Computer users? No. Due to the standard set by Msoft (one desktop to rule them all), hardware design/sales really exploded. Think about it; all you have to do when putting out a new PCI card/some other piece of hardware is to write one set of drivers, not 5. Think about that... Think about how supported Linux is these days.
However, just as I believe we've gained in the home user arena (yes, even usability - what does it tell you when Apple is copying parts of Windows GUI these days?), I think programmers were damaged by MSoft throwing in their weight into the language design arena. Working to kill Java, pushing C++, all 6-7 iterations of it, then ASP, now.Net... One of my CS professors was absolutely right when he said that any language whose primer is 1000+ pages shouldn't be around.
So it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times...
Did the same guys make the sequel (hypercube)? Or was is just the SciFi channel? I thought it was just as good... a very nice extension of the first movie without making it boring...
I would suggest checking your memory? If your memory is bad, every time you copy or edit your files, you might be corrupting the data in them.
And with people reporting multi-year uptimes for their Linux boxes, is it really acceptable to have yours crash twice a day? Heck, my old Win98 could go on longer than that:)
Seriously, before you corrupt too much of your data, fix this!
Yeah, he was. The best depiction of what would happen to a human in vacuum was in Schwarzenegger's Total Recall. First your head swells up, then your eyeballs get to about 4x their size, then your head explodes. I mean, didn't you see the movie?
Just read the second Potter. Yuck. The first one had some appeal because the characters weren't all one-dimensional, the book was fairly imaginative, etc... But the second one! Come on! Rowling just pooped in that well:) Characters are either black or white, the plot is almost identical to the first book (problem->Harry figures it out almost solo-big ending sequence)... and there is never really a sense of fear for the characters. You just *know* it will all be OK.
Potter books are popular for the same reason Teletubbies are: put some green grass down, some cuddly animals, some weird stuff, and make it all snuggly soft. (did that just make sense?)
Completely off topic, but had to get it off my chest:)
"English being Germanic shouldn't be too much of a problem"
Ha!
German sentence structure is *completely* different from English. German heavily favor passive constructions, in addition to sticking their verbs at the very end of the sentence. There are a zillion other differences, but trust me... this is not a trivial task.
You know what else they should do? Fix the Three Gorges Dam! That thing is massive, and already has meter-long cracks in it before it's even open (substandard materials, etc)... so fix it, dammit, before it kills a few million people downstream.
But they won't. The Party has deemed it safe, and safe it is...
I agree with your sentiment on those useless volume control-multimedia keys. What a waste of kb space. However, when it comes to recording short macros, I prefer mine completely on the kb-side. 1) They're faster 2) OS-independent 3) Easier to record 4) Sometimes applications read keystrokes "more directly" than the macro-recorder/playback software. Can't explain it better than that, except that the software solutions don't always work in all the apps.
This whole "track the car and you track its owner" policy only works in the US anyway! We are probably the only country that relies on our cars so much. Other nations use their public transportation.
So the only people you'll be able to track in Iraq would be the cab drivers.
since we're talking about keyboards. I am surprised nobody mentioned programmable keyboards yet. Does anyone use/can recommend any good programmable keyboards these days?
The one I've used is Gateway's model... I think it's called AnyKey kb. Had four extra buttons in the top right, Program Macro(sticking a series of keystrokes into one key press), Remap(remapping a single key), and an extra column of function keys on the left hand side.
In any case, in my programming duties, I often find myself needing to do things like reformat 50 lines in an identical fashion. Like take out first four chars on a line, indent, put AAA there, go to next line. So with this kb, you didn't have to use software, you just record a macro, use it 50 times, and you're done! Life saver for the fingers/wrists/carpal tunnel.
OK, I feel for you when you complain about nothing happening for the next 30 years. You and I will be 60, and we'll never get to pilot our very own space ship (like we did in Freespace/Starlancer/Independence War/Freelancer/etc). Well yeah, that sucks.
Often times I will think about what our grandfathers must have thought they were going to miss because they were born "before their time." Just look at how life has improved over the last 80 years, how far technology has gone, be it household stuff (tornado-vacuums, microwaves?), or cars, or a zillion little and big things.
I think we just have to suck it up, and admit to ourselves that we will not get up there within our lifetimes. It's not gonna happen. It can't. Asking for it in the next 10 years is like asking to build Pentium 3's in 1950s. "Yeah, some day, we'll have a 3 Gigaflop CPU that'll fit on a postage stamp." You need to build infrastructure, you need to make sure it's safe and reliable... it will take TIME...
Two more points, and then I'll post this: 1) If you're feeling so awful about that, think about the grand timescale. - it took us hundreds of thousands of years to even start recording time, or progress from sharpened stones - it took us about two thousand years to develop the steam engine (complex machinery) - it took us about fifty to develop electronics So yes, that last part was quick, but so what? It still took us hundreds of thousands of years to get this far. Give it TIME.
2) Early space exploration will not be all cool, like we think it will. You're probably thinking of your favorite book/movie, in which all these independent miners go out, reap profits, encounter dangers of space and beat them with their improvisational skills and their in-depth knowledge of physics. Suppose for one second that we got to where we got today without mining, and then somebody thought of it. These days, we'd be thinking: "Yeah, that's cool! We'll get to go down there, dig up gems, fight the drow, live adventures, and beat the darkness with our intellect and our improvisational skills."
Space mining, the way most people see it, will be dangerous. And about as glorious as real mining is on Earth today. Hell, space travel alone will be extremely dangerous. Radiation, equipment malfunction, pilot stupidity/lack of attention, loose chunks of stuff hitting your craft... all of those things can and will kill you, without having to do anything but sit in your assigned chair:)
So hate to break it to you folks, but you have to face the truth: no matter how much you want it, it just won't happen for this generation, or a few generations after us. Let's enjoy our space sims meanwhile.
So you will buy hardware that's 2fps faster with certain games for the possibility that you might write your own drivers? And you think that with 'some free time' you can produce something stable enough, and something that will use the full capabilities of your card?
All I have to say: good luck, and we'll see you in 10 years.
And I thought it was because people realized that kids who had cashier jobs really couldn't add or subtract anymore (with 'Counting' being a college-level course these days), so instead of having kids try to do difficult arithmetic like $20-$10, they just made it impossible, requiring kids to type it all into the register so they wouldn't give out wrong change anymore.
I mean, have you seen the looks on their faces when power goes out? Sheer panic!
9/11 terrorists *were* cowards. It's easy to scare the piss out of a plane full of people, and ram it into the building, never seeing the consequences of your actions.
Now, if they were real men, they would challenge the Seals or any other elite US military team to a one-on-one knife fight. Now *that* would be balls.
"if cell phones are really capable of such chaos, why on earth do they allow them on the planes to begin with"
So they would need to scan *all* the luggage on the plane to make sure no cell phones make it through? (I'm not talking about just the carryons either) I'm afraid I'm with the crowd that favors we do something to the electronics in the plane rather than the devices we use. It's just going to get worse, as wireless everything gets cheaper.
The flight attendant would tell you politely to turn it off. If you refuse, they'd probably have to escalate to the captain or the co-captain. If you still refused, I think you could even be considered to be endangering the flight (like getting too drunk and refusing to take your seat, etc, etc... which IS a federal offense at this point, and you *would* go to jail).
"And for those parents who can't afford the latest equipment, a Linux For Schools distro could be put together that specializes in offering only the stuff people need for schoolwork"
Yeah! Great idea! Then parents can ask their 6 year old child to help them install it too, cause the installer is giving them a choice of 50 different "filesystems" on something called "partitions".
Doesn't Msoft pride itself on using all its own software in house? So by that logic, shouldn't a patch policy be: 1) Do lab testing of a patch/patches. 2) Install patch internally first, wait a day for any problems to arise. 3) Release to the public.
Granted, given the enormous array of devices/software that's running on Windows, this testing wouldn't discover all of that... But anything as blatant as losing your network connectivity would certainly be caught. Does anyone have more info on Msoft's internal patching practices?
"The best gamers are going to kick my ass regardless of what hardware they use"
You know, every time I want to play an online game I remind myself of how many times I've been killed by better players. So much so that I detest even the idea of an online game now. Screw those other people, I want to match my wits against this heap of iron in front of me.
Well, CS is like Architecture... many ways to get it right, even more ways to get it wrong. Which branch of that huge tree you pick, that's a matter of a) education (your knowledge of the underlying methods/tools) b) style
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"Computer users would be much better off today"
.Net... One of my CS professors was absolutely right when he said that any language whose primer is 1000+ pages shouldn't be around.
Computer users? No. Due to the standard set by Msoft (one desktop to rule them all), hardware design/sales really exploded. Think about it; all you have to do when putting out a new PCI card/some other piece of hardware is to write one set of drivers, not 5. Think about that... Think about how supported Linux is these days.
However, just as I believe we've gained in the home user arena (yes, even usability - what does it tell you when Apple is copying parts of Windows GUI these days?), I think programmers were damaged by MSoft throwing in their weight into the language design arena. Working to kill Java, pushing C++, all 6-7 iterations of it, then ASP, now
So it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times...
Did the same guys make the sequel (hypercube)? Or was is just the SciFi channel?
I thought it was just as good... a very nice extension of the first movie without making it boring...
I would suggest checking your memory? If your memory is bad, every time you copy or edit your files, you might be corrupting the data in them.
:)
And with people reporting multi-year uptimes for their Linux boxes, is it really acceptable to have yours crash twice a day? Heck, my old Win98 could go on longer than that
Seriously, before you corrupt too much of your data, fix this!
Yeah, he was.
The best depiction of what would happen to a human in vacuum was in Schwarzenegger's Total Recall. First your head swells up, then your eyeballs get to about 4x their size, then your head explodes.
I mean, didn't you see the movie?
Now who started reading the real boring technical paragraph, then switched to the children's version? :)
Was it Vonnegut who said that until a scientist can explain what they're doing to a child, they're really a charlatan?
Just read the second Potter. Yuck. The first one had some appeal because the characters weren't all one-dimensional, the book was fairly imaginative, etc... :)
:)
But the second one! Come on! Rowling just pooped in that well
Characters are either black or white, the plot is almost identical to the first book (problem->Harry figures it out almost solo-big ending sequence)... and there is never really a sense of fear for the characters. You just *know* it will all be OK.
Potter books are popular for the same reason Teletubbies are: put some green grass down, some cuddly animals, some weird stuff, and make it all snuggly soft. (did that just make sense?)
Completely off topic, but had to get it off my chest
"English being Germanic shouldn't be too much of a problem"
Ha!
German sentence structure is *completely* different from English. German heavily favor passive constructions, in addition to sticking their verbs at the very end of the sentence. There are a zillion other differences, but trust me... this is not a trivial task.
I wonder if I'm the only one who read this as:
:)
"Hmmmmmm..." by Caning.
You read about raising kids... and well... associations are there.
You know what else they should do? Fix the Three Gorges Dam! That thing is massive, and already has meter-long cracks in it before it's even open (substandard materials, etc)...
so fix it, dammit, before it kills a few million people downstream.
But they won't. The Party has deemed it safe, and safe it is...
I agree with your sentiment on those useless volume control-multimedia keys. What a waste of kb space.
However, when it comes to recording short macros, I prefer mine completely on the kb-side.
1) They're faster
2) OS-independent
3) Easier to record
4) Sometimes applications read keystrokes "more directly" than the macro-recorder/playback software. Can't explain it better than that, except that the software solutions don't always work in all the apps.
This whole "track the car and you track its owner" policy only works in the US anyway! We are probably the only country that relies on our cars so much.
Other nations use their public transportation.
So the only people you'll be able to track in Iraq would be the cab drivers.
Hey folks,
since we're talking about keyboards. I am surprised nobody mentioned programmable keyboards yet. Does anyone use/can recommend any good programmable keyboards these days?
The one I've used is Gateway's model... I think it's called AnyKey kb. Had four extra buttons in the top right, Program Macro(sticking a series of keystrokes into one key press), Remap(remapping a single key), and an extra column of function keys on the left hand side.
In any case, in my programming duties, I often find myself needing to do things like reformat 50 lines in an identical fashion. Like take out first four chars on a line, indent, put AAA there, go to next line.
So with this kb, you didn't have to use software, you just record a macro, use it 50 times, and you're done! Life saver for the fingers/wrists/carpal tunnel.
Any info appreciated!
OK, I feel for you when you complain about nothing happening for the next 30 years. You and I will be 60, and we'll never get to pilot our very own space ship (like we did in Freespace/Starlancer/Independence War/Freelancer/etc). Well yeah, that sucks.
:)
Often times I will think about what our grandfathers must have thought they were going to miss because they were born "before their time." Just look at how life has improved over the last 80 years, how far technology has gone, be it household stuff (tornado-vacuums, microwaves?), or cars, or a zillion little and big things.
I think we just have to suck it up, and admit to ourselves that we will not get up there within our lifetimes. It's not gonna happen. It can't. Asking for it in the next 10 years is like asking to build Pentium 3's in 1950s. "Yeah, some day, we'll have a 3 Gigaflop CPU that'll fit on a postage stamp." You need to build infrastructure, you need to make sure it's safe and reliable... it will take TIME...
Two more points, and then I'll post this:
1) If you're feeling so awful about that, think about the grand timescale.
- it took us hundreds of thousands of years to even start recording time, or progress from sharpened stones
- it took us about two thousand years to develop the steam engine (complex machinery)
- it took us about fifty to develop electronics
So yes, that last part was quick, but so what? It still took us hundreds of thousands of years to get this far. Give it TIME.
2) Early space exploration will not be all cool, like we think it will. You're probably thinking of your favorite book/movie, in which all these independent miners go out, reap profits, encounter dangers of space and beat them with their improvisational skills and their in-depth knowledge of physics. Suppose for one second that we got to where we got today without mining, and then somebody thought of it. These days, we'd be thinking: "Yeah, that's cool! We'll get to go down there, dig up gems, fight the drow, live adventures, and beat the darkness with our intellect and our improvisational skills."
Space mining, the way most people see it, will be dangerous. And about as glorious as real mining is on Earth today. Hell, space travel alone will be extremely dangerous. Radiation, equipment malfunction, pilot stupidity/lack of attention, loose chunks of stuff hitting your craft... all of those things can and will kill you, without having to do anything but sit in your assigned chair
So hate to break it to you folks, but you have to face the truth: no matter how much you want it, it just won't happen for this generation, or a few generations after us.
Let's enjoy our space sims meanwhile.
Is that a Mac I see in the bottom right corner? Heretic!!!!
So you will buy hardware that's 2fps faster with certain games for the possibility that you might write your own drivers?
And you think that with 'some free time' you can produce something stable enough, and something that will use the full capabilities of your card?
All I have to say: good luck, and we'll see you in 10 years.
Well, it is for the exec who did the canning, and saved his company lots of money and who gets a nice fat bonus because of it...
All in your frame of reference...
And I thought it was because people realized that kids who had cashier jobs really couldn't add or subtract anymore (with 'Counting' being a college-level course these days), so instead of having kids try to do difficult arithmetic like $20-$10, they just made it impossible, requiring kids to type it all into the register so they wouldn't give out wrong change anymore.
I mean, have you seen the looks on their faces when power goes out? Sheer panic!
9/11 terrorists *were* cowards. It's easy to scare the piss out of a plane full of people, and ram it into the building, never seeing the consequences of your actions.
Now, if they were real men, they would challenge the Seals or any other elite US military team to a one-on-one knife fight. Now *that* would be balls.
"if cell phones are really capable of such chaos, why on earth do they allow them on the planes to begin with"
So they would need to scan *all* the luggage on the plane to make sure no cell phones make it through? (I'm not talking about just the carryons either)
I'm afraid I'm with the crowd that favors we do something to the electronics in the plane rather than the devices we use. It's just going to get worse, as wireless everything gets cheaper.
The flight attendant would tell you politely to turn it off. If you refuse, they'd probably have to escalate to the captain or the co-captain. If you still refused, I think you could even be considered to be endangering the flight (like getting too drunk and refusing to take your seat, etc, etc... which IS a federal offense at this point, and you *would* go to jail).
That's just my guess, though.
"And for those parents who can't afford the latest equipment, a Linux For Schools distro could be put together that specializes in offering only the stuff people need for schoolwork"
Yeah! Great idea! Then parents can ask their 6 year old child to help them install it too, cause the installer is giving them a choice of 50 different "filesystems" on something called "partitions".
Doesn't Msoft pride itself on using all its own software in house?
So by that logic, shouldn't a patch policy be:
1) Do lab testing of a patch/patches.
2) Install patch internally first, wait a day for any problems to arise.
3) Release to the public.
Granted, given the enormous array of devices/software that's running on Windows, this testing wouldn't discover all of that...
But anything as blatant as losing your network connectivity would certainly be caught.
Does anyone have more info on Msoft's internal patching practices?
Yeah, they usually call it "lunch hour."
"The best gamers are going to kick my ass regardless of what hardware they use"
You know, every time I want to play an online game I remind myself of how many times I've been killed by better players. So much so that I detest even the idea of an online game now. Screw those other people, I want to match my wits against this heap of iron in front of me.
My ego can only take so much.
Well, CS is like Architecture... many ways to get it right, even more ways to get it wrong. Which branch of that huge tree you pick, that's a matter of
a) education (your knowledge of the underlying methods/tools)
b) style