Having done a degree in London (I say, wot wot?!), I know when I was looking into CS degrees around various institutions, almost none offered anything even close to gaming programming.
But on the contrary, I've also heard a lot of people saying that "games programming degrees" are often rubbish, and are much of the problem. TFA states this too (although it's rather unclear whether their point is "game programming degrees are rubbish, people should do proper degrees" or "game programming degrees need to improve").
If you have a degree in computer science or mathematics, you should be able to apply that to game programming. Or many other things - which is likely the problem for the games industry, in that the people with the relevant skills are preferring to work somewhere with decent pay.
True, although the US doesn't have it all good - despite higher wages, they tend to have longer hours, hardly any holiday, and poorer employement laws (fire-at-will, we-own-everything-you-do-IP-contracts, no-compete clauses). Overall I'd prefer the UK, personally.
The problem in this case is specifically the games industry - where even in the same country, you have lower pay compared with equivalent jobs elsewhere in IT. And that's not offset by better working conditions - on the contrary, it tends to be longer hours and poorer conditions.
This is true in the US also, from the stories I've heard.
When I graduated, I had no desire to go to the US. But I turned down a job at a games company, deciding I'd rather take somewhere with better pay and conditions.
Bah, let the cpu do all that. Gimme a creative guy who can come up with a solid design first, otherwise the brilliant physics engine will never be worth a damn anyway.
I think you misunderstand his point - he didn't mean "intellectual brute force" as in getting the programmer to work out the calculations by hand instead of the CPU! Coming up with a solid design is what requires intellect. It's not a hand-wavy "creativity" issue.
On the other, copy and paste, sending a picture via MMS and video -- these seem like "somewhat nice to have".
When it comes to ease of use, copy and paste is fundamental. Ease of use is not just about how easy it is to work out how to use a feature, it's about features which make everyday use easier.
The claim being put forward is that the Iphone is easier to use - if it misses out on fundamental ease-of-use features, then sure, you can say that it's merely "somewhat nice to have", but it's no longer true that the Iphone is easier to use. Rather, you've relegated ease of use to "somewhat nice to have".
(And given these features are standard on cheap phones, why would I pay more just to settle for "somewhat nice to have"?)
I realise YMMV, but the question is, whose mileage is more typical of what people in general want from a smartphone?
I don't know - is the Iphone the only phone that does conference calling or visual voicemail? If so, you can reasonably claim those as something unique about the Iphone. If not, I'm not sure what the point being made is...
Also, if the guy at 'Limbo of the Lost' bought the game it is his to do with what he wishes because he didn't agree to any stupid 'don't lift graphics' clause and shrinkwrap licenses have never been proven in court anyway so no one has any legal standing to complain about anything.
No, that's copyright infringement. You are not allowed to redistribute copyrighted material by default - that's the law, and nothing to do with stupid EULAs.
I'll bite back - if I want to copy and paste some text on my Iphone, how do I do that? What about sending a picture to someone whose phone doesn't support email attachments, or recording a video? These features may or may not exist, but I can't work out how to use them.
The iPhone brings together iTunes, iPod, & Telephone, and Web capabilities in a unified architecture that is based on OSX format.
It appears to be a common Apple myth that the Iphone did this. In reality, convergence of the telephone, portable music, Internet access (at 3G speeds, btw), along with things the Iphone still doesn't offer (video recording) happened years ago. It's standard - even on dirt cheap phones.
Of course, the myth itself probably attributes to the small success the Iphone has enjoyed, as lots of people here appear to have bought it, thinking that no other phone offers Internet access. That, and all the free advertising the media seems to be giving Apple (this is the first Nokia story I've seen in ages, and even that has to pipe in a spam-ad about Apple; not to mention the hype the BBC give it) - it would be hard for them not to sell. But their market is still tiny compared to Nokia.
A Nokia or Blackberry with a touch screen will not be able to support anything remotely close to what Apple is offering.
I'll bite - what does the Iphone do that no other phone does? (And please, save me from the inevitable "It Just Works", "It's better! It Just Is!" replies...)
It Just Works, it doesn't crash (often), it looks good, it is easy to use, and most of all: It Just Works.
Ah brilliant, a long list of subjective non-reasons! Evidence that it crashes less than all other phones? Example of a feature that is easier to use than all other phones?
My phone just works, it's easy to use, it just works, it doesn't crash (often), it just works, it looks good and it just works.
In fact - it doesn't just work, it does a whole lot more besides. Is the Iphone's best feature merely that it's a working phone?
It also works "out of the box". What phone doesn't?
I asked in a recent thread what some actual unique features of the Iphone were, and it was like getting blood out of a stone. Of course, people were happy to supply me with "But it just is! Iphone rules, other phones suck! It Just Works!"
Like many Apple devices, there is not much really innovative about it.
>80% of iphone uses have used 10 or more applicaiton functions on their phone >95% use the internet and google says most of their mobile queries come from iphones.
How do those stats compare to a similarly priced rival smartphone? How did Google count different makes of phone from the same manufacturer?
Also remember Nokia sells its phones to a vast market - half a billion in 2009, TFA states - which includes all sorts of people, including those who don't care about many functions. Apple on the other hand are targetting only a few million users, most likely technology users who are interesting in Internet functions. It would be a fallacy to conclude that these stats are because of the phones themselves, and not the users.
Touchscreen is just what is notable about the Iphone. Not Internet features - which have been bog standard on dirt cheap phones for years. That's why Nokia don't really care about rivalling it. (I suspect the "Release an Iphone rival" hype comes from PC Pro, rather than Nokia, who don't seem keen to compare their half a billion target market to Apple's millions. Why does everything have to be compared to the Iphone? I'm glad for once in a blue moon to have a Nokia article instead of an Iphone article, but it seems we still have to sneak an advert in for Apple...)
Actually, with your standard raster renderer, they're mostly cheating to make this stuff work.
I'm not sure "cheating" is a fair word. Yes, it is a problem that you have to be careful with the performance of reflections with standard renderers, but both that and raytracing are not doing 100% accurate simulations of reality.
Dynamic shadows are still optional in just about every game that features them. Why? Because only really fast, expensive cards can do it, and even that's stretching it.
Not in my experience, I can happily switch on shadows on my rubbish Intel GMA graphics. But more to the point, a raytracer is hardly going to run on this kind of hardware, either! If we're going to need expensive next generation hardware to run the raytracer, it's fair to compare to a standard renderer running on that kind of hardware too.
And they're always round my house playing my SNES.
But wait, they're not. Why isn't everyone playing dirt-cheap old computer/console games (even cheaper with an emulator)? Surely the old technology isn't a problem?
Except that they are currently only using 16 cores to render that, and the final Larrabee is supposed to have much more of them......well, when it finally comes out
By which time, GPUs will have more cores also.
The other good thing is that ray tracing scales up almost linearly with the number of cores and chips. (Whereas there's a diminishing return for each additional GPU with traditional rendering).
Does it? I'm no expert, but I'm curious for references? (And note, we should be comparing adding additional GPU cores on the same GPU, rather than literally additional processors.)
To take that step a bit further, if it would save lives, I would gladly volunteer to be subjected to torture.
Well I think that you could be a terrorist for all we know (which is sufficient justification - clearly you don't deserve any rights as a suspected terrorist), so step forward - you've just volunteered to be tortured!
Opera still supports the MDI stupidity when even its own author - M$ - has declared it a major mistake in UI design.
Nope, you can choose between MDI or SDI, or if you prefer, you can do "tabs" the way that Firefox does it.
But what's so bad about MDI/tabs? It's better than cluttering up your screen without windows like was the case before tabs came along. If you mean specifically MDI tabs versus the "Firefox" style of tabs, why is MDI worse? The Firefox tabs method has significant limitations, for example, because the tabs can't be treated as internal windows, I can't do things like view two tabs side by side (unless I reopen them in a separate window, which is a rather ugly and labourious way to do it).
Even though I can set Opera to do it either way, I stick with MDI - I'm curious what's stupid about it?
There's a difference between opening up your laptop and taking a look, versus taking a copy to investigate later or, as in this case, confiscating the laptop.
The idea that they need to search for "illegal information" seems rather odd to me anyway - if someone wanted to bring in child abuse images, surely they would use less risky ways than passing them through customs? It seems more like a fishing expedition to get people for anything that happens to be dodgy on their hard disk.
What happens if a US traveller goes to a country that has less than liberal laws on adult images - perhaps that private image of your girlfriend tucked away on your laptop isn't legal there, or perhaps that video is banned? It's the information equivalent of people being imprisoned for poppy seeds in food and over the counter drugs, with the difference that it's a lot harder to make sure your laptop is scrubbed of everything that might be illegal in that country, compared with simply not taking physical objects (unless you don't take the laptop at all, which'd be simpler, but also a significant cost).
This instead offers a choice between raising it to 42 days, and changing the law to allow the police to question suspects on related offences after the 28 day period. 70% supported the latter, with only 13% in favour of the former.
But yes I agree with you about the Lords - the question of how long someone should be locked up for is the very thing that shouldn't be put to the popular vote.
Ah yes, our fine tradition of having decisions by the people we elect overturned by a bunch of unelected lords.
By "people we elect" you mean "people elected by a minority of the country" (about 30something % of voters, I believe).
An unelected second house has it's uses. And lately, the unelected house has done a far better job of defending people's rights and freedoms than this Government. Making things harder for a Government to pass new laws is on the whole better than making it easier.
Or do you disagree with say, the Supreme Court in the US? After all, that's just a bunch of unelected people who can overturn what the elected people have done (Bush must be great, right, after all he was elected!)
I'm for this 42 day thing myself. Its not as if its a breach of human rights or anything, I mean, we aren't waterboarding them, or locking them away for years without trial....
Who is "them"? Will you be so quick to be in favour if you were the one being suspected without charge?
I know, since you believe so strongly in democracy, let's have a straw poll on Slashdot on whether user thermian should spend 42 days locked up without charge. Who's with me? I vote for this - after all, he might be a terrorist, and I'll vote for anything that makes me feel safe.
So you create an arbitrary rule to exclude someone's opinion so it does not count?
Because it doesn't explain why it is better. Otherwise someone can easily counter that by claiming they couldn't use the features in the Iphone.
Do you think "Iphone rules!" "No, Iphone sucks" is a useful discussion to have?
It sounds more like you know he has a valid argument
If he has one, I wish he would share it with us.
And yes, there are things about a UI that make it hard to quantify. Why is one UI "easier" or "more enjoyable to use"? Sometimes those things are hard to quantify and put into words, but you just know it's true. That happens a lot in life. I like pizza, my favorite color is blue
So the Iphone is only good in the same way that people have favourite foods or colours? Okay, but that's not what people usually mean when they compare technology products. In the real world, when one product is better, it's because there are measurable reasons, and not simply "Well I like the colour blue, and I also like the Iphone". Personally I don't like a particular colour so much that I'll pay loads of money for it...
But I love this attempt to completely avoid the need to justify a product's worth. Next time there's an article on a non-Apple niche product (e.g., the Amiga articles we sometimes have), and people ask what's so good about it, I'll respond with "It's the best, it just is, no different to me liking the colour blue".
Sure, but I don't think "sleeping in" has to be literally, the point is that he'll have his time for himself, whether that's sleeping in, on the computer - or volunteering for a charity.
When people go to Church on a Sunday Service, my understanding is that it doesn't involve charity work, so it's misleading to conflate them. Indeed, your argument works in favour - by not going to the Sunday Service to be preached at, he now has time to spend on charity/volunteer work.
There's being intolerant of someone based on their private lives or orientation or (lack of) belief on a philosophical issue, and there's intolerance of people who are intolerant.
The flaw in your argument is assuming that all intolerance is equally bad. Obviously this is not true - most people are intolerant of murderers, for example. The BSA are intolerant of homosexuality and atheism. The OP is intolerant of people who are intolerant of homosexuality and atheism. You decide which is worse.
Evolution vs. creationism...well, the Bible says God created all of the creatures on the earth, but it doesn't describe the method by which He did it, does it?
The story of Genesis is quite specific in terms of describing a method inconsistent with known scientific facts, as far as I can see?
(And yes, I know that many Christians consider Genesis as a myth, but (a) that's not the same thing as reconciling the Bible with science and pretending that the Bible is still 100% true, and (b) if you reject some parts as untrue, the question is what means do you use to decide which parts of the Bible are God's word, and which are not?)
Having said that, I'm not quite ready to embrace evolution as the origin of species (as opposed to evolution within species, which I do accept), but this discovery is definitely interesting.
No he didn't. "Hard to use" is an assertion that needs evidence, it is not evidence that supports the assertion.
Maybe the RAZR is a rubbish phone, but even if it is, it's not the only phone on the market! There are plenty of phones and smartphones out there, including ones which do touch - the logic of "The RAZR is rubbish, therefore the Iphone is the best" doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Having done a degree in London (I say, wot wot?!), I know when I was looking into CS degrees around various institutions, almost none offered anything even close to gaming programming.
But on the contrary, I've also heard a lot of people saying that "games programming degrees" are often rubbish, and are much of the problem. TFA states this too (although it's rather unclear whether their point is "game programming degrees are rubbish, people should do proper degrees" or "game programming degrees need to improve").
If you have a degree in computer science or mathematics, you should be able to apply that to game programming. Or many other things - which is likely the problem for the games industry, in that the people with the relevant skills are preferring to work somewhere with decent pay.
British programmers are alcoholics who write poor hacky code, based on one anecdotal experience from an anonymous source?
Why is this racist nonsense getting modded up?
True, although the US doesn't have it all good - despite higher wages, they tend to have longer hours, hardly any holiday, and poorer employement laws (fire-at-will, we-own-everything-you-do-IP-contracts, no-compete clauses). Overall I'd prefer the UK, personally.
The problem in this case is specifically the games industry - where even in the same country, you have lower pay compared with equivalent jobs elsewhere in IT. And that's not offset by better working conditions - on the contrary, it tends to be longer hours and poorer conditions.
This is true in the US also, from the stories I've heard.
When I graduated, I had no desire to go to the US. But I turned down a job at a games company, deciding I'd rather take somewhere with better pay and conditions.
Bah, let the cpu do all that. Gimme a creative guy who can come up with a solid design first, otherwise the brilliant physics engine will never be worth a damn anyway.
I think you misunderstand his point - he didn't mean "intellectual brute force" as in getting the programmer to work out the calculations by hand instead of the CPU! Coming up with a solid design is what requires intellect. It's not a hand-wavy "creativity" issue.
MMS works fine for me.
On the other, copy and paste, sending a picture via MMS and video -- these seem like "somewhat nice to have".
When it comes to ease of use, copy and paste is fundamental. Ease of use is not just about how easy it is to work out how to use a feature, it's about features which make everyday use easier.
The claim being put forward is that the Iphone is easier to use - if it misses out on fundamental ease-of-use features, then sure, you can say that it's merely "somewhat nice to have", but it's no longer true that the Iphone is easier to use. Rather, you've relegated ease of use to "somewhat nice to have".
(And given these features are standard on cheap phones, why would I pay more just to settle for "somewhat nice to have"?)
I realise YMMV, but the question is, whose mileage is more typical of what people in general want from a smartphone?
I don't know - is the Iphone the only phone that does conference calling or visual voicemail? If so, you can reasonably claim those as something unique about the Iphone. If not, I'm not sure what the point being made is...
Also, if the guy at 'Limbo of the Lost' bought the game it is his to do with what he wishes because he didn't agree to any stupid 'don't lift graphics' clause and shrinkwrap licenses have never been proven in court anyway so no one has any legal standing to complain about anything.
No, that's copyright infringement. You are not allowed to redistribute copyrighted material by default - that's the law, and nothing to do with stupid EULAs.
I'll bite back - if I want to copy and paste some text on my Iphone, how do I do that? What about sending a picture to someone whose phone doesn't support email attachments, or recording a video? These features may or may not exist, but I can't work out how to use them.
Anecdotal evidence
I'm after evidence, not anecdotes.
I've never heard complaints that my model of phone crashes. Or complaints that any model of phone crashes.
No, we shouldn't trust official specs of manufacturers - nor can we trust anecdotes posted by pro-Apple people on a webforum!
The iPhone brings together iTunes, iPod, & Telephone, and Web capabilities in a unified architecture that is based on OSX format.
It appears to be a common Apple myth that the Iphone did this. In reality, convergence of the telephone, portable music, Internet access (at 3G speeds, btw), along with things the Iphone still doesn't offer (video recording) happened years ago. It's standard - even on dirt cheap phones.
Of course, the myth itself probably attributes to the small success the Iphone has enjoyed, as lots of people here appear to have bought it, thinking that no other phone offers Internet access. That, and all the free advertising the media seems to be giving Apple (this is the first Nokia story I've seen in ages, and even that has to pipe in a spam-ad about Apple; not to mention the hype the BBC give it) - it would be hard for them not to sell. But their market is still tiny compared to Nokia.
A Nokia or Blackberry with a touch screen will not be able to support anything remotely close to what Apple is offering.
I'll bite - what does the Iphone do that no other phone does? (And please, save me from the inevitable "It Just Works", "It's better! It Just Is!" replies...)
It Just Works,
it doesn't crash (often),
it looks good,
it is easy to use,
and most of all: It Just Works.
Ah brilliant, a long list of subjective non-reasons! Evidence that it crashes less than all other phones? Example of a feature that is easier to use than all other phones?
My phone just works, it's easy to use, it just works, it doesn't crash (often), it just works, it looks good and it just works.
In fact - it doesn't just work, it does a whole lot more besides. Is the Iphone's best feature merely that it's a working phone?
It also works "out of the box". What phone doesn't?
I asked in a recent thread what some actual unique features of the Iphone were, and it was like getting blood out of a stone. Of course, people were happy to supply me with "But it just is! Iphone rules, other phones suck! It Just Works!"
Like many Apple devices, there is not much really innovative about it.
I fully agree. +1 insightful indeed.
>80% of iphone uses have used 10 or more applicaiton functions on their phone
>95% use the internet and google says most of their mobile queries come from iphones.
How do those stats compare to a similarly priced rival smartphone? How did Google count different makes of phone from the same manufacturer?
Also remember Nokia sells its phones to a vast market - half a billion in 2009, TFA states - which includes all sorts of people, including those who don't care about many functions. Apple on the other hand are targetting only a few million users, most likely technology users who are interesting in Internet functions. It would be a fallacy to conclude that these stats are because of the phones themselves, and not the users.
Touchscreen is just what is notable about the Iphone. Not Internet features - which have been bog standard on dirt cheap phones for years. That's why Nokia don't really care about rivalling it. (I suspect the "Release an Iphone rival" hype comes from PC Pro, rather than Nokia, who don't seem keen to compare their half a billion target market to Apple's millions. Why does everything have to be compared to the Iphone? I'm glad for once in a blue moon to have a Nokia article instead of an Iphone article, but it seems we still have to sneak an advert in for Apple...)
Indeed - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume#Depth_fail . It's still often known as Carmack's Reverse.
Actually, with your standard raster renderer, they're mostly cheating to make this stuff work.
I'm not sure "cheating" is a fair word. Yes, it is a problem that you have to be careful with the performance of reflections with standard renderers, but both that and raytracing are not doing 100% accurate simulations of reality.
Dynamic shadows are still optional in just about every game that features them. Why? Because only really fast, expensive cards can do it, and even that's stretching it.
Not in my experience, I can happily switch on shadows on my rubbish Intel GMA graphics. But more to the point, a raytracer is hardly going to run on this kind of hardware, either! If we're going to need expensive next generation hardware to run the raytracer, it's fair to compare to a standard renderer running on that kind of hardware too.
And they're always round my house playing my SNES.
But wait, they're not. Why isn't everyone playing dirt-cheap old computer/console games (even cheaper with an emulator)? Surely the old technology isn't a problem?
Except that they are currently only using 16 cores to render that, and the final Larrabee is supposed to have much more of them... ...well, when it finally comes out
By which time, GPUs will have more cores also.
The other good thing is that ray tracing scales up almost linearly with the number of cores and chips. (Whereas there's a diminishing return for each additional GPU with traditional rendering).
Does it? I'm no expert, but I'm curious for references? (And note, we should be comparing adding additional GPU cores on the same GPU, rather than literally additional processors.)
To take that step a bit further, if it would save lives, I would gladly volunteer to be subjected to torture.
Well I think that you could be a terrorist for all we know (which is sufficient justification - clearly you don't deserve any rights as a suspected terrorist), so step forward - you've just volunteered to be tortured!
Who wants to go first?
Opera still supports the MDI stupidity when even its own author - M$ - has declared it a major mistake in UI design.
Nope, you can choose between MDI or SDI, or if you prefer, you can do "tabs" the way that Firefox does it.
But what's so bad about MDI/tabs? It's better than cluttering up your screen without windows like was the case before tabs came along. If you mean specifically MDI tabs versus the "Firefox" style of tabs, why is MDI worse? The Firefox tabs method has significant limitations, for example, because the tabs can't be treated as internal windows, I can't do things like view two tabs side by side (unless I reopen them in a separate window, which is a rather ugly and labourious way to do it).
Even though I can set Opera to do it either way, I stick with MDI - I'm curious what's stupid about it?
There's a difference between opening up your laptop and taking a look, versus taking a copy to investigate later or, as in this case, confiscating the laptop.
The idea that they need to search for "illegal information" seems rather odd to me anyway - if someone wanted to bring in child abuse images, surely they would use less risky ways than passing them through customs? It seems more like a fishing expedition to get people for anything that happens to be dodgy on their hard disk.
What happens if a US traveller goes to a country that has less than liberal laws on adult images - perhaps that private image of your girlfriend tucked away on your laptop isn't legal there, or perhaps that video is banned? It's the information equivalent of people being imprisoned for poppy seeds in food and over the counter drugs, with the difference that it's a lot harder to make sure your laptop is scrubbed of everything that might be illegal in that country, compared with simply not taking physical objects (unless you don't take the laptop at all, which'd be simpler, but also a significant cost).
I would be suspicious without seeing the wording of the poll itself.
I don't think this is the poll in question, but a recent YouGov poll is at http://www.yougov.com/uk/archives/pdf/Liberty%20results%2008%2003%2027%20(2).pdf .
This instead offers a choice between raising it to 42 days, and changing the law to allow the police to question suspects on related offences after the 28 day period. 70% supported the latter, with only 13% in favour of the former.
But yes I agree with you about the Lords - the question of how long someone should be locked up for is the very thing that shouldn't be put to the popular vote.
Ah yes, our fine tradition of having decisions by the people we elect overturned by a bunch of unelected lords.
By "people we elect" you mean "people elected by a minority of the country" (about 30something % of voters, I believe).
An unelected second house has it's uses. And lately, the unelected house has done a far better job of defending people's rights and freedoms than this Government. Making things harder for a Government to pass new laws is on the whole better than making it easier.
Or do you disagree with say, the Supreme Court in the US? After all, that's just a bunch of unelected people who can overturn what the elected people have done (Bush must be great, right, after all he was elected!)
I'm for this 42 day thing myself. Its not as if its a breach of human rights or anything, I mean, we aren't waterboarding them, or locking them away for years without trial....
Who is "them"? Will you be so quick to be in favour if you were the one being suspected without charge?
I know, since you believe so strongly in democracy, let's have a straw poll on Slashdot on whether user thermian should spend 42 days locked up without charge. Who's with me? I vote for this - after all, he might be a terrorist, and I'll vote for anything that makes me feel safe.
So you create an arbitrary rule to exclude someone's opinion so it does not count?
Because it doesn't explain why it is better. Otherwise someone can easily counter that by claiming they couldn't use the features in the Iphone.
Do you think "Iphone rules!" "No, Iphone sucks" is a useful discussion to have?
It sounds more like you know he has a valid argument
If he has one, I wish he would share it with us.
And yes, there are things about a UI that make it hard to quantify. Why is one UI "easier" or "more enjoyable to use"? Sometimes those things are hard to quantify and put into words, but you just know it's true. That happens a lot in life. I like pizza, my favorite color is blue
So the Iphone is only good in the same way that people have favourite foods or colours? Okay, but that's not what people usually mean when they compare technology products. In the real world, when one product is better, it's because there are measurable reasons, and not simply "Well I like the colour blue, and I also like the Iphone". Personally I don't like a particular colour so much that I'll pay loads of money for it...
But I love this attempt to completely avoid the need to justify a product's worth. Next time there's an article on a non-Apple niche product (e.g., the Amiga articles we sometimes have), and people ask what's so good about it, I'll respond with "It's the best, it just is, no different to me liking the colour blue".
Sure, but I don't think "sleeping in" has to be literally, the point is that he'll have his time for himself, whether that's sleeping in, on the computer - or volunteering for a charity.
When people go to Church on a Sunday Service, my understanding is that it doesn't involve charity work, so it's misleading to conflate them. Indeed, your argument works in favour - by not going to the Sunday Service to be preached at, he now has time to spend on charity/volunteer work.
There's being intolerant of someone based on their private lives or orientation or (lack of) belief on a philosophical issue, and there's intolerance of people who are intolerant.
The flaw in your argument is assuming that all intolerance is equally bad. Obviously this is not true - most people are intolerant of murderers, for example. The BSA are intolerant of homosexuality and atheism. The OP is intolerant of people who are intolerant of homosexuality and atheism. You decide which is worse.
Evolution vs. creationism...well, the Bible says God created all of the creatures on the earth, but it doesn't describe the method by which He did it, does it?
The story of Genesis is quite specific in terms of describing a method inconsistent with known scientific facts, as far as I can see?
(And yes, I know that many Christians consider Genesis as a myth, but (a) that's not the same thing as reconciling the Bible with science and pretending that the Bible is still 100% true, and (b) if you reject some parts as untrue, the question is what means do you use to decide which parts of the Bible are God's word, and which are not?)
Having said that, I'm not quite ready to embrace evolution as the origin of species (as opposed to evolution within species, which I do accept), but this discovery is definitely interesting.
Speciation has already been observed.
He gave a solid example.
No he didn't. "Hard to use" is an assertion that needs evidence, it is not evidence that supports the assertion.
Maybe the RAZR is a rubbish phone, but even if it is, it's not the only phone on the market! There are plenty of phones and smartphones out there, including ones which do touch - the logic of "The RAZR is rubbish, therefore the Iphone is the best" doesn't work.