Allowing infinite regenerations could easily be done without breaking continuity, but it would destroy the show by making the Doctor's death totally meaningless.
Kinda like playing Zork.
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. > West Game over. You have been eaten by a grue. Start again? Y or N? > Y It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue....
One bit of Time Lord psychology that isn't so different from human. When he was young, he wanted to appear old and wise, now he's old, he wants to appear young for as long as possible.
Try: In the 60s on British TV, you didn't have to be young and sexy to get the part. In our own time, things are not so sensible (which I really don't understand since you're appealing to a predominately male geek audience, not the popular model type kids).
One of the best and most lasting ways of becoming happy is to surround oneself with people that makes you feel happy. If the people around you do not make you happy, it's not their fault. You're responsible for your own happiness. You choose them. Choose people that makes you feel happy.
You're right. That's why all my friends are imaginary. Real people just don't meet my standards or make me happy./sarcasm
Seriously. Stop reading self-help books. They only help the authors get rich.
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!
I sincerely hope you're joking, otherwise your engineering degree makes you nothing more than an educated idiot.
Most professions aren't just about acquiring knowledge. They're also about applying that knowledge. That application takes practice. In your example, a surgeon would be taught how to make incisions, keep the area clean, avoid damaging major organs etc. A medical procedures textbook assumes a lot of knowledge has already been acquired in medical school and won't walk you through these critical things. What's more a surgeon trains with other surgeons and gets taught how to do things one piece at a time with oversight. Eventually they get good. In the meantime there's someone there to do the trickier parts of the op and take over if required. You're not just going to blunder your way into doing it based on a google searches and library books. I wouldn't want to be your first patient. You might get good after a few months or years, after killing a few dozen (or hundred) people.
I've never understood how intelligent people could make such faulty assumptions about the application of specialized knowledge. You remind me of a fruit loop on a flight simulation news group who insisted that because he could program a flight computer, that he'd be able to put down a major airliner if the pilots were incapacitated. Perhaps he'd succeed, and perhaps he wouldn't but I wouldn't want to be on that flight.
And a lot of you guys will be screaming murder. Have you realized that GPL enforcement and Windows license enforcement comes from the same thing as Copyright law?...and yet while I've heard of GPL violations, I've never heard of someone going to jail for them.
Some of us think it's funny you had to actually link to robocode to call out a nerd. Only nerds make jokes they have to explain.
I'm not sure what's funnier: The irony of abusing someone with the word nerd when you do know what robocode is, or the irony of missing that I'm just trying to appeal to a larger audience. (Even on slashdot, there will be users who've never heard of robocode, couldn't be bothered looking it up, but would follow a link).
For years I have been making the analogy to driving cars. It's something most people need to do every day, and so they take the time and effort to learn about cars, at least from an interface standpoint, how to use them, how to interact with the roadways and laws, etc. When they get a new one, they may spend days going over all the new features and learning how to use them.
Really? Most GEEKS do that - go over every feature of the car. Car enthusiasts and car snobs are just varieties of geek. Most people I know take a few weeks to get familiar with all but the basics. The most complicated thing they play with at first is the radio. Also consider the financial investment of a car vs the zero dollar investment of having a computer shoved under your nose by your employer and being asked to do a job that's probably quite mundane.
And now, for many people, a computer is also something they have to use day in and day out to do their jobs. Yet they feel that it's somehow acceptable to simply refuse to learn anything about them or how to use them. Then when a little minor thing goes wrong they throw their hands up in the air and exclaim "I can't work like this!"
Most of the users I've dealt with are experts on the one or two specialist applications they use day in day out. Configuration errors and weird OS quirks are not their day to day thing - they're just crap that gets in the way. Even I've gotten to the point where I've wanted to pull my hair out at obscure problems randomly created by installing an application or meeting some arbitrary condition. The worst problems are the ones that take days or weeks to try and fix and end up something very obscure. (My latest was a memory pool leak on a laptop that was only fixed when I reset the bios to defaults out of desperation before trashing the damn thing)
Well, if it's going to be the apocalypse (and I'm not going to be responsible, much to my chagrin), can you just make sure I get a few weeks' notice? There are... things... I want to do.
Those 'things' are girls and they've already told you they wouldn't have sex with you even if the world were ending.
Oh wait on second thoughts this is slashdot. You do realize that at the end of the world, no one's going to care if you put out a new beta of your new Robocode robot, even if it is unbeatable.
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy.
Please mod this -1 Naive.
Never heard of "alternative" medicine? Or people who kill themselves or burn down their homes illegally rewiring the place?
One wonders why. Why do people just click away all messages sent to them by the system?
Actually I tend to wonder if a message is important why doesn't it get logged? Instead a modal dialog box that prevents the user from continuing operation is popped up and once it is closed the information is lost. You're honestly asking why some double speak the user doesn't understand that gets in the way of them continuing to work or trying to fix the problem gets closed??? I really don't think it's the user that's being stupid here.
Why isn't it the standard that when an important (critical) error message is popped up it's not logged (along with the response) to the system log? Then the IT support community collectively waste millions of hours getting the user to recreate the problem (which sometimes can't be done). THAT is stupid.
You should have said 10X the size, meaing it'll take 10x as long for O(N) and 100x as long for O(N^2). I think that'd have made your point much better and is closer to a realistic situation.
Find somewhere that allows you to job share. You and one other person cover the week's work and talk between yourselves on the phone to handle anything that goes beyond your time.
For example you work Mon, Tuesday, Wednesday and the other person works Thursday, Friday (or perhaps overlaps on Wednesday).
It isn't without hitches, but it works for some people where I work. I guess how feasible it depends on the nature of the job as well.
This is what happens any time you start making life choices and moral decisions based on anything other than sound logical thinking. Everyone has a right to believe what they wish to, and that is as it should be. However the expectation that we allow morality based on fair stories, whether they're 2000 years old or less than a hundred years old, is just bullshit.
If it had been done right about the time the Microsoft Ads came out, it would have been okay. Doing it now sends the message that Linux is behind the times and unoriginal. Much like using Jerry Seinfeld years after his TV show was a hit.
This is a case of "there is more than one way to cut it", where free software is able to "give you choice". Making a system that excels at web surfing does not need to turn your computer onto some specialized dumb terminal, you can have both the general, and the specific ones.
You're describing a web browser.
Now, I can't really imagine a way to make web browsing easier, and, by the discussion it seems both you and the GP also can't, so that is merely a philosophical point.
Web browsing is easy. That's why so many non-tech users are able do it without becoming hobbyists.
I probably should have been more specific: I'm not trying to force everyone to switch to an online world. When I said that you should come up with new ideas, I meant that you should try to be the best at something that wasn't done right before. Whoever cares about what you do better than everyone else will start using your solution. People who don't have a need for what you are solving can keep using their good old platform.
Why create a whole new solution that totally excludes other use, when you have a perfectly good solution that works right now? You seem to forget that the reason the PC took off in the first place is that it's a general purpose machine. The most popular operating systems have been the ones with the most hardware and software support.
Regarding your approach about starting IE automatically, sorry but you missed my point. That's the kind of answer that shows you have not actually thought about the problem and are trying to use old technology and hope it will be good enough. The "good enough" mindset is the #1 reason you won't come up with a killer app.
People use their machines in wildly different ways and coming up with a new solution that excludes other use is not going to fly. You'll end up with a specialist product, NOT a "killer app". When you do something completely new and are able to run it on commodity hardware alongside other software, that'll give you a killer app. The spreadsheet didn't require you to remove other software from the computer to run it for example. On the modern desktop multitasking is the norm and multiple applications, online and offline working together is expected. Online only solutions give MAY give a slight improvement in online functionality but you'd lose a lot more functionality than you gain if you didn't support offline apps concurrently.
In any case an online dumb terminal, which is what you're describing, is nothing new. Certainly not a killer app.
Last year, I continued using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host). This year, I continued using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host). Next year, I will continue using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host).
If I ever need performance or need to run an app that won't work virtualized, I'll find a machine to install it onto without virtualization.
In other words: I use my computer more and more just to interact online, not so much to run applications locally on my machine. But every OS out there still thinks of the web as just another program. Can't we do better?
Yeah, you could do much better. You could realize that there are other people who still use their computer differently to yourself. My laptop is almost always offline because I use it on my commute to and from work and can't justify paying exorbitant prices for wireless broadband.
You're using Windows. If you want IE to start automatically, just put a shortcut to it on your startup folder and quit trying to make computers less useful for everyone who still see big benefits in running things locally.
You fail at basic math. Extended warranties are a gamble that are always in the house's favor.
You have way too much faith in the quality of the product the house pedals.
On my current Dell laptop I've had 2 hardisks and one screen replacement. Cost would have been around AUD1200. I waited until they were offering the extended warranty for free in an end of year clearance.
On the laptop before my last it cost me a few hundred dollars to replace the motherboard. There is an unacknowledged design fault with the case that causes wearing on one of the circuits on the board. I wish I'd bought extended warranty on that machine. It would have been cheaper than the fix.
Now you go do the math, you arrogant sod. You fail at basic manners.
You're really asking the wrong people about this. Most of the replies you're going to get on Slashdot will be no restrictions because I wouldn't want restrictions on my machine. This is true for adults but you're dealing with children, some as young as 11 years old.
You better ban books, news papers, magazines, music, and toys while you're at it. After all, that's much easier than teaching children how to be responsible for themselves. You know like using a computer for learning in the class room and frivolous games only when it's play time.
People baby kids into their teens and then people wonder why you get a generation of irresponsible layabouts.
Slashdot Mirror
Allowing infinite regenerations could easily be done without breaking continuity, but it would destroy the show by making the Doctor's death totally meaningless.
Kinda like playing Zork.
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. ...
> West
Game over. You have been eaten by a grue. Start again? Y or N?
> Y
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
One bit of Time Lord psychology that isn't so different from human. When he was young, he wanted to appear old and wise, now he's old, he wants to appear young for as long as possible.
Try: In the 60s on British TV, you didn't have to be young and sexy to get the part. In our own time, things are not so sensible (which I really don't understand since you're appealing to a predominately male geek audience, not the popular model type kids).
One of the best and most lasting ways of becoming happy is to surround oneself with people that makes you feel happy. If the people around you do not make you happy, it's not their fault. You're responsible for your own happiness. You choose them. Choose people that makes you feel happy.
You're right. That's why all my friends are imaginary. Real people just don't meet my standards or make me happy. /sarcasm
Seriously. Stop reading self-help books. They only help the authors get rich.
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!
I sincerely hope you're joking, otherwise your engineering degree makes you nothing more than an educated idiot.
Most professions aren't just about acquiring knowledge. They're also about applying that knowledge. That application takes practice. In your example, a surgeon would be taught how to make incisions, keep the area clean, avoid damaging major organs etc. A medical procedures textbook assumes a lot of knowledge has already been acquired in medical school and won't walk you through these critical things. What's more a surgeon trains with other surgeons and gets taught how to do things one piece at a time with oversight. Eventually they get good. In the meantime there's someone there to do the trickier parts of the op and take over if required. You're not just going to blunder your way into doing it based on a google searches and library books. I wouldn't want to be your first patient. You might get good after a few months or years, after killing a few dozen (or hundred) people.
I've never understood how intelligent people could make such faulty assumptions about the application of specialized knowledge. You remind me of a fruit loop on a flight simulation news group who insisted that because he could program a flight computer, that he'd be able to put down a major airliner if the pilots were incapacitated. Perhaps he'd succeed, and perhaps he wouldn't but I wouldn't want to be on that flight.
Personally i think he's a pompous jerk and is often shortsighted, but I cant deny he's the master of marketing.
You just repeated yourself. Master of Marketing would have been sufficient.
And a lot of you guys will be screaming murder. Have you realized that GPL enforcement and Windows license enforcement comes from the same thing as Copyright law? ...and yet while I've heard of GPL violations, I've never heard of someone going to jail for them.
I read about this 3 or 4 days ago in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Yet I see dozens of crappy "stories" on slashdot that are not news - some idiot with a blog making a comment on something or other - belongs in idle.
Perhaps it's time to just bite the bullet and move over to Digg since quality here is about the same now.
I'm secretly in love with my best friend's wife, but I like gay midget porn.
You think you have problems? Your best friend's wife's name is Steve. She has a beard and is 86cm tall.
"The Cyberknife is not a real knife"
Dangit, that headline got my hopes up...
The sharks with freaking laser beam union would never put up with that. With a name like Landshark17 I'd have thought you'd know that!
Some of us think it's funny you had to actually link to robocode to call out a nerd. Only nerds make jokes they have to explain.
I'm not sure what's funnier: The irony of abusing someone with the word nerd when you do know what robocode is, or the irony of missing that I'm just trying to appeal to a larger audience. (Even on slashdot, there will be users who've never heard of robocode, couldn't be bothered looking it up, but would follow a link).
For years I have been making the analogy to driving cars. It's something most people need to do every day, and so they take the time and effort to learn about cars, at least from an interface standpoint, how to use them, how to interact with the roadways and laws, etc. When they get a new one, they may spend days going over all the new features and learning how to use them.
Really? Most GEEKS do that - go over every feature of the car. Car enthusiasts and car snobs are just varieties of geek. Most people I know take a few weeks to get familiar with all but the basics. The most complicated thing they play with at first is the radio. Also consider the financial investment of a car vs the zero dollar investment of having a computer shoved under your nose by your employer and being asked to do a job that's probably quite mundane.
And now, for many people, a computer is also something they have to use day in and day out to do their jobs. Yet they feel that it's somehow acceptable to simply refuse to learn anything about them or how to use them. Then when a little minor thing goes wrong they throw their hands up in the air and exclaim "I can't work like this!"
Most of the users I've dealt with are experts on the one or two specialist applications they use day in day out. Configuration errors and weird OS quirks are not their day to day thing - they're just crap that gets in the way. Even I've gotten to the point where I've wanted to pull my hair out at obscure problems randomly created by installing an application or meeting some arbitrary condition. The worst problems are the ones that take days or weeks to try and fix and end up something very obscure. (My latest was a memory pool leak on a laptop that was only fixed when I reset the bios to defaults out of desperation before trashing the damn thing)
Well, if it's going to be the apocalypse (and I'm not going to be responsible, much to my chagrin), can you just make sure I get a few weeks' notice? There are... things... I want to do.
Those 'things' are girls and they've already told you they wouldn't have sex with you even if the world were ending.
Oh wait on second thoughts this is slashdot. You do realize that at the end of the world, no one's going to care if you put out a new beta of your new Robocode robot, even if it is unbeatable.
What your women don't have breasts???
\0/
@|@
|
_/^\_
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy.
Please mod this -1 Naive.
Never heard of "alternative" medicine? Or people who kill themselves or burn down their homes illegally rewiring the place?
One wonders why. Why do people just click away all messages sent to them by the system?
Actually I tend to wonder if a message is important why doesn't it get logged? Instead a modal dialog box that prevents the user from continuing operation is popped up and once it is closed the information is lost. You're honestly asking why some double speak the user doesn't understand that gets in the way of them continuing to work or trying to fix the problem gets closed??? I really don't think it's the user that's being stupid here.
Why isn't it the standard that when an important (critical) error message is popped up it's not logged (along with the response) to the system log? Then the IT support community collectively waste millions of hours getting the user to recreate the problem (which sometimes can't be done). THAT is stupid.
You should have said 10X the size, meaing it'll take 10x as long for O(N) and 100x as long for O(N^2). I think that'd have made your point much better and is closer to a realistic situation.
Find somewhere that allows you to job share. You and one other person cover the week's work and talk between yourselves on the phone to handle anything that goes beyond your time.
For example you work Mon, Tuesday, Wednesday and the other person works Thursday, Friday (or perhaps overlaps on Wednesday).
It isn't without hitches, but it works for some people where I work. I guess how feasible it depends on the nature of the job as well.
This is what happens any time you start making life choices and moral decisions based on anything other than sound logical thinking. Everyone has a right to believe what they wish to, and that is as it should be. However the expectation that we allow morality based on fair stories, whether they're 2000 years old or less than a hundred years old, is just bullshit.
If it had been done right about the time the Microsoft Ads came out, it would have been okay. Doing it now sends the message that Linux is behind the times and unoriginal. Much like using Jerry Seinfeld years after his TV show was a hit.
This is a case of "there is more than one way to cut it", where free software is able to "give you choice". Making a system that excels at web surfing does not need to turn your computer onto some specialized dumb terminal, you can have both the general, and the specific ones.
You're describing a web browser.
Now, I can't really imagine a way to make web browsing easier, and, by the discussion it seems both you and the GP also can't, so that is merely a philosophical point.
Web browsing is easy. That's why so many non-tech users are able do it without becoming hobbyists.
I probably should have been more specific: I'm not trying to force everyone to switch to an online world. When I said that you should come up with new ideas, I meant that you should try to be the best at something that wasn't done right before. Whoever cares about what you do better than everyone else will start using your solution. People who don't have a need for what you are solving can keep using their good old platform.
Why create a whole new solution that totally excludes other use, when you have a perfectly good solution that works right now? You seem to forget that the reason the PC took off in the first place is that it's a general purpose machine. The most popular operating systems have been the ones with the most hardware and software support.
Regarding your approach about starting IE automatically, sorry but you missed my point. That's the kind of answer that shows you have not actually thought about the problem and are trying to use old technology and hope it will be good enough. The "good enough" mindset is the #1 reason you won't come up with a killer app.
People use their machines in wildly different ways and coming up with a new solution that excludes other use is not going to fly. You'll end up with a specialist product, NOT a "killer app". When you do something completely new and are able to run it on commodity hardware alongside other software, that'll give you a killer app. The spreadsheet didn't require you to remove other software from the computer to run it for example. On the modern desktop multitasking is the norm and multiple applications, online and offline working together is expected. Online only solutions give MAY give a slight improvement in online functionality but you'd lose a lot more functionality than you gain if you didn't support offline apps concurrently.
In any case an online dumb terminal, which is what you're describing, is nothing new. Certainly not a killer app.
Last year, I continued using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host).
This year, I continued using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host).
Next year, I will continue using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host).
If I ever need performance or need to run an app that won't work virtualized, I'll find a machine to install it onto without virtualization.
In other words: I use my computer more and more just to interact online, not so much to run applications locally on my machine. But every OS out there still thinks of the web as just another program. Can't we do better?
Yeah, you could do much better. You could realize that there are other people who still use their computer differently to yourself. My laptop is almost always offline because I use it on my commute to and from work and can't justify paying exorbitant prices for wireless broadband.
You're using Windows. If you want IE to start automatically, just put a shortcut to it on your startup folder and quit trying to make computers less useful for everyone who still see big benefits in running things locally.
You fail at basic math. Extended warranties are a gamble that are always in the house's favor.
You have way too much faith in the quality of the product the house pedals.
On my current Dell laptop I've had 2 hardisks and one screen replacement. Cost would have been around AUD1200. I waited until they were offering the extended warranty for free in an end of year clearance.
On the laptop before my last it cost me a few hundred dollars to replace the motherboard. There is an unacknowledged design fault with the case that causes wearing on one of the circuits on the board. I wish I'd bought extended warranty on that machine. It would have been cheaper than the fix.
Now you go do the math, you arrogant sod. You fail at basic manners.
You're really asking the wrong people about this. Most of the replies you're going to get on Slashdot will be no restrictions because I wouldn't want restrictions on my machine. This is true for adults but you're dealing with children, some as young as 11 years old.
You better ban books, news papers, magazines, music, and toys while you're at it. After all, that's much easier than teaching children how to be responsible for themselves. You know like using a computer for learning in the class room and frivolous games only when it's play time.
People baby kids into their teens and then people wonder why you get a generation of irresponsible layabouts.