A. I was making a generalised statement. If you personally can go without making a phone call on planes, then you don't fall into the category of people I was criticising. However, far too many people spend far too much time peering down into the little screens of their phones rather than getting on with life beyond gadgetry. 20 years ago, people didn't need to be constantly in contact, why are we so different now?
B. No. Because if someone sat next to me starts making a phone call, I will politely ask them to cease. And if they won't then I'll start complaining to the airline - and if a lot of people do this (as they surely will) then there will need to be a policy change.
C. So take your sim out and listen to MP3s and watch videos. As for SMS, I don't have a problem with that (except for the sadness of people constantly texting their lives away) on a plane - I just don't want someone else's life story blaring out next to me.
Because if you're so SAD an individual you can't do without making a phone call for the duration of one flight, then there is definitely something wrong with you!
Sorry, your mobile may be of high importance to you, but to me its just a tool that lets me make or receive phone calls occasionally, invariably out of earshot of other people.
You may joke but the fact is that if you're a BBC license player & Linux user like I am, then as far as I'm concerned my license money is as good as that of any Windows user and the BBC have a duty, as a publicly funded organisation, to support me.
Incidentally, there are a number of open media streaming and download platforms supported by both Windows & Linux so the BBC should, from the outset, have looked at this from a totally platform neutral and Open perspective.
Whatever you think of Vista, its still easier to use than linux and has more software AND it is better than XP security wise.
I really hate to see generalised sweeping statements & despite criticising the poster for never having used Vista, you don't sound to me as though you've used Linux much.
Firstly, let's get rid of this "easier to use" myth. The GUIs in Windows, Gnome & KDE are similar enough that the average Joe Sixpack could adapt to using any of them relatively easily - features like "Save", "Cut", "Paste", etc. work pretty much the same across the board. Sure, Joe Sixpack has problems at the Linux BASH prompt, but in my experience he also has problems putting in wireless keys, creating a new partition, configuring permissions, etc. in all those nice graphical Windows tools also.
I'm happy to accept that more people "know" Windows than they do Linux but no-one leaves the womb with an instinctual Windows knowledge - they still learnt from scratch at some point and it would not take any person longer to learn the basics in Linux than it does in Windows.
Secondly, I think you mean "more COMMERCIAL software" rather than just "more software". You seem to forget the wealth of FOSS applications out there that run both within Linux & Windows. Sure, a lot of it is less mature or feature-rich than commercial counterparts but I would argue that, for example, OpenOffice has more than enough features and usability for the 95% of MS Office users who don't get into VB macros and the advance MS Office integration stuff.
Please remember that most commercial software vendors capitalise on the fact that most Joe Sixpacks find it easier to part with a few hundred pounds/dollars/euros for a shrinkwrapped software box than having to themselves go find, download & install free software from the Internet.
I've been buying a few PC magazines over the past few weeks to read laptop reviews before I actually ended up buying one.
Since I've been looking for a gaming-quality laptop, I've been paying specific interest in GPU chipsets & 3DMark benchmark values. In one magazine I read, they mentioned the fact that in order to benchmark Vista properly, they had to ***LEAVE THE LAPTOP TO SETTLE DOWN FOR 30 MINUTES AFTER BOOTING*** before even thinking about accurate benchmark figures because of what Vista is doing after boot-up.
If that is actually a true fact then I'm thoroughly amazed.
Incidentally, I settled on a Dell XPS M1710 in the end which Dell would not sell me with XP - but which I found new from another dealer with XP on it at a considerably discounted price.
I do not call deliberately massaging temperature statistics by 60 years a "slight mistake".
I also fail to understand how Al Gore could completely ignore some very obvious facts in his movie, namely:
1. It's a geological/climatological "given" that the Earth has gone through several Ice Ages (i.e. climate changes) even before man ever came on the scene. Therefore not all climate changes are man-made.
2. There is a so far totally unproven "chicken and egg" situation with regard to CO2 emissions - namely that it's possible that more CO2 is emitted by the oceans because of a (natural?) temperature change.
3. Whilst Mr Gore picked on regions of the poles where ice is melting, he failed to mention that in certain regions, the ice is getting thicker also.
i.e. The severely injured original captain of the Enterprise from "The Menagerie" who was left totally wheelchair bound and beeping once for "Yes" and two for "No"?
Text game: A Mind Forever Voyaging.....(question: anyone besides me even recognize this title?)
Yep, an Infocom text adventure game.
But how would you suggest it is remade? There are a number of new interpreter programs that you can load the data files into to play the game in a more modern environment - Frotz & WinFrotz spring to mind, I'm sure there are one or two more.
I absolutely ***LOVED*** this game on the Commodore Amiga although I think there was a PC version of it or the predecessor game Millennium 2.2.
It was basically a game of colonising the planets of the Solar System, the planetary moons also, and mining them to produce ships, weapons and new technology. All the while, a race of evil types were plotting their revenge against you.
The nice thing was that it was very well paced. You started off manually flying shuttles from the Earth to your moonbase bringing up ores to your Moon factory - and just as it started to get repetitive, you developed an autopilot and could then program the shuttle to carry on automatically.
I'm not a programmer but I've always wondered why such an excellent game as Starcraft, which is still being patched & updated by Blizzard, has never had a patch to allow screen resolution change. Surely it's the OS that handles screen resolution so why is it such a big issue?
What you're describing seems to be "Galactic Civilisations 2" - Google for it and for the producers Stardock.
I never played original MOO but played MOO2 endlessly - GalCiv 2 ***REALLY*** is MOO2 with ALL of the nice bells and whistles we 4X gamers have ever wanted - tech trees, customisable starships to the point of designing them completely yourself, custom races.
Plus Stardock are supporting the game really well with regular updates and, once you've registered it online, you can load it onto any PC as it doesn't need the DVD to play.
Check it out - you won't be disappointed if you like MOO.
Yes, I do agree that if you want to buy an OS-less PC for your own Linux installation, then there are a few retailers who sell them. But this is still far from being most or all retailers.
Additionally, why shouldn't a new PC also bear a sticker that says "Designed for Linux" as well as "Designed for Windows"? Why can't hardware manufacturers do more to certify their hardware for Linux? At the moment, buying a PC for Linux, especially a laptop, requires a lot of careful research.
I'm like you in that I really don't care if Joe Sixpack down the street runs Linux or not - if Windows does for him what he needs it to do then good luck to him.
But I do think a lot more can be done to give the consumer a real choice - and I for one object to paying a Microsoft tax on a PC for an OS I won't use.
MTV is a music channel that has never done anything apart from pushing the most bland and boring parts of the music scene over-and-over again into the minds of teenagers who are so desperate to conform in order to avoid standing out in a crowd where they would be ridiculed by their peers.
Halo is also very "safe". It's popular brand that is currently very cool to say you like - that's the main reason for it's popularity.
MTV and Halo go very well hand-in-hand together - watch MTV and you don't have to get off your spotty teenage backside and go find more interesting music. Play Halo, and you don't have to bother playing far better games like Half-Life or Unreal Tournament.
Tomorrow afternoon, when I go into my local town shopping centre, I bet if I go into any one of the record stores there will still be just as many people paying over-inflated prices for CDs filled with plastic, manufactured music as there were last week.
Let's be realists here - whatever you and I think about the ruling, there is NOT going to be some huge consumer embargo on buying RIAA-financing CDs.
The sheep for whom money comes far too easy will still be there buying their souless music as much as they ever were.
Prior to iPods, mobile phones, Facebook, etc. etc., were the youth of the day just standing around bored with their hands in their pockets any more than they do today?
When I was a teenager 25-30 years ago, I read a lot, built models, did a lot of home electronics, a bit of woodwork and started programming on some of the first home computer systems - and I'd argue that I'm more technically savvy than most of the youngsters today because I learnt to build stuff from scratch so much, whether software, some wooden shelves or an electronic gizmo.
An iPod is a portable music player like a Walkman was 15 years ago, Facebook is just an extension of writing and meeting pen-friends 20 or more years ago.
If anything the modern "have it all now" youngsters have lost such qualities as patience and long attention spans.
I did well at school because I DAMN WELL GOT SOME COMMON SENSE AND BUCKLED DOWN TO DOING SOME BLOODY WORK!!!!
Remind me - HOW MANY KIDS WITH DYSLEXIA AND ADHD WERE THERE 25 YEARS AGO???
Why must I only be allowed to enjoy "guitar and vocal" music?
I do not recall anywhere that I stated what you should and shouldn't listen to - I merely expressed my opinion that drum and bass sounds like someone kicking a metal bucket down stone steps.
A couple of years ago I spent £700 ($1400 approx.) on a CD player, amplifier and speakers because, in the shop and later at home, I noticed a phenomenal sound quality difference between that setup and a £150 all-in-one hi-fi system.
However, I've also heard systems costing £5000 and whilst that sounds a little better than my £700, for me it's not worth the £4300 difference. And when you get to that level of spending, the amount of improvement you get is minimal.
I'm not sure about the speaker cables argument - a friend gave me some spare high quality speaker cables for my setup but I can't say I heard any difference between those and the original ones I was using.
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B. No. Because if someone sat next to me starts making a phone call, I will politely ask them to cease. And if they won't then I'll start complaining to the airline - and if a lot of people do this (as they surely will) then there will need to be a policy change.
C. So take your sim out and listen to MP3s and watch videos. As for SMS, I don't have a problem with that (except for the sadness of people constantly texting their lives away) on a plane - I just don't want someone else's life story blaring out next to me.
Sorry, your mobile may be of high importance to you, but to me its just a tool that lets me make or receive phone calls occasionally, invariably out of earshot of other people.
Deal with it.
Incidentally, there are a number of open media streaming and download platforms supported by both Windows & Linux so the BBC should, from the outset, have looked at this from a totally platform neutral and Open perspective.
There is no way that U2's little guitarist bloke can outperform the likes of Joe Satriani, John Petrucci & Paul Gilbert!
[Cue the melodic sync refrain & synth drumming]
I really hate to see generalised sweeping statements & despite criticising the poster for never having used Vista, you don't sound to me as though you've used Linux much.
Firstly, let's get rid of this "easier to use" myth. The GUIs in Windows, Gnome & KDE are similar enough that the average Joe Sixpack could adapt to using any of them relatively easily - features like "Save", "Cut", "Paste", etc. work pretty much the same across the board. Sure, Joe Sixpack has problems at the Linux BASH prompt, but in my experience he also has problems putting in wireless keys, creating a new partition, configuring permissions, etc. in all those nice graphical Windows tools also.
I'm happy to accept that more people "know" Windows than they do Linux but no-one leaves the womb with an instinctual Windows knowledge - they still learnt from scratch at some point and it would not take any person longer to learn the basics in Linux than it does in Windows.
Secondly, I think you mean "more COMMERCIAL software" rather than just "more software". You seem to forget the wealth of FOSS applications out there that run both within Linux & Windows. Sure, a lot of it is less mature or feature-rich than commercial counterparts but I would argue that, for example, OpenOffice has more than enough features and usability for the 95% of MS Office users who don't get into VB macros and the advance MS Office integration stuff.
Please remember that most commercial software vendors capitalise on the fact that most Joe Sixpacks find it easier to part with a few hundred pounds/dollars/euros for a shrinkwrapped software box than having to themselves go find, download & install free software from the Internet.
Since I've been looking for a gaming-quality laptop, I've been paying specific interest in GPU chipsets & 3DMark benchmark values. In one magazine I read, they mentioned the fact that in order to benchmark Vista properly, they had to ***LEAVE THE LAPTOP TO SETTLE DOWN FOR 30 MINUTES AFTER BOOTING*** before even thinking about accurate benchmark figures because of what Vista is doing after boot-up.
If that is actually a true fact then I'm thoroughly amazed.
Incidentally, I settled on a Dell XPS M1710 in the end which Dell would not sell me with XP - but which I found new from another dealer with XP on it at a considerably discounted price.
Well done - just about the funniest Slashdot post I've read in months.
I also fail to understand how Al Gore could completely ignore some very obvious facts in his movie, namely:
1. It's a geological/climatological "given" that the Earth has gone through several Ice Ages (i.e. climate changes) even before man ever came on the scene. Therefore not all climate changes are man-made.
2. There is a so far totally unproven "chicken and egg" situation with regard to CO2 emissions - namely that it's possible that more CO2 is emitted by the oceans because of a (natural?) temperature change.
3. Whilst Mr Gore picked on regions of the poles where ice is melting, he failed to mention that in certain regions, the ice is getting thicker also.
i.e. The severely injured original captain of the Enterprise from "The Menagerie" who was left totally wheelchair bound and beeping once for "Yes" and two for "No"?
Yep, an Infocom text adventure game.
But how would you suggest it is remade? There are a number of new interpreter programs that you can load the data files into to play the game in a more modern environment - Frotz & WinFrotz spring to mind, I'm sure there are one or two more.
But I think this is another game like Elite - lots will emulate it but no-one will get close to the original.
It was basically a game of colonising the planets of the Solar System, the planetary moons also, and mining them to produce ships, weapons and new technology. All the while, a race of evil types were plotting their revenge against you.
The nice thing was that it was very well paced. You started off manually flying shuttles from the Earth to your moonbase bringing up ores to your Moon factory - and just as it started to get repetitive, you developed an autopilot and could then program the shuttle to carry on automatically.
I'm not a programmer but I've always wondered why such an excellent game as Starcraft, which is still being patched & updated by Blizzard, has never had a patch to allow screen resolution change. Surely it's the OS that handles screen resolution so why is it such a big issue?
I never played original MOO but played MOO2 endlessly - GalCiv 2 ***REALLY*** is MOO2 with ALL of the nice bells and whistles we 4X gamers have ever wanted - tech trees, customisable starships to the point of designing them completely yourself, custom races.
Plus Stardock are supporting the game really well with regular updates and, once you've registered it online, you can load it onto any PC as it doesn't need the DVD to play.
Check it out - you won't be disappointed if you like MOO.
...she got in a lot of good practice at Lucent Technologies also.
Yes, I do agree that if you want to buy an OS-less PC for your own Linux installation, then there are a few retailers who sell them. But this is still far from being most or all retailers.
Additionally, why shouldn't a new PC also bear a sticker that says "Designed for Linux" as well as "Designed for Windows"? Why can't hardware manufacturers do more to certify their hardware for Linux? At the moment, buying a PC for Linux, especially a laptop, requires a lot of careful research.
I'm like you in that I really don't care if Joe Sixpack down the street runs Linux or not - if Windows does for him what he needs it to do then good luck to him.
But I do think a lot more can be done to give the consumer a real choice - and I for one object to paying a Microsoft tax on a PC for an OS I won't use.
Then presumably you are Belgian with little experience of interesting comic books.
Halo is also very "safe". It's popular brand that is currently very cool to say you like - that's the main reason for it's popularity.
MTV and Halo go very well hand-in-hand together - watch MTV and you don't have to get off your spotty teenage backside and go find more interesting music. Play Halo, and you don't have to bother playing far better games like Half-Life or Unreal Tournament.
Maybe we should harness their colletive "HUH" energies and use it to put a toupee over the hole in the ozone layer...
I thought the little chattering aliens running about turned Halo 1 into a Disney game for 10 year olds.
I played it once all the way through then sold my copy on eBay.
Vastly overrated game.
Let's be realists here - whatever you and I think about the ruling, there is NOT going to be some huge consumer embargo on buying RIAA-financing CDs.
The sheep for whom money comes far too easy will still be there buying their souless music as much as they ever were.
Prior to iPods, mobile phones, Facebook, etc. etc., were the youth of the day just standing around bored with their hands in their pockets any more than they do today?
When I was a teenager 25-30 years ago, I read a lot, built models, did a lot of home electronics, a bit of woodwork and started programming on some of the first home computer systems - and I'd argue that I'm more technically savvy than most of the youngsters today because I learnt to build stuff from scratch so much, whether software, some wooden shelves or an electronic gizmo.
An iPod is a portable music player like a Walkman was 15 years ago, Facebook is just an extension of writing and meeting pen-friends 20 or more years ago.
If anything the modern "have it all now" youngsters have lost such qualities as patience and long attention spans.
I did well at school because I DAMN WELL GOT SOME COMMON SENSE AND BUCKLED DOWN TO DOING SOME BLOODY WORK!!!!
Remind me - HOW MANY KIDS WITH DYSLEXIA AND ADHD WERE THERE 25 YEARS AGO???
I do not recall anywhere that I stated what you should and shouldn't listen to - I merely expressed my opinion that drum and bass sounds like someone kicking a metal bucket down stone steps.
However, I've also heard systems costing £5000 and whilst that sounds a little better than my £700, for me it's not worth the £4300 difference. And when you get to that level of spending, the amount of improvement you get is minimal.
I'm not sure about the speaker cables argument - a friend gave me some spare high quality speaker cables for my setup but I can't say I heard any difference between those and the original ones I was using.