Yes. I have actually done phone support, and you would not believe how dumb some people are. Many will call for support before they even turn their computer on. They want someone to babysit them through the entire process before they even try to do it themselves.
Yeah, because no one is more likely to call tech support to learn how to turn the computer on than a Linux user.
Yep. New version of Mint will be based on Ubuntu 14.04 until 2016, which is when new LTS versions of both Mint and Ubuntu are expected. Mint is saying it will make it "trivial" to update. I hope that's true.
The fate of Kennewick man is still a matter of some debate. A court approved study on the remains, but the American Indian tribes are trying to halt research while the decision is appealed.
For an example of why these findings are so political, check out this related story in The Guardian speculating that the Mexican remains might show the first Americans were of European origin.
Microsoft are said to be prepared to spend $2 billion funding Xbox live over the next five years, suggesting it will be some time before the home entertainment division break into the black."
I don't begrudge people their money and I'm not an anti-corporate type. MS may be evil, but not for simply making money. Still, it's good to put numbers like $2 billion in perspective. The state I live in has about 8 million people. We're facing a budget shortfall (two-year budget, compared to MS's five-year plan) of about $2-3 billion, and people are flipping out -- school funding may be cut, roads might not get fixed or else taxes are going seriously up. One can argue about the reasons -- like government spending way too much already -- and it's not really important to my point. I just wanted to give that figure a context: It's a statewide disaster. Or an investment in making a line of video game hardware successful. Take your pick.
Maybe, maybe not. Humans observe things they don't fully understand, perceive patterns they cannot fully define. Things may be indirectly observable, and there's no reason to assume that life existing in, say, five dimensions would not be observable in four. It may be premature to say, too, that we'll never come up with the right model to understand it.
Take sensory input as an analogy. A blind person does not perceive light in one important way that a seeing person does. However, a blind person experiences radiant heat in a tactile manner just a seeing person does and could, in any number of experiments, perceive an effect of light. This is just a different kind of observation, and it's no great leap to think a world full of blind humans would come up with a full-blown theory that incorporates our abstract understanding of light.
In much the same way, we perceive four dimensions, three of space and one of time. Yet there's plenty that happens to us and around us we don't fully understand but which seems ordered -- in short, which could be analogous to a blind person's experience of light. We see the implications in theories of physics that attempt to explain the mysteries of the universe by incorporating a theory of more than four dimensions. For all we know, we occupy six dimensions but just don't perceive it directly.
Sometimes I think they just screw up on pricing. It happens in paper formats, too: I bought a relatively specialized journalism text last year from Barnes & Noble that was available in hardcover and paperback, and the Web site showed the cost of the the paperback as twice the cost of the hardcover version. There was a discount on the hardcover book, but miniscule compared to the price difference; they were just priced that far apart. At the store, that disparity was confirmed and met with the same puzzled look I had. So I smiled and bought the hardcover.
Re:Great OS, but Palm's platforms are lagging...
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Palm OS 5.0 Preview
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I read from my Visor and like it OK, but it is hard on the eyes. A PDA seems like a natural for anybody looking for an ebook reader, just because you get all the PDA functionality in addition. Maybe PDAs are more adapatable to new/emerging file formats, too?
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Yes. I have actually done phone support, and you would not believe how dumb some people are. Many will call for support before they even turn their computer on. They want someone to babysit them through the entire process before they even try to do it themselves.
Yeah, because no one is more likely to call tech support to learn how to turn the computer on than a Linux user.
Yep. New version of Mint will be based on Ubuntu 14.04 until 2016, which is when new LTS versions of both Mint and Ubuntu are expected. Mint is saying it will make it "trivial" to update. I hope that's true.
The fate of Kennewick man is still a matter of some debate. A court approved study on the remains, but the American Indian tribes are trying to halt research while the decision is appealed.
For an example of why these findings are so political, check out this related story in The Guardian speculating that the Mexican remains might show the first Americans were of European origin.
I don't begrudge people their money and I'm not an anti-corporate type. MS may be evil, but not for simply making money. Still, it's good to put numbers like $2 billion in perspective. The state I live in has about 8 million people. We're facing a budget shortfall (two-year budget, compared to MS's five-year plan) of about $2-3 billion, and people are flipping out -- school funding may be cut, roads might not get fixed or else taxes are going seriously up. One can argue about the reasons -- like government spending way too much already -- and it's not really important to my point. I just wanted to give that figure a context: It's a statewide disaster. Or an investment in making a line of video game hardware successful. Take your pick.
Take sensory input as an analogy. A blind person does not perceive light in one important way that a seeing person does. However, a blind person experiences radiant heat in a tactile manner just a seeing person does and could, in any number of experiments, perceive an effect of light. This is just a different kind of observation, and it's no great leap to think a world full of blind humans would come up with a full-blown theory that incorporates our abstract understanding of light.
In much the same way, we perceive four dimensions, three of space and one of time. Yet there's plenty that happens to us and around us we don't fully understand but which seems ordered -- in short, which could be analogous to a blind person's experience of light. We see the implications in theories of physics that attempt to explain the mysteries of the universe by incorporating a theory of more than four dimensions. For all we know, we occupy six dimensions but just don't perceive it directly.
Sometimes I think they just screw up on pricing. It happens in paper formats, too: I bought a relatively specialized journalism text last year from Barnes & Noble that was available in hardcover and paperback, and the Web site showed the cost of the the paperback as twice the cost of the hardcover version. There was a discount on the hardcover book, but miniscule compared to the price difference; they were just priced that far apart. At the store, that disparity was confirmed and met with the same puzzled look I had. So I smiled and bought the hardcover.
I read from my Visor and like it OK, but it is hard on the eyes. A PDA seems like a natural for anybody looking for an ebook reader, just because you get all the PDA functionality in addition. Maybe PDAs are more adapatable to new/emerging file formats, too?