likely to outsource, save every penny in the short term to go to your pay packet and up and go when things start collapsing around you to another country where you can do it all over again or go on nice holidays.
This very different new theme and the window button changes don't seem to serve any purpose other than to make new visual changes for a new release.
Ubuntu might do better if they kept a better measure of consistency in the look-and-feel and user interface between versions.
For example, the shut down and log out buttons were separated in 9.10 and there is no longer any good way to have a single button that can simply shut down, standby, hibernate, and log out. There was no real need to change this and not provide a way of doing what was possible before.
Also, the volume control was merged into the notification area (to improve usability no doubt). The problem with this for me is when I watch a fullscreen something on my primary monitor, I cannot simply place a volume control applet on the other and scroll up and down to change the volume like I could before without making the primary notification area sit on the second monitor.
Change for the sake of change just doesn't seem like the way to promote a good Operating System. There will always be detractors, but Ubuntu should aim to have the level of consistency it needs for people to identify it (over a period of time longer than 6 months) as a particular brand.
Additionally, I personally would hate to see the old human theme disappear over time because a newer Macintosh-like theme takes some artist's fancy. I think the old human theme really captured the essence of the term "Ubuntu" (and the icons looked easier to associate with the tasks and didn't take so much space).
Laptops don't have a middle mouse button unless you buy an add-on.
Try clicking left and right mouse buttons simultaneously.
So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.
No, energy can't be transmitted instantly... you apparently still need the classical channel in order to know what measurement to perform in the receiving end, just like in good old quantum teleportation.
Yes. However, that is for one measurement. To really know what speed you are limited to before you can get surplus energy out on one end (eaten on the other of course), you also need to know how many possibilities there are for measurement, and how much energy you would lose in measuring the "wrong" variable.
For instance, you could set up, say 100 such entanglements in parallel and then measure at random whether some spin is up or down at some time of some particle or whatever would be necessary at random. Chances maybe good that you get the extra energy out on, say 2 of these 10 measurements and end up coming out on top. If this were possible, you might be able to beat the classical channel speed limit all together (albeit with somewhat diminished output) over large distances.
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with the first paragraph, I take issue with the second:
You can make a machine smarter, but people keep getting dumber all the time. At some point you just have to say to those people forget it, you're not going to learn, you're not worth trying to explain it to. Here's your Etch-a-Sketch.
From the context of an article on malware, are the users really getting dumber with time? Who really wants to learn about antivirus/security practises? This is the job of the techies, not something to foist on unsuspecting users. You cock this up it's your problem.
I hope you are not one of those people in tech-support who says to me to click on something I've already clicked on several times, then continues with the line that they would have to be sitting in front of the machine because it is "too hard" for me to understand, and who is a general waste of time to call with a computer problem.
The good ones almost always will solve a problem over the phone efficiently, be a pleasure to converse with, and not overtly insult their clients intelligence. They may even teach the average user something in the process (the user is unlikely to learn through doing if all they get is looked down on). You should ask yourself how would you like to be treated if you asked what's happening on the screen, and someone's running a quantum physics simulation.
Show something colorful/educational about computing on computer display terminals. However, make sure that when the kid get too close or touches the screen, he/she gets a good zap. That'll make them think twice about damaging the equipment.
(In case you are a moderator, I am of course joking, and not trying to give informative advice here).
A real problem with long variable names and strict formatting (spacing, line width, etc.) can come about when moderately difficult mathematical formulas have to be coded (and lots of them sometimes). I wouldn't want to read variable names longer than x,y,z, v (or maybe vel), etc. and function names longer than sin, cos, etc. in an actual formula. Nor would I want a single line of code split over 10 lines or for that line to be completely unaligned mathematically.
Sorry if I am falling into the same trap as many others here, as well as the the author of the article, and generalizing too much.
Is that specific to Metacity?
Seems to be. Although Compiz has some window related plugins that ought to be able to be configured to do the same thing.
Of course, the dragging with the mouse works in Metacity and Compiz, and is probably the easiest way to solve the problem (even for maximized windows).
To move a window to another monitor (not workspace) in GNOME, press alt+F7, hold shift and the direction you want to move.
Bullshit. There's no such thing as zero emissions unless you're knee deep in shit in the middle of the wilderness, burning wood for heat. Killing wild animals with your bare hands or tools you hobbled together yourself. Living in a hut made of shrubs down by the river.
You insensitive clod. You can go live knee deep in shit in the wilderness if you want to, hippie. I don't have to, as I travel by clean and green foot-power, ala Fred Flintstone.
public static publicstatic(int main) {
label:
long long long_number = 0;
for (int inti=0; inti>0; ++i) { };
long int integer = 0;int sky_is_green = sky_is_blue= 0;
if (long_numer!=80) {
if ((long int) long_number==integer && sky_is_green!=~long_number) printf ("hell");
if (!sky_is_blue) printc('o');
else print ("my god!");
printc(" "); }
else if (!sky_is_green!=sky_is_blue)
goto label;
else
printf("there");
printf("world!"); }
I remember reading that GNOME 2.30 was going to be relabelled GNOME 3.00, or something like that. Where did all these ideas to change (read stuff up as per KDE rivals) a perfectly workable base desktop environment suddenly come from?
Why not focus on improving the 2.x series, and maybe add in some extra features for a 3.x release?
I would be very happy with a GNOME desktop that:
If GNOME developers did at least some of this kind of stuff, I'd be a very happy person indeed. They've made an excellent desktop so far and really doesn't need much more than polishing in my view.
i'd spend it doing something else anyway to avoid people like you.
I spend my time avoiding people who can't read complete sentences. I said "firefox and eclipse".
Not meaning to be rude, but you don't seem to be very good at this.
Seriously, don't bullshit me. I bought into the whole OS X is so superior, it's Unix, blah-de-da at one point and I found out it's a pile of shit when I tried it... It's people like you who end up causing good people who value their time greatly to waste their time and money on absolute shit... I have a problem when people like you start spouting lies and half truths.
Seeing as I don't really like Macs, I'm surprised to find myself thinking "what a whinger," when reading the parent post. What a bothersome tirade. The OP is saying that Apple tries to improve their software over time -- hardly an Earth shattering claim.
With regards to stability, we've probably all seen problems with the Operating System we use. Both with code and just generally.
Myself, I have seen code not work on one of Linux/Windows because of forward slash/backslash differences, "pause" and other basic features not working quite the same in C code, threading not working as intended because of different compilers doing different things, etc.
I've seen the video card driver lock Linux systems so bad that unplugging was the only option when rendering too much data at once, Windows 2000/XP not respond for many minutes when a network path could not be found or you mistakenly clikced "open with," Windows virus effects (graphics plain crash for no apparent reason when left idle too long, copy/paste feature removed, etc), problems of slowness/usability in Vista (reordering everything "for dummies"), Macintosh refuse to log in and just have the spinning wheel go on forever, etc, etc.
I think most people have had problems with whatever Operating System they run. It's like they have come out of their infancy, only to become little kids that have to be monitored and assisted to get out of trouble all the time. Problems are all part of the computer experience -- no Operating System has a monopoly on this (even Macs) or is free of them.
Casual gamers will generally see hardcore games as needlessly complicated. Hardcore gamers will generally see casual games as overly simple and thus boring. And thus, a divide was born.
Let me give a possible alternative explanation for these terms and the divide from a I-have-no-idea-what-type-of-gamer-I-am sort of a guy.
I think marketing types are to blame for all the overuse of stereotypes and general innovation killing in gaming-land of today.
It's possible that some time ago the people for whose job it is to increase profits probably decided that they were only selling their company's games to boys. Hence they could more than double their profits if they sold equally to girls, and then some more to older folks.
How to sell games though to this new audience with little previous exposure - pretty the games up, make them simpler, and have a "hold-your-hand" button.
The games were made much simpler, at the same time cheap RAM began to be made use of, by adding more and more save features+extra lives - ostensibly so that one didn't have to repeat things ad nauseam. This simplification removed a lot of the sense of satisfaction about beating a new challenge in a game. It also removed a feeling of fine control over the character, as it wasn't really necessary to acquire this over time to complete anything (for both developers and players).
So the games became simpler, more shallow, and less time was spent actually controlling the (now nicely rendered) character/object.
This I think is where the casual gamer/hard core gamer labelling comes in. Some people still wanted games with difficult to obtain objectives and gameplay. So, based on stereotypes of the day, the marketing types decided large amounts of button pressing (where it had to be the right buttons you mashed in order to progress) and enemies with huge health points would satisfy this. I am of course talking about first person shooters of the "hard-core" type. The rest of the games with lower difficulty were to also be sold to girls/older folk, and became "casual" games.
This divide between casual/hard-core seems to have happened over time though. It's as if all the good game developers jumped one-by-one into a big hole at different times, and are slowly trying to climb back towards the light.
I'll at least be happy if this game and others like it bring back that fine sense of control, innovative and varied game design, whilst keeping the possibility to die and have to redo things to get that bigger sense of achievement when completing something. Who cares what it is labelled by the media if the enjoyment you can get out of it is longer-lived, so much that it is really worth your while to play. I want to see more games that aren't about cheap, never ending victories, and actually challenging gameplay made fun.
Sorry if that all reads like a rant. I'm not usually up this early in the morning.
Okay. However, if they make the rules too annoying, some clever bastard in languages is bound to write the character limited section in Classsical Chinese... and the word limited section in humongous German words.
> But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation... ...then the computer on which the simulation is running must exist in a universe.
But this would make many things much easier to explain.
For instance, general relativity -> floating point bug; black holes -> program bug not picked up in testing, slowly patched out of existence; quantum double slit pattern -> performance optimization applied when no one is looking; time's arrow -> step simulation; big bang -> start time of simulation; expansion of the universe -> higher dimensional being that runs the simulation is on the hardware upgrade treadmill.
See how easy problems in cosmology become?