In fact, it might be cruel simply to have a creature with our level of intelligence but without the ability to do anything with it. It would be like shoving a kid in solitary for their whole life. Clearly they would go crazy in short order. That's what really bored humans with too little stimulation do.
Have you seen animals pacing up and down endlessly in their cages or biting at their bars; twisting their necks or rolling heads; vomiting or hurting themselves? All these are symptoms of animals being driven mad because of captivity. This madness, called 'stereotype behaviour' is caused due to removal of animals from their natural habitat, frustration, boredom, lack of life in normal social groups, excessive human control and no control on self. Caged big cats will often pace the same path again and again. Great apes and elephants may rock, sway or shift repeatedly from side to side. Other disturbed behaviour may include licking the walls and chewing the bars of their pens. The startling thing is that most of the animals in the zoos suffer from this terrible syndrome.
...I went to an open day at the University of Central Lancashire (Begin the slagging off), last saturday were they has a full demonstration of this, it was pretty good, using 3 rear projexted screens to make a 3d hallway
Now I have images of blue neon trim and all sorts of flashy bling bling on the farm...
And on this week's "Pimp My Ride", the team update run down farm bulldozer with chrome treads, an air conditioned cabin with built in jacuzzi, satellite/Internet/DVD player, 20" plasma display, surround sound and a custom paint job with flames on the bucket and speed stripes on the cabin.
What is this American obsession with eating out? Round here people usually just eat the canteen swill or bring sandwiches.
Because of the combination of several reasons:
(1) The majority of companies in the Bay Area don't have catering facilities. Property speculators built office blocks without any consideration for dining facilities. And the cost of high rent prohibits new restaurants from opening.
If you have a corporate campus with 3000 employees, you need a dining room of equivalent size.
After a few weeks, eating sandwiches (or even a fixed weekly menu) become tedious and monotonous. So employees are desperate for variety.
(2) Employees are often required to work long hours in office buildings where having a window is considered a luxury. Consequently, lunchtime is the only time during the day that they can go outside and see sunlight. Especially during Winter.
(3) There are very few if any public bars in the West coast, and the few that exist are mainly used by truckers or Mexican farm workers. And since everyone has to drive to get anywhere, drinking alcohol while driving or even at work is a strict no-no, particularly for government contractors.
(4) Because senior employees have families, they are unable to attend social events during the evenings.
The result of all these factors, is that eating out at a restaurant at lunchtime in Silicon Valley takes on a near religious significance.
Much the same as going out drinking at the local pub with your workmates on a Friday lunchtime or evening has in the UK or on the East coast.
That's true - while I didn't drive to work, we would have to zig-zag through the car-park trying to find a space. Oakland was reputed to be toughes t place to find a parking space as the city council had legislated that each office block should have 10% less parking spaces than there were employees. This was supposed to reduce congestion by forcing people to use public transit, but the effect was to encourage a parking space deathmatch as everyone tried to get in as early as possible.
There was one occasion our team were going out to celebrate someone's Birthday. Our mission was to get to a restaurant in Menlo Park.
Getting into downtown Menlo Park wasn't too bad, but trying to find a parking space was even harder. We would get to the front of the traffic lights, just as the lights turned red, and see an empty space open up. By the time the lights changed to green, the space was taken again. That happened several times. We went to another car park, and saw some empty spaces. Unfortunately, the entrance was blocked by some ditzy lady from LA who was looking at her map trying to find the way to SF airport. She eventually found her way out of the car park and we managed to find a space. When everyone else managed to arrive at the table, they all had their own stories to tell. Parking at the office wasn't too bad, as we had been relocated to a smaller block away from the main campus, but following concerns from local residents a mile down the road, it was made illegal to make a right turn from our car park exit onto the local access road, even though the exit formed a T junction with the street.
Although the situation isn't much better in the UK. After working in the Bay Area, many of the British roads seem to be like a go-kart racing track, except that there is a speed restriction of 15 miles/hour.
because they decided to replace strong plots and good character development with gratuitious sexual situations in order to attract UPN's 18-25 year old male target audience.
Definitely. Or perhaps they relied too much on time travel stories, which have become rather cliche in Trek of late.
More than likely. For a Sci-Fi series to become popular, it has to explore current political issues. Star Trek explored the Cold War through the battle between Earth and the Klingon empire. ST:TNG achieved this by exploring the topics of discussion: can intelligent machines really be considered life, the drugs war/international trade.
Another problem is if you have two series exploring the same topic (Eg. Farscape and ST:Voyager both exploring the topic of a crew finding their way home).
Or perhaps not calling it Star Trek for two years didn't help?
Or perhaps the really BAD theme music for Enterprise?
Audiences don't usually watch a Sci-Fi series just for the introduction sequence or title, but it is a good indicator of the amount of effort put into the program.
Or the tortured script of Nemesis, which was an obvious attempt to combine the elements of the higher rating treks into a new movie?
A movie is really a one off event that you might see once. Whether somebody will make the effort to watch the next episode of a series, is based on the previous two episodes.
Or Berman and Braga not understanding what Trek audiences really like?
Definitely.
It's no use blaming the old reruns for poor ratings. Even for a series based purely on special effects, the special effects are constantly improving from month to month.
As a comparison, UK Gold plays reruns of old Dr. Who episodes. The old series seems slow and clunky compared to the new series.
The only problem now (unrelated to the series) is that the title sequence of every other program now seems to use SFX (eg. Sports programs also do the zoom-in sequence from Earth orbit to country/sky/clouds/city/street/sports field).
Well, you can, but then the cafe loses the incentive to provide tables for everyone.
It's much better for team morale for everyone to be able to meet together for lunch each day. But only if there is one table large enough for the whole team (circular tables are best), otherwise all sorts of unpleasant "them and us" seniority mentalities start to creep in if employees have to choose which table to sit at.
According to the Italian version of the event, they weren't speeding through the checkpoint, nor were they given any warning that there was a checkpoint up ahead (no lights, signs, or soldiers waving them down).
Many of these companies have more than 20+ building distributed across the Bay Area. It's only the main campus which has the large cafeteria and maybe other luxuries like a fitness centre (SGI's main building was across the road from the cinema multiplex).
If you're not working at the main building, then you end up with at least a 20 minute freeway drive to the nearest restaurant. For anywhere upmarket, you need to book at least a day in advance, as there are usually queues outside by lunchtime (Palo Alto). If you're lucky there might be a Mexican restaurant with outside tables, or a Chinese takeaway, but all the tables are quickly taken. And the specials would be snapped up within quarter of an hour of cooking.
And if it's anything like the shopping malls in the UK, the cafeteria will be on the top floor, with the disabled toilets on the ground floor, and the shops inbetween won't exchange paper money for coins.
Our research lab uses both Matlab, Java, C and C++ (depending upon the preferences of the PhD student). Each language has it advantages and disadvantages:
Matlab: All the functions are prewritten, but execution of image processing operations (FFT, Inverse-FFT, image reading) is slow without the "toolbox", and there is the danger of the odd application crash. This is good enough for someone wanting to prototype algorithms.
Java has the Java2D library - As with Matlab, all the functions prewritten, but there may be the odd bug (or rather misunderstanding on what effect a particular option has). There is the advantage of object orientated programming, but JIT compiling helps with speed.
C was used in the past, but the lack of templates, classes and inheritance meant that list/array management for each type of data had to be rewritten. And the other disadvantage was that in many cases, the program writer would make optimisations/assumptions or add process operations unique to his/her project (images are *always* 128x128 or 256x256 for FFT operations).
The other language used is C++, which is used for inhouse real-time applications with GUI's such as WxWidgets, Qt and MFC.
From the article on Jupiter A. Composition of Jupiter
The fact that Jupiter's radius is 11.2 times larger than Earth's means that its volume is more than 1,300 times the volume of Earth. The mass of Jupiter, however, is only 318 times the mass of Earth. Jupiter's density (1.33 g/cm3) is therefore less than one-fourth of Earth's density (5.52 g/cm3). Jupiter's low density indicates that the planet is composed primarily of the lightest elements--hydrogen and helium.
The computer models predict that Jupiter's outer layer, composed of a gaseous mixture of hydrogen, helium, and traces of hydrogen-rich compounds such as ammonia, methane, and water vapor, is about 1,000 km (about 600 mi) thick. Beneath this layer, the pressure is so great and the atmosphere is so hot and compressed that the hydrogen and helium atoms do not behave as a gas, but as what physicists call a supercritical fluid. Supercritical fluids form at high temperatures and pressures and have properties similar to those of both gases and liquids. The supercritical zone extends 20,000 to 30,000 km (12,000 to 19,000 mi) into Jupiter, which is about one-fourth to one-third of the radius of the planet.
Beneath the supercritical fluid zone, the pressure reaches 3 million Earth atmospheres. At this depth, the atoms collide so frequently and violently that the hydrogen atoms are ionized--that is, the negatively charged electrons are stripped away from the positively charged protons of the hydrogen nuclei. This ionization results in a sea of electrically charged particles that resembles a liquid metal and gives rise to Jupiter's magnetic field. This liquid metallic hydrogen zone is 30,000 to 40,000 km (19,000 to 25,000 mi) thick--about half the radius of the planet--and extends to the molten rock core at Jupiter's center. The molten rock core occupies a sphere with a radius of about 10,000 km (about 6,000 mi)--about one-fourth of Jupiter's total radius--and has a mass perhaps 10 to 15 times the mass of Earth.
In ratio to the "strong force" which holds the nucleus of the atom together, the electromagnetic force is 1/137, the weak force is 1/(10^6), and gravity is 1/(10^39).
Thus gravity is 10^37 times weaker than the electronmagnetic force, and 10^33 times weaker than the weak force. So you are going to need a considerable amount of mass to overcome these forces.
Another factor is Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation:
F = G . m1 . m2 / ( r^2)
where G is the Gravitational constant
m1 and m2 are the masses of two objects (eg. hydrogen atoms, dust, asteroids,...) and r is the distance between the two objects
The implication of this equation is that gravitational forces become greater the closer the two objects are. So the gas cloud has to pull itself together from gas to liquid (a liquid cannot be compressed any further). At this stage, pressure is created, and gets converted into heat (electromagnetic force)
If there isn't enough mass, a sufficiently deep gravity well won't form, and you will end up with a superhot liquid gas planet - which is more or less what Jupiter is.
Barnes and Noble usually have large bookstores, with entirely different sections if not rooms, for Fiction, Non-Fiction, Political, and Religion books. Depending upon the layout, it might be possible for two sections to be adjacent, although I have never seen any Bibles being placed anywhere else except the main From the exact wording, the writer certainly sounds like a joker messing around with someone else's property.
There is an art to GUI programming which I think is denigrated in the technical community.
I can appreciate that - I have worked with X-Windows/Motif and MFC in the past, and currently working with Qt. I don't believe the technical community look down upon good GUI design, it is more the fact that it takes so much effort to get what would appear to be a simple task, especially when it is the first time you have tried to write such software(*).
The other frustration that the technical community seem to have is the amount of code that maintaining a good user interface seems to take. You can get a Linux kernel small enough to boot off a floppy disk, but adding a windowing system requires a CD-ROM just to support the fonts, and bitmap support (images, themes, audio), let alone true multimedia support.
(*) Example, the user wants to be able to open a modeless dialog window with two lists, with the ability to select and drag items between the lists; one is the list of things available, the other is the list of things in use. Getting the basic dialog window with Cancel, Reset, Apply and OK buttons is simple enough (after taking care to place the buttons in the right order, so an input error isn't catastrophic), but then you realize that you need to add message boxes to query anything that might lose data. Adding the list boxes is simple enough, but then you need to add drag and drop handlers for both list boxes, adding safety checks to these handlers to ensure the correct type of data is being dropped, ensure that the lists are updated, and sorted if required. Then you have to add signal/slots to export these events to the application, as well as define the right layout to allow the window to be resized (tricky in X-windows/Motif, near impossible in MFC, but not too difficult in Qt).
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, the companies have done deals with the local churchs to have the transmitters installed inside the church towers.
In fact, it might be cruel simply to have a creature with our level of intelligence but without the ability to do anything with it. It would be like shoving a kid in solitary for their whole life. Clearly they would go crazy in short order. That's what really bored humans with too little stimulation do.
Actually, when wild animals used to large territories are placed in caged captivity (polar bears, lions, tigers etc...) they usually do go mad.
Have you seen animals pacing up and down endlessly in their cages or biting at their bars; twisting their necks or rolling heads; vomiting or hurting themselves? All these are symptoms of animals being driven mad because of captivity. This madness, called 'stereotype behaviour' is caused due to removal of animals from their natural habitat, frustration, boredom, lack of life in normal social groups, excessive human control and no control on self. Caged big cats will often pace the same path again and again. Great apes and elephants may rock, sway or shift repeatedly from side to side. Other disturbed behaviour may include licking the walls and chewing the bars of their pens. The startling thing is that most of the animals in the zoos suffer from this terrible syndrome.
...I went to an open day at the University of Central Lancashire (Begin the slagging off), last saturday were they has a full demonstration of this, it was pretty good, using 3 rear projexted screens to make a 3d hallway
VR Caves are still on the high-end of the market.
Consumer stereo glasses have come down in price to $200 and less.
Now I have images of blue neon trim and all sorts of flashy bling bling on the farm...
And on this week's "Pimp My Ride", the team update run down farm bulldozer with chrome treads, an air conditioned cabin with built in jacuzzi, satellite/Internet/DVD player, 20" plasma display, surround sound and a custom paint job with flames on the bucket and speed stripes on the cabin.
What is this American obsession with eating out? Round here people usually just eat the canteen swill or bring sandwiches.
Because of the combination of several reasons:
(1) The majority of companies in the Bay Area don't have catering facilities. Property speculators built office blocks without any consideration for dining facilities. And the cost of high rent prohibits new restaurants from opening.
If you have a corporate campus with 3000 employees, you need a dining room of equivalent size.
After a few weeks, eating sandwiches (or even a fixed weekly menu) become tedious and monotonous. So employees are desperate for variety.
(2) Employees are often required to work long hours in office buildings where having a window is considered a luxury. Consequently, lunchtime is the only time during the day that they can go outside and see sunlight. Especially during Winter.
(3) There are very few if any public bars in the West coast, and the few that exist are mainly used by truckers or Mexican farm workers. And since everyone has to drive to get anywhere, drinking alcohol while driving or even at work is a strict no-no, particularly for government contractors.
(4) Because senior employees have families, they are unable to attend social events during the evenings.
The result of all these factors, is that eating out at a restaurant at lunchtime in Silicon Valley takes on a near religious significance.
Much the same as going out drinking at the local pub with your workmates on a Friday lunchtime or evening has in the UK or on the East coast.
That's true - while I didn't drive to work, we would have to zig-zag through the car-park trying to find a space. Oakland was reputed to be toughes t place to find a parking space as the city council had legislated that each office block should have 10% less parking spaces than there were employees. This was supposed to reduce congestion by forcing people to use public transit, but the effect was to encourage a parking space deathmatch as everyone tried to get in as early as possible.
There was one occasion our team were going out to celebrate someone's Birthday. Our mission was to get to a restaurant in Menlo Park.
Getting into downtown Menlo Park wasn't too bad, but trying to find a parking space was even harder. We would get to the front of the traffic lights, just as the lights turned red, and see an empty space open up. By the time the lights changed to green, the space was taken again. That happened several times. We went to another car park, and saw some empty spaces. Unfortunately, the entrance was blocked by some ditzy lady from LA who was looking at her map trying to find the way to SF airport. She eventually found her way out of the car park and we managed to find a space. When everyone else managed to arrive at the table, they all had their own stories to tell.
Parking at the office wasn't too bad, as we had been relocated to a smaller block away from the main campus, but following concerns from local residents a mile down the road, it was made illegal to make a right turn from our car park exit onto the local access road, even though the exit formed a T junction with the street.
Although the situation isn't much better in the UK. After working in the Bay Area, many of the British roads seem to be like a go-kart racing track, except that there is a speed restriction of 15 miles/hour.
Or perhaps the ratings dropped...
because they decided to replace strong plots and good character development with gratuitious sexual situations in order to attract UPN's 18-25 year old male target audience.
Definitely.
Or perhaps they relied too much on time travel stories, which have become rather cliche in Trek of late.
More than likely. For a Sci-Fi series to become popular, it has to explore current political issues. Star Trek explored the Cold War through the battle between Earth and the Klingon empire. ST:TNG achieved this by exploring the topics of discussion: can intelligent machines really be considered life, the drugs war/international trade.
Another problem is if you have two series exploring the same topic (Eg. Farscape and ST:Voyager both exploring the topic of a crew finding their way home).
Or perhaps not calling it Star Trek for two years didn't help?
Or perhaps the really BAD theme music for Enterprise?
Audiences don't usually watch a Sci-Fi series just for the introduction sequence or title, but it is a good indicator of the amount of effort put into the program.
Or the tortured script of Nemesis, which was an obvious attempt to combine the elements of the higher rating treks into a new movie?
A movie is really a one off event that you might see once. Whether somebody will make the effort to watch the next episode of a series, is based on the previous two episodes.
Or Berman and Braga not understanding what Trek audiences really like?
Definitely.
It's no use blaming the old reruns for poor ratings. Even for a series based purely on special effects, the special effects are constantly improving from month to month.
As a comparison, UK Gold plays reruns of old Dr. Who episodes. The old series seems slow and clunky compared to the new series.
The only problem now (unrelated to the series) is that the title sequence of every other program now seems to use SFX (eg. Sports programs also do the zoom-in sequence from Earth orbit to country/sky/clouds/city/street/sports field).
Well, you can, but then the cafe loses the incentive to provide tables for everyone.
It's much better for team morale for everyone to be able to meet together for lunch each day. But only if there is one table large enough for the whole team (circular tables are best), otherwise all sorts of unpleasant "them and us" seniority mentalities start to creep in if employees have to choose which table to sit at.
You don't zoom thru an armed checkpoint in Iraq.
According to the Italian version of the event, they weren't speeding through the checkpoint, nor were they given any warning that there was a checkpoint up ahead (no lights, signs, or soldiers waving them down).
Many of these companies have more than 20+ building distributed across the Bay Area. It's only the main campus which has the large cafeteria and maybe other luxuries like a fitness centre (SGI's main building was across the road from the cinema multiplex).
If you're not working at the main building, then you end up with at least a 20 minute freeway drive to the nearest restaurant. For anywhere upmarket, you need to book at least a day in advance, as there are usually queues outside by lunchtime (Palo Alto). If you're lucky there might be a Mexican restaurant with outside tables, or a Chinese takeaway, but all the tables are quickly taken. And the specials would be snapped up within quarter of an hour of cooking.
And if it's anything like the shopping malls in the UK, the cafeteria will be on the top floor, with the disabled toilets on the ground floor, and the shops inbetween won't exchange paper money for coins.
The day they are out of business, or they have managed to have every customer jailed.
Then they will campaign to have prison life improved through the availabilty of Internet access, MP3 players and PC's.
Our research lab uses both Matlab, Java, C and C++ (depending upon the preferences of the PhD student).
Each language has it advantages and disadvantages:
Matlab: All the functions are prewritten, but execution of image processing operations (FFT, Inverse-FFT, image reading) is slow without the "toolbox", and there is the danger of the odd application crash. This is good enough for someone wanting to prototype algorithms.
Java has the Java2D library - As with Matlab, all the functions prewritten, but there may be the odd bug (or rather misunderstanding on what effect a particular option has). There is the advantage of object orientated programming, but JIT compiling helps with speed.
C was used in the past, but the lack of templates, classes and inheritance meant that list/array management for each type of data had to be rewritten. And the other disadvantage was that in many cases, the program writer would make optimisations/assumptions or add process operations unique to his/her project (images are *always* 128x128 or 256x256 for FFT operations).
The other language used is C++, which is used for inhouse real-time applications with GUI's such as WxWidgets, Qt and MFC.
From the article on Jupiter
...)
A. Composition of Jupiter
The fact that Jupiter's radius is 11.2 times larger than Earth's means that its volume is more than 1,300 times the volume of Earth. The mass of Jupiter, however, is only 318 times the mass of Earth. Jupiter's density (1.33 g/cm3) is therefore less than one-fourth of Earth's density (5.52 g/cm3). Jupiter's low density indicates that the planet is composed primarily of the lightest elements--hydrogen and helium.
The computer models predict that Jupiter's outer layer, composed of a gaseous mixture of hydrogen, helium, and traces of hydrogen-rich compounds such as ammonia, methane, and water vapor, is about 1,000 km (about 600 mi) thick. Beneath this layer, the pressure is so great and the atmosphere is so hot and compressed that the hydrogen and helium atoms do not behave as a gas, but as what physicists call a supercritical fluid. Supercritical fluids form at high temperatures and pressures and have properties similar to those of both gases and liquids. The supercritical zone extends 20,000 to 30,000 km (12,000 to 19,000 mi) into Jupiter, which is about one-fourth to one-third of the radius of the planet.
Beneath the supercritical fluid zone, the pressure reaches 3 million Earth atmospheres. At this depth, the atoms collide so frequently and violently that the hydrogen atoms are ionized--that is, the negatively charged electrons are stripped away from the positively charged protons of the hydrogen nuclei. This ionization results in a sea of electrically charged particles that resembles a liquid metal and gives rise to Jupiter's magnetic field. This liquid metallic hydrogen zone is 30,000 to 40,000 km (19,000 to 25,000 mi) thick--about half the radius of the planet--and extends to the molten rock core at Jupiter's center. The molten rock core occupies a sphere with a radius of about 10,000 km (about 6,000 mi)--about one-fourth of Jupiter's total radius--and has a mass perhaps 10 to 15 times the mass of Earth.
In order for a cloud of hydrogen gas to form a star, both gravity and pressure have to overcome the various fundamental forces that prevent atoms from fusing together,/a> (weak, electromagnetic).
In ratio to the "strong force" which holds the nucleus of the atom together, the electromagnetic force is 1/137, the weak force is 1/(10^6), and gravity is 1/(10^39).
Thus gravity is 10^37 times weaker than the electronmagnetic force, and 10^33 times weaker than the weak force. So you are going to need a considerable amount of mass to overcome these forces.
Another factor is Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation:
F = G . m1 . m2 / ( r^2)
where G is the Gravitational constant
m1 and m2 are the masses of two objects (eg. hydrogen atoms, dust, asteroids,
and r is the distance between the two objects
The implication of this equation is that gravitational forces become greater the closer the two objects are. So the gas cloud has to pull itself together from gas to liquid (a liquid cannot be compressed any further). At this stage, pressure is created, and gets converted into heat (electromagnetic force)
If there isn't enough mass, a sufficiently deep gravity well won't form, and you will end up with a superhot liquid gas planet - which is more or less what Jupiter is.
That's the one (406373
Barnes and Noble usually have large bookstores, with entirely different sections if not rooms, for Fiction, Non-Fiction, Political, and Religion books. Depending upon the layout, it might be possible for two sections to be adjacent, although I have never seen any Bibles being placed anywhere else except the main
From the exact wording, the writer certainly sounds like a joker messing around with someone else's property.
They cancelled donut day? Man, that's terrible - although nobody ever seemed to care for the sesame seed bagels.
Apparently, it was the most controversial film of it's time :).
What possible bearing on the rating could that line have on the rating? Is "puff" a swear word or something?
America's religious right are very touchy about Creationism vs. Evolutionism.
Having God disappear in a puff of logic is just rubbing salt in the wound.
There's a IRC chat in bash.org, where a guy got fired for accidently putting Bibles in the fiction section.
That's not the problem - what if the string begins with '\0' ie. zero length?
That should be:
// Avoid overflow
void process_string( char *pstr )
{
char tempbuf[1024];
strncpy( tempbuf, pstr, 1023 );
tempbuf[strlen(tempbuf)-1] = '\0';
}
Don't forget NUL terminating a string:
// Avoid overflow
void process_string( char *pstr )
{
char tempbuf[1024];
strncpy( tempbuf, pstr, 1023 );
buffer[strlen(buffer)-1] = '\0';
}
Wow! A stretch 4x4! Great for making an appearance at those outback movie premiers - just remember to bring your own beer and BBQ ribs.
Not bigger wheels, bigger tires. Shoulda went with some 44" Baja Claws
No, you need sand tyres - mud tyres are designed to dig deep into the dirt.
That's the last thing you want to do if you are travelling across sand.
There is an art to GUI programming which I think is denigrated in the technical community.
I can appreciate that - I have worked with X-Windows/Motif and MFC in the past, and currently working with Qt. I don't believe the technical community look down upon good GUI design, it is more the fact that it takes so much effort to get what would appear to be a simple task, especially when it is the first time you have tried to write such software(*).
The other frustration that the technical community seem to have is the amount of code that maintaining a good user interface seems to take. You can get a Linux kernel small enough to boot off a floppy disk, but adding a windowing system requires a CD-ROM just to support the fonts, and bitmap support (images, themes, audio), let alone true multimedia support.
(*) Example, the user wants to be able to open a modeless dialog window with two lists, with the ability to select and drag items between the lists; one is the list of things available, the other is the list of things in use. Getting the basic dialog window with Cancel, Reset, Apply and OK buttons is simple enough (after taking care to place the buttons in the right order, so an input error isn't catastrophic), but then you realize that you need to add message boxes to query anything that might lose data. Adding the list boxes is simple enough, but then you need to add drag and drop handlers for both list boxes, adding safety checks to these handlers to ensure the correct type of data is being dropped, ensure that the lists are updated, and sorted if required. Then you have to add signal/slots to export these events to the application, as well as define the right layout to allow the window to be resized (tricky in X-windows/Motif, near impossible in MFC, but not too difficult in Qt).
You haven't tried using the modern BT phoneboxes with the hinged plate glass doors.