I've participatedin the ACM local competitions for two years in a row now. If studying computer science has taught me anything, it's that understanding algorithms and design patterns is paramount. We should, in fact, have them memorized, and the competition reflects that.
We all write programs, so we're all programmers, but I definitely think there is a difference between a "computer scientist" and, say, a computer engineer, a code monkey, a web programmer, etc.
The ACM competition is computer science--no question about it.
I think what you're criticizing is authoritarian governments. What you've described as far as a "socialist state" was not at all what Karl Marx had intended, but was something that developed with the help of Lenin and friends. Not to defend him or argue your point, but just to clarify.
The gold level business support is actually quite excellent. I haven't had any problems with understanding the support staff or getting replacement parts shipped out and in the office next day. Ditto for the onsite support. And if I do have problems (has happened once in 5 years) a quick call to my acccount manager got them jumping.
From what I hear their standard support sucks ass. I guess it's a "you get what you pay for" situation.
My good friend's mother bought a Dell not long ago, and when the power supply broke they called me in to take a look at it. After examining it, I called Dell tech support on her behalf (she was afraid to talk to them since she doesn't know much about computers). They had paid for gold service, but when I called the number, the very first thing the gold service tech told me was that I had called the wrong department and that he was forwarding me to the real tech support.
This got me transferred to India or thereabouts--the connection was poor, and while we understood each other fairly well, the man tried incessantly to get me off the phone. Despite his pleading for me to call back later, I refused, and I did my best to work with the guy. After I had convinced him to actually help me, he informs me that I qualify for gold service and sends me back to the assholes that transferred me there in the first place.
The third tech, however was very courteous and helpful. After verifying the problem, he put out a work order in minutes.
My experience was this: Gold support is wonderful, but Dell is going to make you fight for it.
On one hand, I believe that technological advances in video games and computer games has decreased dramatically. It's true that games kept getting more and more sophisticated graphics, but I don't think the graphical difference between games today and a few years ago are that great. Compare that to when I was a child (late 80's, early 90's), each new game offered something totally different, and most popular games took unique approaches to graphics that enhanced the game. Even newer games released for the same platform were significantly better--you see this less and less on modern platforms.
Also, I also like to believe that games were more fun and creative. When was the last time you played a game like Quest for Glory? How about Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure? I'm sure there are still creative games being made today, but it gets difficult to find the gems among the rest of what's being produced (I liked Katamari Damacy;).
Has anyone here ever seen CDE? For the love of God.
If I'm going to stare at a screen for hours each day, I'd like to have what I'm looking at be easy on the eyes. I'm not a GUI nut either--text mode can be visually pleasing too, depending who is writing the software (ever logged into VMS? For the love of God!).
Eye candy is not always necessary, but as long as it's helpful and not distracting, I'm all for it. Good examples are window managers such as fluxbox, windowmaker, and enlightenment. They're pretty simple in some respects, but they look quite nice. Of those three, enlightenment 0.17 is loaded with more eye candy than I've ever seen, though none of it feels obtrusive.
What got my goat was that the original poster pointed to this as a benefit: "Frustration builds character!"
Well, I don't know if I would go that far. I think there is some truthfulness in your parody, but what I really wanted to say is that linux may encourage people to learn more about computers not because they will get frustrated, but because there are more tools at their disposal. Windows has great tools for it too, but they're not all sitting on the machine, just waiting to be discovered. If I were a child, had I discovered Windows had a C compiler waiting for me, I would have been jumping for joy. All I had to bring with me to Windows was a BASIC interpreter from an older system (DOS). A fun tool, and great for children, but dead by the time I was learning it.
Granted, not all kids are interested in computers themselves. linux is great for people with "computer interest." However, you talk about it like it's actually a hindrance to other things, which was not what I believe or intended to say. linux has great word processing capability (better than what I had as a kid), and its fair share of friendly paint tools (invoking GIMP here is a bit of a straw man). Really, linux enables you to do a lot of great things that aren't directly related to computing.
What I'd like to stress most about my point is computer systems as a social phenomenon. linux users are quite often natural tinkerers, and the community reflects this. Encouraging children to join a culture like that helps them to learn new things (at least about linux), and also to develop a particular perspective on computer software. They may not fully appreciate the merit or value of Free software or even know what it is, but those who are curious will learn. Most people in the world don't even know what Free software is, and distributing linux helps spread awareness. Even if they end up not liking it, they'll have some experience to back up their opinions with.
I would also like to stress that people who find linux totally frustrating and inconvenient will switch to Windows very rapidly. That's not a problem, so we're not exactly forcing anything upon them. If we didn't show them linux, though, they wouldn't even know what it is. If they end up switching to Windows, they'll now have both linux and Windows in their vocabulary; if we just gave them Windows, they'd only have one.
Also, kids who at least are familiar with linux may grow up to find that they have an edge over many of their peers. Maybe it'll help them get a job, or maybe one day they will have to sit down in front of a *nix terminal and not be totally lost. It could happen! So let's expand their worlds a little.
Yes, Windows is more popular. Linux will give the kids a harder time, and they will be disappointed that they can't run all the software that they expected. However, it will be a learning experience for them. Some families will take it off right away and replace it with Windows, but others will stick with linux. Those kids might get exposed to software that will inspire them to learn more about computers and study them later in life. It's very difficult to learn about computers when you learn Windows. I know this because I was raised with Windows and came away from it with almost nothing.
Most people just use Windows and don't learn much of anything. Also, do you really want to pay for Windows licenses?
I don't know why, but one of the first things that jumps to mind is that part of Zelda64 where you have to run around the town and find the lady's lost cuccos, returning them all to the pen for a shiny glass bottle. That game had a lot of good quests like that, even IF nearly all of them involved collecting items. It makes the kleptomaniac in me happy.:-)
Not only had I built every package from source (using ports), I also took the trouble to rebuild the base system and kernel with a custom configuration and options.
The benefits to some of this were obvious; the FreeBSD GENERIC kernel at the time seemed (to my eyes) to suffer a massive performance loss from its configuration. Anyone running FreeBSD *must* build at least a custom kernel, even if they use the binary distribution of everything else.
It was a lot of effort. What did I get out of it? It was by the end one of the speediest systems I had ever used since the days of DOS. Most programs loaded faster than their binary equivalents (on older machines the differences were more glaringly obvious, such as the time it took to initialize X).
One time I clocked my old machine, running a custom built FreeBSD installation, against the other computers in the house from power-on to a full desktop (after login).
On my machine, the entire affair (BIOS, bootloader, bootstrapping, system loading, X, login, desktop environment (WindowMaker in this case)) cost a mere 45 seconds. My father's machine, which was in all respects a faster computer, loaded Windows 2000 in the course of perhaps two minutes. Also, I stopped timing after the desktop came up, but Windows does continue to load and fidget about for a good while after that. The extra time taken for it to settle down would have cost it another minute, but only because of all the crap my dad had set to load, which I don't blame Windows for.
The kitchen computer also ran Windows 2000, but had a slimmer configuration, so it loaded shortly over a minute. FreeBSD, however, still beat them both badly.
In light of my own experience, compiling from source can get you some rather wonderful results. However, I noticed that not all systems were created equal. While FreeBSD GENERIC was as slow as molasses, I find in linux that the binary kernels that come with my distributions seem to load and operate just as fast, if not faster than my custom build of FreeBSD. In linux I have used only binary packages, and the system overall "feels" just as fast, though some operations are a little slower (like loading emacs;)).
I appreciate the arguments presented by both camps, but I feel the need to point out that some are too quick to downplay the possible performance gains offered by custom builds, because they certainly exist. Sometimes they can be noticeably significant.
All this activation stuff sucks tho, what if you want to show your kids/grandkids what you used to play 20 years from now? Is that online activation still gonna work:(
What I imagine happening is that when the games become less popular they will be resold with some of the copy protections removed.
My favorite example of a game that received a little more freedom was Epic's Age of Wonders. I lusted after the first one for years, but the price tag was always ridiculous, even after the game had aged significantly. One day I saw both AoW I & II packaged together for $10 on a value rack at Target. It was being distributed by a different publisher, and this version of the games had been very professionally updated to run on NT based systems (I had previously owned a copy of AoW that only ran on Win98--nothing else), and neither of the games required the CD to run. I've been able to install the game on computers owned by friends, and we've had a really good time with the direct-connect multiplayer.
If publishers care, things like this will happen--games will get cleaned up and have stupid crap removed. Lots of old commercial games get open-sourced, too. However, there are always those games that will get thrown away and lost to oblivion, and copyright protection may make them eventually unplayable.
IF you're doubting, it's already been pointed out that flash memory has a limited number of write cycles. For thumb drives, a block device is being emulated, and wear-leveling should be performed internally to help combat that problem, but the amount of abuse that it would be subject to while being used as virtual memory is excessive for the device.
Also, flash memory is slow to write. This problem is made worse because of the overhead caused by the use of a "normal" file system (ie FAT, ext3, etc) on top of block emulation, which rests on another, internal file system. With these devices, telling the OS to use a flash-specific FS such as jffs2 or cramfs cannot be done since the system does not have direct access to the memory. Also note that flash memory is accessed sequentially.
So, in theory, USB flash drives make GREAT virtual memory devices. You just gotta keep in mind that you're a) slowing your system down considerably and b) destroying your flash drive.:-)
I made my USB flash drive a swap device on my system. It sounded like a good idea, but it wasn't. The memory stick was an order of magnitude slower than my hard drive, and system performance lowered. After doing the experiment, I did some research into the nature of flash memory, and I discovered that using it as a swap device is perhaps the worst conceivable thing. Seriously.
I inherited a 286 portable computer from a friend of mine a couple years ago. It runs DOS 3.0, and I've been running kermit on it for a serial terminal emulator so I can log into my main box. I'm sure that's as close to linux as that thing is ever going to get.:)
You're right; Pentium II isn't that old. Why, I remember quite well when those were considered seriously fast processors for a PC. Never owned one, though, as I live in an AMD family.
Pentium II is old hardware? I was expecting an article on how it'd run on a 286, Mac 512k, LISA, etc. Or at most a 386.
Are you serious? The only version of unix I'm aware of that ran on 16 bit personal computers that I'm aware of is Xenix. Other household names such as BSD and linux were strictly i386, as earlier architectures were unsuitable for a unix system.
But I've never heard someone like Alice disparage Bob's achievement as being worthless because all he did was study
I've done it before, but that's because I used to be one of those students that performed at the same level as my classmates who tortured themselves with effort while I expended very little. Why did I disparage their achievement? Because these particular students had inferiority complexes, and they lived by this "I'm more intelligent than everyone else because I have the best grades" idea, and never passed up a chance to let others know about it and rub it in.
So, was I angry at them because of their ability to invest time? No--I find that very admirable because I find myself unwilling to do what they did. I hated them because they weren't intellectual in the slightest, but they had this grand idea that they were great thinkers of their time. Any attempt at having an intelligent conversation with them got you nothing but a lot of ego and some second-hand opinions.
The fact that some of these people will be afforded high positions in society as adults worries me a bit; they never seemed healthy to me.
Ah, okay. I see what you're trying to say. Even so, I would definitely not call that idol worship. I apologize for my harsh language.
I think what's important to understand is that muslims have a lot of respect for the prophet. For example, in the catholic church, the virgin Mary is very honored and respected. She's the perfect example of a "normal" (ie not God). Mohommad is held in a similar light because he's the model person. Neither of them are God, so neither of them are worshiped, but they set the example.
Of course, if you publicly humiliate the prophet, you're going to have a lot of angry muslims. If you did the same to Mary, you'd have a lot of angry christians. They'd be VERY VERY angry. Angry enough to kill you in some cases. Does that make them idols, though?
I think the entire world should start plastering images of Mohammad everywhere.
Of course, you do realize that images of Mohammad do not exist, right? Sure, some people have made up images, but take a look at an old piece of artwork here. The prophet's face is intentionally left blank in order to highlight the importance of his message over the characteristics of his person. In fact, if you study muslim architecture, you won't see too many things like statues (these are rampant in the Western world) or other human representations; most of the design and artwork are abstract. They've gone to greater lengths to prevent idol worship than anyone else.
Islam is perhaps the furthest religion in existence from idol worship, bar none. In Christianity, even the Eastern Orthodox church permits icons (2D images are okay, but 3D models are forbidden).
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but I think you should touch up with reality a little bit before spouting off in public. It doesn't speak very well in your favor.
I was born in 1986, so I didn't really get into console gaming until a few years after Zelda was popular, but I enjoyed lots of fun RPGs at the time. A friend of mine once brought over Link to the Past, and we sat there all day and beat the game in one sitting together.
Around when 3D gaming was taking off, there was the N64. Admittedly, the console wasn't that great, but there was a lot of hype behind it and there were a few great titles (mostly overshadowed by the sheer volume of crap). I was foolish in those days and didn't realize that Squaresoft had left me for Sony, but even by the time I found out, I didn't care; Final Fantasy games were going to be released for the PC in the future, and I decided to take my ill-gotten cash (I was too young to work, so it was all bounty from the holidays) and purchase a shiny new N64. The driving force behind my purchasing decision? Ocarina of Time.
Okay, so I did spend several good hours playing Mario Kart 64 and Star Fox 64, but the vast majority of the time I spent just playing Zelda 64. It's one of the few games I've ever owned that I've played all the way though, and I did it several times. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a game so much since Final Fantasy III/VI back in the day.
Was it worth it to buy a console just so I could play one game? Absolutely. Will I do it again? Twilight Princess is approaching release, and I've been tempted to drop the cash just to buy a Gamecube. I've never been interested in owning one before, but all it takes is one killer app.
I don't know how good grammar is in comic books, but I have a good friend that was practically raised on comic books, and he's just about based his entire life around them (he's trying to start a career writing scripts for comic books and movies based off of comic books).
From what I've observed, he kind of has his own special grammar. His formal prose is lackluster, but in written communication he maintains a sort of brevity and charm that you would easily associate with comic books. Unfortunately for him, he's internalized so much of the informal style that it interferes with his writing ability. As long as he sticks with writing comic books, though, I think he'll do just fine.
It lacks balls, and it makes them sound very naive. What I like better is the Russian message that VAX's had embedded in their microchips for soviet engineers to find: "VAX: When you care enough to steal, steal from the best."
7. Parental controls: Families, schools, and libraries will appreciate the tuned-up parental controls, which let you limit access in a variety of ways. Web filtering can block specific sites, screen out objectionable content by selected type, and lock out file downloads. You can also restrict each account's access by time of day or day of the week. As a dad, I can tell you this will be great for keeping kids off the PC while you're at work, for instance. You can even block access to games based on their Entertainment Software Rating Board ratings.
I grew up in a family that used AOL, and I had to endure parental controls for most of my life. Since I love computers so much, it was perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of my life, and it was extremely shameful and demoralizing because it sent me a message that my parents didn't trust or respect me. During those years I despised them because there was no personal or human aspect to our relationship--only control.
Having third party software that does this is one thing, but building these features into the operating system is something entirely different, and I find it abhorrent. I feel really sorry for kids growing up now that are going to have to fight Vista in the home.
That's a psychological affect called "racial preference", and it's fairly universal. Basically, people have a difficult time distinguishing features in races other than their own. That explains the common phrase, "They all look the same to me."
Slashdot Mirror
We all write programs, so we're all programmers, but I definitely think there is a difference between a "computer scientist" and, say, a computer engineer, a code monkey, a web programmer, etc.
The ACM competition is computer science--no question about it.
I think what you're criticizing is authoritarian governments. What you've described as far as a "socialist state" was not at all what Karl Marx had intended, but was something that developed with the help of Lenin and friends. Not to defend him or argue your point, but just to clarify.
My good friend's mother bought a Dell not long ago, and when the power supply broke they called me in to take a look at it. After examining it, I called Dell tech support on her behalf (she was afraid to talk to them since she doesn't know much about computers). They had paid for gold service, but when I called the number, the very first thing the gold service tech told me was that I had called the wrong department and that he was forwarding me to the real tech support.
This got me transferred to India or thereabouts--the connection was poor, and while we understood each other fairly well, the man tried incessantly to get me off the phone. Despite his pleading for me to call back later, I refused, and I did my best to work with the guy. After I had convinced him to actually help me, he informs me that I qualify for gold service and sends me back to the assholes that transferred me there in the first place.
The third tech, however was very courteous and helpful. After verifying the problem, he put out a work order in minutes.
My experience was this: Gold support is wonderful, but Dell is going to make you fight for it.
Let's say you're in a room with two consoles. On one, there is Halo. On the other, there is the latest Time Crisis. Which do you go to first?
You're probably guessing which one I went to.
Also, I also like to believe that games were more fun and creative. When was the last time you played a game like Quest for Glory? How about Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure? I'm sure there are still creative games being made today, but it gets difficult to find the gems among the rest of what's being produced (I liked Katamari Damacy ;).
If I'm going to stare at a screen for hours each day, I'd like to have what I'm looking at be easy on the eyes. I'm not a GUI nut either--text mode can be visually pleasing too, depending who is writing the software (ever logged into VMS? For the love of God!).
Eye candy is not always necessary, but as long as it's helpful and not distracting, I'm all for it. Good examples are window managers such as fluxbox, windowmaker, and enlightenment. They're pretty simple in some respects, but they look quite nice. Of those three, enlightenment 0.17 is loaded with more eye candy than I've ever seen, though none of it feels obtrusive.
Well, I don't know if I would go that far. I think there is some truthfulness in your parody, but what I really wanted to say is that linux may encourage people to learn more about computers not because they will get frustrated, but because there are more tools at their disposal. Windows has great tools for it too, but they're not all sitting on the machine, just waiting to be discovered. If I were a child, had I discovered Windows had a C compiler waiting for me, I would have been jumping for joy. All I had to bring with me to Windows was a BASIC interpreter from an older system (DOS). A fun tool, and great for children, but dead by the time I was learning it.
Granted, not all kids are interested in computers themselves. linux is great for people with "computer interest." However, you talk about it like it's actually a hindrance to other things, which was not what I believe or intended to say. linux has great word processing capability (better than what I had as a kid), and its fair share of friendly paint tools (invoking GIMP here is a bit of a straw man). Really, linux enables you to do a lot of great things that aren't directly related to computing.
What I'd like to stress most about my point is computer systems as a social phenomenon. linux users are quite often natural tinkerers, and the community reflects this. Encouraging children to join a culture like that helps them to learn new things (at least about linux), and also to develop a particular perspective on computer software. They may not fully appreciate the merit or value of Free software or even know what it is, but those who are curious will learn. Most people in the world don't even know what Free software is, and distributing linux helps spread awareness. Even if they end up not liking it, they'll have some experience to back up their opinions with.
I would also like to stress that people who find linux totally frustrating and inconvenient will switch to Windows very rapidly. That's not a problem, so we're not exactly forcing anything upon them. If we didn't show them linux, though, they wouldn't even know what it is. If they end up switching to Windows, they'll now have both linux and Windows in their vocabulary; if we just gave them Windows, they'd only have one.
Also, kids who at least are familiar with linux may grow up to find that they have an edge over many of their peers. Maybe it'll help them get a job, or maybe one day they will have to sit down in front of a *nix terminal and not be totally lost. It could happen! So let's expand their worlds a little.
Yes, Windows is more popular. Linux will give the kids a harder time, and they will be disappointed that they can't run all the software that they expected. However, it will be a learning experience for them. Some families will take it off right away and replace it with Windows, but others will stick with linux. Those kids might get exposed to software that will inspire them to learn more about computers and study them later in life. It's very difficult to learn about computers when you learn Windows. I know this because I was raised with Windows and came away from it with almost nothing.
Most people just use Windows and don't learn much of anything. Also, do you really want to pay for Windows licenses?
I don't know why, but one of the first things that jumps to mind is that part of Zelda64 where you have to run around the town and find the lady's lost cuccos, returning them all to the pen for a shiny glass bottle. That game had a lot of good quests like that, even IF nearly all of them involved collecting items. It makes the kleptomaniac in me happy. :-)
Not only had I built every package from source (using ports), I also took the trouble to rebuild the base system and kernel with a custom configuration and options.
The benefits to some of this were obvious; the FreeBSD GENERIC kernel at the time seemed (to my eyes) to suffer a massive performance loss from its configuration. Anyone running FreeBSD *must* build at least a custom kernel, even if they use the binary distribution of everything else.
It was a lot of effort. What did I get out of it? It was by the end one of the speediest systems I had ever used since the days of DOS. Most programs loaded faster than their binary equivalents (on older machines the differences were more glaringly obvious, such as the time it took to initialize X).
One time I clocked my old machine, running a custom built FreeBSD installation, against the other computers in the house from power-on to a full desktop (after login).
On my machine, the entire affair (BIOS, bootloader, bootstrapping, system loading, X, login, desktop environment (WindowMaker in this case)) cost a mere 45 seconds. My father's machine, which was in all respects a faster computer, loaded Windows 2000 in the course of perhaps two minutes. Also, I stopped timing after the desktop came up, but Windows does continue to load and fidget about for a good while after that. The extra time taken for it to settle down would have cost it another minute, but only because of all the crap my dad had set to load, which I don't blame Windows for.
The kitchen computer also ran Windows 2000, but had a slimmer configuration, so it loaded shortly over a minute. FreeBSD, however, still beat them both badly.
In light of my own experience, compiling from source can get you some rather wonderful results. However, I noticed that not all systems were created equal. While FreeBSD GENERIC was as slow as molasses, I find in linux that the binary kernels that come with my distributions seem to load and operate just as fast, if not faster than my custom build of FreeBSD. In linux I have used only binary packages, and the system overall "feels" just as fast, though some operations are a little slower (like loading emacs ;)).
I appreciate the arguments presented by both camps, but I feel the need to point out that some are too quick to downplay the possible performance gains offered by custom builds, because they certainly exist. Sometimes they can be noticeably significant.
What I imagine happening is that when the games become less popular they will be resold with some of the copy protections removed.
My favorite example of a game that received a little more freedom was Epic's Age of Wonders. I lusted after the first one for years, but the price tag was always ridiculous, even after the game had aged significantly. One day I saw both AoW I & II packaged together for $10 on a value rack at Target. It was being distributed by a different publisher, and this version of the games had been very professionally updated to run on NT based systems (I had previously owned a copy of AoW that only ran on Win98--nothing else), and neither of the games required the CD to run. I've been able to install the game on computers owned by friends, and we've had a really good time with the direct-connect multiplayer.
If publishers care, things like this will happen--games will get cleaned up and have stupid crap removed. Lots of old commercial games get open-sourced, too. However, there are always those games that will get thrown away and lost to oblivion, and copyright protection may make them eventually unplayable.
Okay, so maybe conservative use will slow down the destruction of the memory, but you don't address the speed issue.
IF you're doubting, it's already been pointed out that flash memory has a limited number of write cycles. For thumb drives, a block device is being emulated, and wear-leveling should be performed internally to help combat that problem, but the amount of abuse that it would be subject to while being used as virtual memory is excessive for the device.
Also, flash memory is slow to write. This problem is made worse because of the overhead caused by the use of a "normal" file system (ie FAT, ext3, etc) on top of block emulation, which rests on another, internal file system. With these devices, telling the OS to use a flash-specific FS such as jffs2 or cramfs cannot be done since the system does not have direct access to the memory. Also note that flash memory is accessed sequentially.
So, in theory, USB flash drives make GREAT virtual memory devices. You just gotta keep in mind that you're a) slowing your system down considerably and b) destroying your flash drive. :-)
I made my USB flash drive a swap device on my system. It sounded like a good idea, but it wasn't. The memory stick was an order of magnitude slower than my hard drive, and system performance lowered. After doing the experiment, I did some research into the nature of flash memory, and I discovered that using it as a swap device is perhaps the worst conceivable thing. Seriously.
You're right; Pentium II isn't that old. Why, I remember quite well when those were considered seriously fast processors for a PC. Never owned one, though, as I live in an AMD family.
Are you serious? The only version of unix I'm aware of that ran on 16 bit personal computers that I'm aware of is Xenix. Other household names such as BSD and linux were strictly i386, as earlier architectures were unsuitable for a unix system.
I've done it before, but that's because I used to be one of those students that performed at the same level as my classmates who tortured themselves with effort while I expended very little. Why did I disparage their achievement? Because these particular students had inferiority complexes, and they lived by this "I'm more intelligent than everyone else because I have the best grades" idea, and never passed up a chance to let others know about it and rub it in.
So, was I angry at them because of their ability to invest time? No--I find that very admirable because I find myself unwilling to do what they did. I hated them because they weren't intellectual in the slightest, but they had this grand idea that they were great thinkers of their time. Any attempt at having an intelligent conversation with them got you nothing but a lot of ego and some second-hand opinions.
The fact that some of these people will be afforded high positions in society as adults worries me a bit; they never seemed healthy to me.
I think what's important to understand is that muslims have a lot of respect for the prophet. For example, in the catholic church, the virgin Mary is very honored and respected. She's the perfect example of a "normal" (ie not God). Mohommad is held in a similar light because he's the model person. Neither of them are God, so neither of them are worshiped, but they set the example.
Of course, if you publicly humiliate the prophet, you're going to have a lot of angry muslims. If you did the same to Mary, you'd have a lot of angry christians. They'd be VERY VERY angry. Angry enough to kill you in some cases. Does that make them idols, though?
Of course, you do realize that images of Mohammad do not exist, right? Sure, some people have made up images, but take a look at an old piece of artwork here. The prophet's face is intentionally left blank in order to highlight the importance of his message over the characteristics of his person. In fact, if you study muslim architecture, you won't see too many things like statues (these are rampant in the Western world) or other human representations; most of the design and artwork are abstract. They've gone to greater lengths to prevent idol worship than anyone else.
Islam is perhaps the furthest religion in existence from idol worship, bar none. In Christianity, even the Eastern Orthodox church permits icons (2D images are okay, but 3D models are forbidden).
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but I think you should touch up with reality a little bit before spouting off in public. It doesn't speak very well in your favor.
Around when 3D gaming was taking off, there was the N64. Admittedly, the console wasn't that great, but there was a lot of hype behind it and there were a few great titles (mostly overshadowed by the sheer volume of crap). I was foolish in those days and didn't realize that Squaresoft had left me for Sony, but even by the time I found out, I didn't care; Final Fantasy games were going to be released for the PC in the future, and I decided to take my ill-gotten cash (I was too young to work, so it was all bounty from the holidays) and purchase a shiny new N64. The driving force behind my purchasing decision? Ocarina of Time.
Okay, so I did spend several good hours playing Mario Kart 64 and Star Fox 64, but the vast majority of the time I spent just playing Zelda 64. It's one of the few games I've ever owned that I've played all the way though, and I did it several times. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a game so much since Final Fantasy III/VI back in the day.
Was it worth it to buy a console just so I could play one game? Absolutely. Will I do it again? Twilight Princess is approaching release, and I've been tempted to drop the cash just to buy a Gamecube. I've never been interested in owning one before, but all it takes is one killer app.
From what I've observed, he kind of has his own special grammar. His formal prose is lackluster, but in written communication he maintains a sort of brevity and charm that you would easily associate with comic books. Unfortunately for him, he's internalized so much of the informal style that it interferes with his writing ability. As long as he sticks with writing comic books, though, I think he'll do just fine.
Thanks... I have a bad memory with exact phrases.
Now that's what I'm talking about.
I grew up in a family that used AOL, and I had to endure parental controls for most of my life. Since I love computers so much, it was perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of my life, and it was extremely shameful and demoralizing because it sent me a message that my parents didn't trust or respect me. During those years I despised them because there was no personal or human aspect to our relationship--only control.
Having third party software that does this is one thing, but building these features into the operating system is something entirely different, and I find it abhorrent. I feel really sorry for kids growing up now that are going to have to fight Vista in the home.
That's a psychological affect called "racial preference", and it's fairly universal. Basically, people have a difficult time distinguishing features in races other than their own. That explains the common phrase, "They all look the same to me."