Please be careful with your terminology. "Cognitive science" is a interdisciplinary field pivoting primarily around artificial intelligence and linguistics, and it is not an appropriate euphemism for psychologists or psychiatrists.
You will not, in my experience, ever find a cognitive scientist suggesting drugs or offering psychological advice except in the limited way that the armchair doctor in any of us do.
While I can truly understand the need to smack down the ignorant among Slashdotters (there are so many, admittedly sometimes including myself) I don't really agree that I should've had to download the software and try it -- that is, in theory, what the "preview" was supposed to be for. If what you say is true, then the article really fails to mention that properly.
Besides, as the article says: "The highly anticipated version 2.0 of the GIMP, due out next month..."
I'm not willing to port the GIMP 2.0 pre-release to OS X (that's what MacGimp is for), compile it, run it, and try it out, just to comment on a Slashdot story about an article that was supposed to show me how it looks to save me that pain.
In closing, let me say that I really look forward to the new Gimp if it has a less clutterable UI.
Hi, could I have some of that shit you're smoking?
If by "It's gone" you mean "It's still here", then I agree with you. I'll also agree if by "All new" you meant "exactly the fucking same".
Did you look at the screenshots? Sorry, but slightly changing the shadows and highlights on some of the controls to make it look more glossy is NOT A NEW UI. How it looks is not why some people (including myself) dislike Gimp's UI. UI stands for user interface, which is something you interact with. It's the way that we interact with the program that leaves the sour taste in our mouth.
The problem for me is the tens of windows that get hidden underneath each other and provide no easy way to find the one you want short of shuffling through your windows like you're searching through a pile of papers on your desk. Highly inefficient and completely disruptive to the workflow process. Photoshop, Visual Studio, 3D Modelling programs, and numerous other things that need to handle the display of large volumes of disparate data all have slightly different approaches to solving these problems, but they all rely heavily on two proven methods of UI design: "expansion" and "tabbing". Most of them don't even bother to use the default Windows controls for this, but they all do it. Microsoft, on the other hand, has moved away from multi-window and MDI applications for a long time now, because they're cluttered and awkward for users. It's an analogy that isn't useful and doesn't make sense.
GIMP would do well, in my opinion, to take a lesson from the de-facto standards. I'm all for innovating in open source rather than just following the leader, but you really have to be careful that your "innovation" is actually an improvement or at least comparable to the standard. In this case it isn't.
Comet says, "Oh, I see! This delivery of water was supposed to refresh the supply of water a few hundred thousand years for your neighbor, Mars. Oh, you say he's dead now? That's terrible! There must've been some mix-up when I went into orbit. I'm very sorry to bother you folks. I'll be on my way, then."
Seriously though, it really will be an impressive feat if they are able to land this probe on something so small, eccentric and fast-moving. I wish them the best of luck.
I agree with KFG. Viva is great, don't just assume a product sucks because it's cheap. For example, I prefer Safeway's Dr. Skipper to real Dr. Pepper sometimes (although it depends on my mood). Regardless, it's good. Hooray for cheap stuff, if you don't try it, you're often missing out.
I disagree with that interpretation. It wouldn't make sense to append an amendment that says "nevermind, actually, do the exact opposite." Especially if it would need majority to pass, when defeating the original only requires a quarter against.
What the amendment is saying, is: granted that we're no longer including non-free packages in any distributions from now on, we will still provide the non-free software that's in older distributions, as well as continuing to offer bug tracking and mailing lists for those packages.
I pirated UT long ago, and then bought it once I realized how much fun it was (about a week later). I was never a 'hardcore fan', but I did enjoy it a lot, played around with making mutators, etc. When I heard about UT2003, I went and played the UT2003 demo, and wasn't impressed enough to buy the game. The game was alright, I just felt that I could get the exact same amount of fun out of UT-the-original, which I already owned. If I hadn't had the benefit of the demo, I likely would've purchased UT2003 and then held a grudge against the entire UT franchise for selling me a blatant rehash with updated graphics. Instead, I just opted not to buy the game and harbor no ill will. May not seem like a win for them, but in the long run it is.
So now the UT2004 demo comes around, and I try it out. Whee! Vehicles! Whee! Tribes-like Capture-and-hold mode! Whee! The sniper rifle! I am SO getting this game! Had there been no demo, I would've just written this game off as Tired Rehash 2 and not even given it a second thought. Instead, I'm going to buy it the day it comes out. And Epic has made me into a loyal fan again, eager to check out their next offering. Score one for Epic, and score one for me.
So yeah. UT2004 Demo == Superb move. Even if they delayed UT2004 to get the demo into this superb state? Hell yeah it's worth it.
I love PostgreSQL. It's OO, blazingly fast, easy to install, robust, and free as free can be. All sorts of things that Firebird is not. And the name doesn't have a chance of *ever* conflicting with anything. Hah.
The whole text-based game industry is being replaced, or has been replaced, by games with visuals because there is no good reason to restrict gameplay to text-only when you can spruce it up with immersive graphical environments.
You're wrong. There's one very good, and very solid reason that MMORPGs will never provide quite the same thing as text-based environments (specifically MOOs, MUCKs, MUSHes, etc): user-created-content.
Anyone who has a basic grasp of a language (and most people do -- though IM conversations sometimes indicate otherwise) can create whatever their imagination desires simply by writing some mediocre descriptive prose to get their message across. Short of sudden and marked advances in brain-to-computer interface technology, the artistically-challenged among us will never be able to as fully express our imaginations in a MMORPG, even one of the few that allows user-created-content. And the people who are excellent artists often find that it's a lot simpler and more convenient to simply write some description than do high-quality artwork or 3D models for whatever it is they're imagining.
So don't be so quick to abandon those text based worlds. There will always be some that survive and even flourish. Admittedly, the number of players has been thinning out significantly in the past several years, and we don't believe it'll stop anytime in the near future. But you'd be surprised how many new players we still continue to get, and how many reasons they have for staying.
I predict the final to be a bitter, violent battle to the death between the Final Fantasy 7 Fanbois, and the Diablo 2 Drones. I don't think that any other two genres have a strong enough support foundation to make it. And those two specific games are the ones handily leading those genres at the moment.
And I don't think it really needs to be said, but this poll, along with anything coming out of GameSpy makes Slashdot polls look scientific.
Approval voting is such an underutilized concept. It makes sense in most cases in my opinion, but at the very least, it makes sense to narrow down large fields into smaller ones for more targetted voting. What a waste. X-COM should really get at least into the semi-finals, but I suspect it won't even make the qualifiers.
Surprisingly even to myself some days, I haven't pirated a game since I started earning income. I'm always happy to support the people who make things that I enjoy. Even when they're bitter disappointments, which so many have been recently. *cough, MOO3, SimCity4*
Similarly to how I approach music these days, when I start getting too cynical to "waste" money on a game, I'll start looking for free alternatives like Chromatron or return to my old favourites, often using things like Exult.
Doing superficial good to placate the masses while doing real evil that will screw the masses long after they've forgotten about the folks responsible, does not make one half-evil, it makes one a politician (in other words, pure evil).
Seriously though, Blizzard is above even Adobe on the list of companies I will never ever buy products from, no matter how good or useful they may be, or how much I may want them. Adobe being in the black books for having a foreign citizen arrested the second he stepped on American soil for the crime of figuring out how to change a bit in one of their files.
Ok, I tried to post this earlier, but Slashdot was doing it's random 503 error.
Doesn't run PopUpCop (IE plugin). I use PopUpCop to turn off/on GIF animation and Flash auto-start.
To turn off looping animations:
Type about:config into the URL bar, double click on image.animation_mode (a search for 'anim' should return only that property) and set the value to one of the following:
none -- images will not animate, at all, ever.
once -- images will animate once, then stop on the last frame
normal -- the default, images animate and loop as requested by the webpage
Enjoy using Firefox, or whatever Mozilla flavour you end up settling on.
Re:AMD have been better than Intel for some time..
on
AMD Back in the Black
·
· Score: 1
I've been building AMD systems since the Athlon 700MHz was top-of-the-line. And when I say "systems", I'm talking around 15.
And I've never had a memory problem, or indeed any problem that could be blamed on AMD, except for running too hot due to the cheap, crappy heatsinks/thermal pads that come with AMD CPUs. The few problems that I have had have been solved, without exception, by moving from a cheapass OEM 300W powersupply to an Antec 380W.
I still use IE because Mozilla doesn't SHIFT+Click with the same behavior (open in new window) as IE... I won't even talk about that stupid dinosaur splash screen.
Wow, are you trolling or what? First of all, as of this writing, shift-clicking on a link in FireFox (formerly Firebird) does open it in a new window, although god knows why you'd want to do that when you can middle-click to open it in a tab in the background instead.
Secondly, the "stupid dinosaur splash screen" (which I loved) has been gone for about 4 release versions of Mozilla now, to be replaced with a hideously drab orange box with 'Mozilla' written in it. Now that we've compromised on an ugly splash screen, no one's happy. Hooray for attempting to pander to everyone!
Obviously you have not programmed in BASIC enough.
There is more than one type of numeric variable in BASIC. They all have their own suffix. You can have longInt& shortInt% and floatingPoint! (The default, with no suffix, is a short int).
This is from Microsoft QuickBasic, earlier versions and Visual Basic may not work in the same way.
WUXGA = Should be banned, and the marketing executive responsible should be shot.
They managed to come up with a term even more meaningless to the average computer buyer than the number of pixels, while also being completely meaningless to most geeks. Hooray, everyone wins!
I absolutely despise that method of naming resolutions. I keep praying that it will die, and quickly. But it never seems to.
Psst. Would you like to know how "bundles" are done? They're simply directories, contiaining the program in the Contents/MacOS/ directory beneath it. Exactly as grandparent post suggested, everything is technically sound underneath but not particularly user friendly. Finder is what does the job of making it easy for the user to interact with these 'bundles'. That is where the logic belongs./bin,/usr/bin and/usr/local/bin are there for a *reason*. Maybe they don't make sense to you, but they have crucial distinctions./bin contains critical system files that even the distro needs to be cautious when updating./usr/bin is the distro's files, it should be able to do what it wants with any of those programs./usr/local is locally-installed software that did not come from the distribution, and it should be off-limits.
The problem is not that there are directories which make this distinction (would you prefer using a Windows-like registry to keep track of who installed what files? HA, that works well.) The real problem is that no one has bothered to abstract them in a useful way. It would not be unreasonable, say, to have several main "directories" listed such as 'etc', 'bin', 'lib', and have them contain a list of all files within any directory of that type, annotated with the type of installion. I'm sure there are better ways than that, but there's something right off the top of my head.
But what file manager would you put this in anyway? Linux has no equivalent to 'Finder'. Nautilus can browse directories nicely, but it's not the desktop environment's one-stop-shop for all things filebrowsing, like Finder is in OS X. Until you have a unified framework for things like that, you will never be able to abstract the filesystem away for the UI without something like GTK popping up and ruining it.
And, for the record, OS X is not symlink hell at all. It has no more symlinks (which are not a bad thing, and I can't imagine how many you would need to create a hell of any sort) than any typical Linux installation.
Smart BootManager is a personal favourite bootloader for me. My favourite feature is probably useless for what you intend to do, but if you stick it on a floppy, it will let you boot from the CDROM of a computer ancient enough that it doesn't normally support CDROM booting. This has saved me from pulling out my hair numerous times to boot, say, a Windows install CD, or a Debian install CD, or whatever you may need to install that is too big to fit on a disk or USB drive.
It has a nice asciigraphic menu, is completely runtime-configurable, and fits in 30kB. Really impressive, in my opinion. If you can partition your USB drive in a way that it understands, it should be able to do what you want.
If the people you hang around with would rate you based on what computer you have, perhaps you should look for new people to hang around with. Seriously, if someone respected me less because of what material possession I own, that person isn't someone I'm really interested in having respect from anyway.
When all is said and done, Mr. Keeping-Up-With-The-Joneses is going to be a hell of a lot more broke and less happy than Bob, who I might add probably has a lot more time to spend doing what he wants, rather than fixing or upgrading his computer. Computers are terrible investment except in a select few circumstances. Much like cars. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't have one, but pouring all your money into it is likely not going to do you any good in the long run.
Nevermind the TV station's backup power (You know, they do have a need to transmit during emergencies. They do plan for this stuff, albeit poorly)
The poster clearly stated that he was watching stations throughout New York. New York had their power back within a day or two. Ontario, meanwhile, was on (at best) rolling blackouts for a week and then some.
I know this because I was travelling through Ontario at the time and ended up stranded, hooray. My kingdom for a non-electric gas pump! *glowers*
they knew how to use the VC++ Resource Editor to create dialogs but didn't feel comfortable writing C++ code
And what's wrong with that? There's a perfectly viable alternative for those people: VB. They may not be CS majors, but that doesn't mean they should have to contract a programmer if they want to write a silly little program for something or other. The hard part of most userland programs is the UI, not the code.
Some people don't care about database normal forms and other shit that doesn't *really* matter when it comes to simply getting the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
Please be careful with your terminology. "Cognitive science" is a interdisciplinary field pivoting primarily around artificial intelligence and linguistics, and it is not an appropriate euphemism for psychologists or psychiatrists.
You will not, in my experience, ever find a cognitive scientist suggesting drugs or offering psychological advice except in the limited way that the armchair doctor in any of us do.
While I can truly understand the need to smack down the ignorant among Slashdotters (there are so many, admittedly sometimes including myself) I don't really agree that I should've had to download the software and try it -- that is, in theory, what the "preview" was supposed to be for. If what you say is true, then the article really fails to mention that properly.
Besides, as the article says: "The highly anticipated version 2.0 of the GIMP, due out next month..."
I'm not willing to port the GIMP 2.0 pre-release to OS X (that's what MacGimp is for), compile it, run it, and try it out, just to comment on a Slashdot story about an article that was supposed to show me how it looks to save me that pain.
In closing, let me say that I really look forward to the new Gimp if it has a less clutterable UI.
Don't like the old UI? It's gone. All new.
Hi, could I have some of that shit you're smoking?
If by "It's gone" you mean "It's still here", then I agree with you. I'll also agree if by "All new" you meant "exactly the fucking same".
Did you look at the screenshots? Sorry, but slightly changing the shadows and highlights on some of the controls to make it look more glossy is NOT A NEW UI. How it looks is not why some people (including myself) dislike Gimp's UI. UI stands for user interface, which is something you interact with. It's the way that we interact with the program that leaves the sour taste in our mouth.
The problem for me is the tens of windows that get hidden underneath each other and provide no easy way to find the one you want short of shuffling through your windows like you're searching through a pile of papers on your desk. Highly inefficient and completely disruptive to the workflow process. Photoshop, Visual Studio, 3D Modelling programs, and numerous other things that need to handle the display of large volumes of disparate data all have slightly different approaches to solving these problems, but they all rely heavily on two proven methods of UI design: "expansion" and "tabbing". Most of them don't even bother to use the default Windows controls for this, but they all do it. Microsoft, on the other hand, has moved away from multi-window and MDI applications for a long time now, because they're cluttered and awkward for users. It's an analogy that isn't useful and doesn't make sense.
GIMP would do well, in my opinion, to take a lesson from the de-facto standards. I'm all for innovating in open source rather than just following the leader, but you really have to be careful that your "innovation" is actually an improvement or at least comparable to the standard. In this case it isn't.
Comet says, "Oh, I see! This delivery of water was supposed to refresh the supply of water a few hundred thousand years for your neighbor, Mars. Oh, you say he's dead now? That's terrible! There must've been some mix-up when I went into orbit. I'm very sorry to bother you folks. I'll be on my way, then."
Seriously though, it really will be an impressive feat if they are able to land this probe on something so small, eccentric and fast-moving. I wish them the best of luck.
I was waiting for the BluesNews effect to die down so I could get decent download speeds on this. Now I'm really screwed, eh?
I agree with KFG. Viva is great, don't just assume a product sucks because it's cheap. For example, I prefer Safeway's Dr. Skipper to real Dr. Pepper sometimes (although it depends on my mood). Regardless, it's good. Hooray for cheap stuff, if you don't try it, you're often missing out.
I disagree with that interpretation. It wouldn't make sense to append an amendment that says "nevermind, actually, do the exact opposite." Especially if it would need majority to pass, when defeating the original only requires a quarter against.
What the amendment is saying, is: granted that we're no longer including non-free packages in any distributions from now on, we will still provide the non-free software that's in older distributions, as well as continuing to offer bug tracking and mailing lists for those packages.
Note the part where it says "in our archive".
I agree wholeheartedly.
I pirated UT long ago, and then bought it once I realized how much fun it was (about a week later). I was never a 'hardcore fan', but I did enjoy it a lot, played around with making mutators, etc. When I heard about UT2003, I went and played the UT2003 demo, and wasn't impressed enough to buy the game. The game was alright, I just felt that I could get the exact same amount of fun out of UT-the-original, which I already owned. If I hadn't had the benefit of the demo, I likely would've purchased UT2003 and then held a grudge against the entire UT franchise for selling me a blatant rehash with updated graphics. Instead, I just opted not to buy the game and harbor no ill will. May not seem like a win for them, but in the long run it is.
So now the UT2004 demo comes around, and I try it out. Whee! Vehicles! Whee! Tribes-like Capture-and-hold mode! Whee! The sniper rifle! I am SO getting this game! Had there been no demo, I would've just written this game off as Tired Rehash 2 and not even given it a second thought. Instead, I'm going to buy it the day it comes out. And Epic has made me into a loyal fan again, eager to check out their next offering. Score one for Epic, and score one for me.
So yeah. UT2004 Demo == Superb move. Even if they delayed UT2004 to get the demo into this superb state? Hell yeah it's worth it.
I love PostgreSQL. It's OO, blazingly fast, easy to install, robust, and free as free can be. All sorts of things that Firebird is not. And the name doesn't have a chance of *ever* conflicting with anything. Hah.
The whole text-based game industry is being replaced, or has been replaced, by games with visuals because there is no good reason to restrict gameplay to text-only when you can spruce it up with immersive graphical environments.
You're wrong. There's one very good, and very solid reason that MMORPGs will never provide quite the same thing as text-based environments (specifically MOOs, MUCKs, MUSHes, etc): user-created-content.
Anyone who has a basic grasp of a language (and most people do -- though IM conversations sometimes indicate otherwise) can create whatever their imagination desires simply by writing some mediocre descriptive prose to get their message across. Short of sudden and marked advances in brain-to-computer interface technology, the artistically-challenged among us will never be able to as fully express our imaginations in a MMORPG, even one of the few that allows user-created-content. And the people who are excellent artists often find that it's a lot simpler and more convenient to simply write some description than do high-quality artwork or 3D models for whatever it is they're imagining.
So don't be so quick to abandon those text based worlds. There will always be some that survive and even flourish. Admittedly, the number of players has been thinning out significantly in the past several years, and we don't believe it'll stop anytime in the near future. But you'd be surprised how many new players we still continue to get, and how many reasons they have for staying.
And right below that was Total Annihilation. I hate Gamespy.
If you can't think of any ways to mention Debian or apt-get, then you are not nearly as cool as Debian Troll. I mourn the lack of recent posts by him.
I predict the final to be a bitter, violent battle to the death between the Final Fantasy 7 Fanbois, and the Diablo 2 Drones. I don't think that any other two genres have a strong enough support foundation to make it. And those two specific games are the ones handily leading those genres at the moment.
And I don't think it really needs to be said, but this poll, along with anything coming out of GameSpy makes Slashdot polls look scientific.
Approval voting is such an underutilized concept. It makes sense in most cases in my opinion, but at the very least, it makes sense to narrow down large fields into smaller ones for more targetted voting. What a waste. X-COM should really get at least into the semi-finals, but I suspect it won't even make the qualifiers.
Surprisingly even to myself some days, I haven't pirated a game since I started earning income. I'm always happy to support the people who make things that I enjoy. Even when they're bitter disappointments, which so many have been recently. *cough, MOO3, SimCity4*
Similarly to how I approach music these days, when I start getting too cynical to "waste" money on a game, I'll start looking for free alternatives like Chromatron or return to my old favourites, often using things like Exult.
Doing superficial good to placate the masses while doing real evil that will screw the masses long after they've forgotten about the folks responsible, does not make one half-evil, it makes one a politician (in other words, pure evil).
Seriously though, Blizzard is above even Adobe on the list of companies I will never ever buy products from, no matter how good or useful they may be, or how much I may want them. Adobe being in the black books for having a foreign citizen arrested the second he stepped on American soil for the crime of figuring out how to change a bit in one of their files.
Doesn't run PopUpCop (IE plugin). I use PopUpCop to turn off/on GIF animation and Flash auto-start.
To turn off looping animations:
Type about:config into the URL bar, double click on image.animation_mode (a search for 'anim' should return only that property) and set the value to one of the following:
- none -- images will not animate, at all, ever.
- once -- images will animate once, then stop on the last frame
- normal -- the default, images animate and loop as requested by the webpage
Irritating flash ads are handled by the famous Flash Click-To-View plugin.Enjoy using Firefox, or whatever Mozilla flavour you end up settling on.
I've been building AMD systems since the Athlon 700MHz was top-of-the-line. And when I say "systems", I'm talking around 15.
And I've never had a memory problem, or indeed any problem that could be blamed on AMD, except for running too hot due to the cheap, crappy heatsinks/thermal pads that come with AMD CPUs. The few problems that I have had have been solved, without exception, by moving from a cheapass OEM 300W powersupply to an Antec 380W.
I still use IE because Mozilla doesn't SHIFT+Click with the same behavior (open in new window) as IE ... I won't even talk about that stupid dinosaur splash screen.
Wow, are you trolling or what? First of all, as of this writing, shift-clicking on a link in FireFox (formerly Firebird) does open it in a new window, although god knows why you'd want to do that when you can middle-click to open it in a tab in the background instead.
Secondly, the "stupid dinosaur splash screen" (which I loved) has been gone for about 4 release versions of Mozilla now, to be replaced with a hideously drab orange box with 'Mozilla' written in it. Now that we've compromised on an ugly splash screen, no one's happy. Hooray for attempting to pander to everyone!
Obviously you have not programmed in BASIC enough.
There is more than one type of numeric variable in BASIC. They all have their own suffix. You can have longInt& shortInt% and floatingPoint! (The default, with no suffix, is a short int).
This is from Microsoft QuickBasic, earlier versions and Visual Basic may not work in the same way.
WUXGA = Should be banned, and the marketing executive responsible should be shot.
They managed to come up with a term even more meaningless to the average computer buyer than the number of pixels, while also being completely meaningless to most geeks. Hooray, everyone wins!
I absolutely despise that method of naming resolutions. I keep praying that it will die, and quickly. But it never seems to.
Psst. Would you like to know how "bundles" are done? They're simply directories, contiaining the program in the Contents/MacOS/ directory beneath it. Exactly as grandparent post suggested, everything is technically sound underneath but not particularly user friendly. Finder is what does the job of making it easy for the user to interact with these 'bundles'. That is where the logic belongs. /bin, /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin are there for a *reason*. Maybe they don't make sense to you, but they have crucial distinctions. /bin contains critical system files that even the distro needs to be cautious when updating. /usr/bin is the distro's files, it should be able to do what it wants with any of those programs. /usr/local is locally-installed software that did not come from the distribution, and it should be off-limits.
The problem is not that there are directories which make this distinction (would you prefer using a Windows-like registry to keep track of who installed what files? HA, that works well.) The real problem is that no one has bothered to abstract them in a useful way. It would not be unreasonable, say, to have several main "directories" listed such as 'etc', 'bin', 'lib', and have them contain a list of all files within any directory of that type, annotated with the type of installion. I'm sure there are better ways than that, but there's something right off the top of my head.
But what file manager would you put this in anyway? Linux has no equivalent to 'Finder'. Nautilus can browse directories nicely, but it's not the desktop environment's one-stop-shop for all things filebrowsing, like Finder is in OS X. Until you have a unified framework for things like that, you will never be able to abstract the filesystem away for the UI without something like GTK popping up and ruining it.
And, for the record, OS X is not symlink hell at all. It has no more symlinks (which are not a bad thing, and I can't imagine how many you would need to create a hell of any sort) than any typical Linux installation.
Smart BootManager is a personal favourite bootloader for me. My favourite feature is probably useless for what you intend to do, but if you stick it on a floppy, it will let you boot from the CDROM of a computer ancient enough that it doesn't normally support CDROM booting. This has saved me from pulling out my hair numerous times to boot, say, a Windows install CD, or a Debian install CD, or whatever you may need to install that is too big to fit on a disk or USB drive.
It has a nice asciigraphic menu, is completely runtime-configurable, and fits in 30kB. Really impressive, in my opinion. If you can partition your USB drive in a way that it understands, it should be able to do what you want.
If the people you hang around with would rate you based on what computer you have, perhaps you should look for new people to hang around with. Seriously, if someone respected me less because of what material possession I own, that person isn't someone I'm really interested in having respect from anyway.
When all is said and done, Mr. Keeping-Up-With-The-Joneses is going to be a hell of a lot more broke and less happy than Bob, who I might add probably has a lot more time to spend doing what he wants, rather than fixing or upgrading his computer. Computers are terrible investment except in a select few circumstances. Much like cars. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't have one, but pouring all your money into it is likely not going to do you any good in the long run.
Nevermind the TV station's backup power (You know, they do have a need to transmit during emergencies. They do plan for this stuff, albeit poorly)
The poster clearly stated that he was watching stations throughout New York. New York had their power back within a day or two. Ontario, meanwhile, was on (at best) rolling blackouts for a week and then some.
I know this because I was travelling through Ontario at the time and ended up stranded, hooray. My kingdom for a non-electric gas pump! *glowers*
they knew how to use the VC++ Resource Editor to create dialogs but didn't feel comfortable writing C++ code
And what's wrong with that? There's a perfectly viable alternative for those people: VB. They may not be CS majors, but that doesn't mean they should have to contract a programmer if they want to write a silly little program for something or other. The hard part of most userland programs is the UI, not the code.
Some people don't care about database normal forms and other shit that doesn't *really* matter when it comes to simply getting the job done.