And if you think Star Trek is bad, you should check out Dora The Explorer. There's this one movie my kid has, where Dora travels from South America, to France, to Tanzania, to Russia, to China, all in one day. Not only that she's using vehicles like a ship, an amphibious motor scooter, and a train, (I think it's a steam or diesel locomotive, not some fancy mag lev train). She doesn't even make it plausible by using an airplane.
I know you're trying to be funny, but here's my funny anecdote. I got a Vista laptop over the weekend. It was dog ass slow, so I installed Mandriva (I was planning to install it before I bought it). I took me a few hours to get the network card drivers working, but after that, I had a full 3D desktop with wireless capability. So, while it took some of my time to get my machine working under Linux, but I figure I've already saved that much time in how much quicker my machine operates then when Vista is running. And I don't even get a 3D Desktop in windows, because it thinks my computer isn't good enough, and only ships with home basic.
Also, computers usually come with free CD/DVD buring software like Nero. It doesn't have all the options of the full version, but I haven't found anything I can't do with it. Stuff like that I like to keep around. Not all software that comes preinstalled is crap, althought I'll agree that the majority of it is.
If it's anything like the Acer Laptop I just bought, there's an 8 Gig partition at the beginning of the drive. You change some setting in the BIOS, and when it books, it resets the hard drive back to factory settings. Haven't tried it yet (and maybe won't for a while), but the option is there.
They solved checkers, so a computer will never lose, but you can get a draw. However, I'm not sure that the same would happen with chess. Currently, chess hasn't been solved, but we have a computer that can beat the best human in the world. So, if we were to solve chess, then would a human even be able to play to a draw? Playing a perfect game of chess is much more difficult than playing a perfect game of checkers. Also, computers advance in speed much faster than humans. Getting a computer to play a perfect game of chess might take 10 or 20 more years. People wouldn't have advanced that much by then, and probably won't be playing much better than they are playing now. It took humans about 200,000 years to get to our current intelligence. On the other hand, computers have only been around for about 60 years.
From what I understand, they also programmed every game Kasparov ever played into Deep Blue. So, anything that Kasparov had ever done before, the computer knew about it. No human could ever memorize every game played by his opponent. No human could ever think 20 moves ahead. It's like that movie, Bad Company, where Chris Rock is playing chess, and tells the guy how the entire game is going to know. This is the kind of thing that Deep Blue probably could have done to some degree of certainty with Kasparov. It's hard to be someone when they can anticipate every move you are going to make.
I've found that by and large, people in my university in my courses, and those I work with to be very social. On the other hand, I know a lot of people who took arts and social sciences who never talked to a single person in their class, unless they had to do a group project, which was less often then in computer science, or engineering. The people who I graduated with were all very social. It's actually the non-social ones that ended up having problems with the courses and dropping out in the first couple years.
However, I've met a lot of people who are doing coding who are more inept at coding then even the most socially inept programmer. Get that? There are people who are coding who have no idea what they are doing, but many companies let them do this. However, they won't get a computer guy with bad social skills to talk to the clients. Kind of a double standard in most situations.
Whoever built the computer probably has a lot of money for you to take. If they built some super-backgammon machine, and said, anyone who can beat it gets $100, or $1,000,000 (if they're really confident), would that make it more fun. Of course we'd still probably want to have real people rolling real dice to ensure randomness, and that the machine wasn't cheating.
I also use the web in this way. I have almost no bookmarks, as I have all the urls of the sites I want to visit memorized. It's faster to hit CTRL+T and type in the URL then it is to find something in my bookmarks. And while searching would be a little quicker using the built in search box, I don't find actually loading up google to slow me down that much. On a related note, does anybody else turn off the history function. I have never found a use for it. Unless you visit 5 pages a day, it gets way too huge to find anything. I think it should be implemented a little better, saving the path which you followed to get to a page. so, instead of seeing some random page in a list, I can see that the page is under the links I followed when I searched for "C++ Book Reviews" (as an example).
Not only that, who are their customers? Users might be more appropriate wording. It's not like many (any) people actually pay money to these companies for their services.
In the late eighties and nineties, at least here in the US, you heard the term "computer literacy" used a lot in connection with education. The thing was, it was a crock. The "computer skills" kids learned in the late 80s have very little direct relevance in 2010.
It depends on whether you were learning actual skills, or whether you were learning to press certain buttons. The skills I learned using MS-DOS in 1990 are still skills that I use today in my everyday life. Just the concepts of files, folders, move, rename, copy are some very simple skills that haven't changed much in the last 20 years. Same with word processing. Sure they've added a bunch of functionality to MS Word, but the simples function, bold, italics, font size, spell check, indent, tables, alignment, justify, table of contents, and other things haven't changed in the last 15 years.
However, just as counterexample, my father visits Greece often to visit his wife's family. They are amazed at how well he knows how to fix things. According to him, the people there have no idea how to fix anything by themselves. Even finding anybody with tools is often difficult. When they see him doing plumbing or electrical work, it's like watching David Blaine perform magic tricks. It's not just North Americans (I'm from Canada) who take everything in for a repair. Many people in other countries don't know how to repair anything. I know a lot of people who fix their own stuff. There actually seems to be quite a large do-it-yourself market right now. It might be different in third world countries, where people have no means to pay someone else to fix something, then of course they fix it themselves. But don't talk like everybody in the first world except the US is fixing all their own stuff.
Actually, the only things that require double click, as far as i'm aware, are the file icons on your desktop/explorer. I think everything else is double click. I think there's an option somewhere that lets you enable opening files with a single click. Once that's enabled, there should be no double clicking required. Also, if unsure, you can just single click, and when nothing happens, then double click.
Strangely enough, the only earbuds that ever didn't hurt my ears were the ones I got with my Sony Minidisc player. The Minidisc player was kind of crap, due to the sonicstage software used for loading the songs, but I won't get into that. I don't wear glasses, so I don't have any problems with headphones being uncomfortable. However, earbuds are almost always uncomfortable. Maybe I just have sensitive ears or something. It seems my cartilage is harder than most. Also, a good pair of headphones can double as earmuffs in the winter. Probably won't stop you from wearing a toque while skiing, but it helps when you have to wait 10-15 minutes for the bus on your way to work.
Actually, the iPod earbuds probably don't contain much more than 50 cents of materials and engineering. All your comment proves to me is that you got ripped off on the $30 earbuds. You can't get good sound out of an ear bud. I got some pretty hefty headphones, and they weren't that expensive, but they sound about 10 times better than any earbuds or portable music player included earphones. I don't know why people use earbuds. They sound like crap and they are uncomfortable. Use a real set of headphones if you want to hear your music the way it was meant to be heard.
It's not even a double standard. If you look at it, we, the open source community always want things to be more open. So if a closed source company releases something under open source, then we praise them because they are becoming more open, which is good. However, if a product that was once open source stops being open source, then it is becoming less open, which is bad. More open = good, less open = bad. Simple really. I don't see where the double standard exists.
Couldn't you build a 4-way,8-way, or N-Way board where there isn't such a latency problem? Where each processor is connected to each other processor. Sure the circuit design would be pretty complex, but if it is such a speed increase, such that 3 processors gives you more power than 4, then it might be worth it. It might be very difficult with 16 + processors, but 4 shouldn't be that difficult. If it is impossible, please explain why.
I had downloaded the old thundercats episodes, and was surprised at how badly they were done. I remember it being a really good TV show, but once you look back on it, your mind kind of forgets how bad it was, or you were too young to realize it. It's the same with watching Simpsons episodes from the first and second seasons. The drawings are much more crude, and the animation much worse then what they've accomplished later on in the series. South Park hasn't seemed to change much though.
I know that Mandriva tells you if you have any services installed that have open ports (SSH,Samba) when you do the install. There are some necessary open ports for most users, like samba. Having open ports doesn't have to be a bad thing, although I will agree that having them open without any reason is not a good idea. However, as long as you keep on top of the updates (very easy with Mandriva and most other distros), you shouldn't have too much to worry about.
Just because a movie is made from a book doesn't mean it's terrible. Kubrick is considered one of the greats, but many of his movies are based on old novels. Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut, from the 5 movies that I know, all say they are base on or "inspired by" some other novel. The only one I own that doesn't say it's based on some other piece of work is Dr. Strangelove. So, while I would like to see some original stories. Seeing movies based of books isn't all that bad, assuming they are using interesting books and the movie is done well.
Although I have to say, seeing Apple on that list confuses the hell out of me. For a company that makes their living stating how terrible MS (and vista) in particular is, you would think that they wouldn't want to keep Microsoft in their format monopoly. Open formats, especially for office suites would bring the Mac a long way in helping to win over a lot of users. I think the major reason most people don't choose Mac or Linux is because they are worried about whether or not their documents will open correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you think Star Trek is bad, you should check out Dora The Explorer. There's this one movie my kid has, where Dora travels from South America, to France, to Tanzania, to Russia, to China, all in one day. Not only that she's using vehicles like a ship, an amphibious motor scooter, and a train, (I think it's a steam or diesel locomotive, not some fancy mag lev train). She doesn't even make it plausible by using an airplane.
Partimage. Haven't used it before but it seems pretty popular, and seems to be what you're looking for.
I know you're trying to be funny, but here's my funny anecdote. I got a Vista laptop over the weekend. It was dog ass slow, so I installed Mandriva (I was planning to install it before I bought it). I took me a few hours to get the network card drivers working, but after that, I had a full 3D desktop with wireless capability. So, while it took some of my time to get my machine working under Linux, but I figure I've already saved that much time in how much quicker my machine operates then when Vista is running. And I don't even get a 3D Desktop in windows, because it thinks my computer isn't good enough, and only ships with home basic.
Also, computers usually come with free CD/DVD buring software like Nero. It doesn't have all the options of the full version, but I haven't found anything I can't do with it. Stuff like that I like to keep around. Not all software that comes preinstalled is crap, althought I'll agree that the majority of it is.
If it's anything like the Acer Laptop I just bought, there's an 8 Gig partition at the beginning of the drive. You change some setting in the BIOS, and when it books, it resets the hard drive back to factory settings. Haven't tried it yet (and maybe won't for a while), but the option is there.
They solved checkers, so a computer will never lose, but you can get a draw. However, I'm not sure that the same would happen with chess. Currently, chess hasn't been solved, but we have a computer that can beat the best human in the world. So, if we were to solve chess, then would a human even be able to play to a draw? Playing a perfect game of chess is much more difficult than playing a perfect game of checkers. Also, computers advance in speed much faster than humans. Getting a computer to play a perfect game of chess might take 10 or 20 more years. People wouldn't have advanced that much by then, and probably won't be playing much better than they are playing now. It took humans about 200,000 years to get to our current intelligence. On the other hand, computers have only been around for about 60 years.
From what I understand, they also programmed every game Kasparov ever played into Deep Blue. So, anything that Kasparov had ever done before, the computer knew about it. No human could ever memorize every game played by his opponent. No human could ever think 20 moves ahead. It's like that movie, Bad Company, where Chris Rock is playing chess, and tells the guy how the entire game is going to know. This is the kind of thing that Deep Blue probably could have done to some degree of certainty with Kasparov. It's hard to be someone when they can anticipate every move you are going to make.
I've found that by and large, people in my university in my courses, and those I work with to be very social. On the other hand, I know a lot of people who took arts and social sciences who never talked to a single person in their class, unless they had to do a group project, which was less often then in computer science, or engineering. The people who I graduated with were all very social. It's actually the non-social ones that ended up having problems with the courses and dropping out in the first couple years.
However, I've met a lot of people who are doing coding who are more inept at coding then even the most socially inept programmer. Get that? There are people who are coding who have no idea what they are doing, but many companies let them do this. However, they won't get a computer guy with bad social skills to talk to the clients. Kind of a double standard in most situations.
Whoever built the computer probably has a lot of money for you to take. If they built some super-backgammon machine, and said, anyone who can beat it gets $100, or $1,000,000 (if they're really confident), would that make it more fun. Of course we'd still probably want to have real people rolling real dice to ensure randomness, and that the machine wasn't cheating.
Yes, but I don't think that this survey is talking about corporate customers.
I also use the web in this way. I have almost no bookmarks, as I have all the urls of the sites I want to visit memorized. It's faster to hit CTRL+T and type in the URL then it is to find something in my bookmarks. And while searching would be a little quicker using the built in search box, I don't find actually loading up google to slow me down that much. On a related note, does anybody else turn off the history function. I have never found a use for it. Unless you visit 5 pages a day, it gets way too huge to find anything. I think it should be implemented a little better, saving the path which you followed to get to a page. so, instead of seeing some random page in a list, I can see that the page is under the links I followed when I searched for "C++ Book Reviews" (as an example).
Not only that, who are their customers? Users might be more appropriate wording. It's not like many (any) people actually pay money to these companies for their services.
However, just as counterexample, my father visits Greece often to visit his wife's family. They are amazed at how well he knows how to fix things. According to him, the people there have no idea how to fix anything by themselves. Even finding anybody with tools is often difficult. When they see him doing plumbing or electrical work, it's like watching David Blaine perform magic tricks. It's not just North Americans (I'm from Canada) who take everything in for a repair. Many people in other countries don't know how to repair anything. I know a lot of people who fix their own stuff. There actually seems to be quite a large do-it-yourself market right now. It might be different in third world countries, where people have no means to pay someone else to fix something, then of course they fix it themselves. But don't talk like everybody in the first world except the US is fixing all their own stuff.
Actually, the only things that require double click, as far as i'm aware, are the file icons on your desktop/explorer. I think everything else is double click. I think there's an option somewhere that lets you enable opening files with a single click. Once that's enabled, there should be no double clicking required. Also, if unsure, you can just single click, and when nothing happens, then double click.
Strangely enough, the only earbuds that ever didn't hurt my ears were the ones I got with my Sony Minidisc player. The Minidisc player was kind of crap, due to the sonicstage software used for loading the songs, but I won't get into that. I don't wear glasses, so I don't have any problems with headphones being uncomfortable. However, earbuds are almost always uncomfortable. Maybe I just have sensitive ears or something. It seems my cartilage is harder than most. Also, a good pair of headphones can double as earmuffs in the winter. Probably won't stop you from wearing a toque while skiing, but it helps when you have to wait 10-15 minutes for the bus on your way to work.
Actually, the iPod earbuds probably don't contain much more than 50 cents of materials and engineering. All your comment proves to me is that you got ripped off on the $30 earbuds. You can't get good sound out of an ear bud. I got some pretty hefty headphones, and they weren't that expensive, but they sound about 10 times better than any earbuds or portable music player included earphones. I don't know why people use earbuds. They sound like crap and they are uncomfortable. Use a real set of headphones if you want to hear your music the way it was meant to be heard.
It's not even a double standard. If you look at it, we, the open source community always want things to be more open. So if a closed source company releases something under open source, then we praise them because they are becoming more open, which is good. However, if a product that was once open source stops being open source, then it is becoming less open, which is bad. More open = good, less open = bad. Simple really. I don't see where the double standard exists.
Couldn't you build a 4-way,8-way, or N-Way board where there isn't such a latency problem? Where each processor is connected to each other processor. Sure the circuit design would be pretty complex, but if it is such a speed increase, such that 3 processors gives you more power than 4, then it might be worth it. It might be very difficult with 16 + processors, but 4 shouldn't be that difficult. If it is impossible, please explain why.
I had downloaded the old thundercats episodes, and was surprised at how badly they were done. I remember it being a really good TV show, but once you look back on it, your mind kind of forgets how bad it was, or you were too young to realize it. It's the same with watching Simpsons episodes from the first and second seasons. The drawings are much more crude, and the animation much worse then what they've accomplished later on in the series. South Park hasn't seemed to change much though.
I know that Mandriva tells you if you have any services installed that have open ports (SSH,Samba) when you do the install. There are some necessary open ports for most users, like samba. Having open ports doesn't have to be a bad thing, although I will agree that having them open without any reason is not a good idea. However, as long as you keep on top of the updates (very easy with Mandriva and most other distros), you shouldn't have too much to worry about.
Just because a movie is made from a book doesn't mean it's terrible. Kubrick is considered one of the greats, but many of his movies are based on old novels. Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut, from the 5 movies that I know, all say they are base on or "inspired by" some other novel. The only one I own that doesn't say it's based on some other piece of work is Dr. Strangelove. So, while I would like to see some original stories. Seeing movies based of books isn't all that bad, assuming they are using interesting books and the movie is done well.
Gabe and Tycho saw it coming the whole time. Here's 2 approriate comics
Part 1
Part 2
Although I have to say, seeing Apple on that list confuses the hell out of me. For a company that makes their living stating how terrible MS (and vista) in particular is, you would think that they wouldn't want to keep Microsoft in their format monopoly. Open formats, especially for office suites would bring the Mac a long way in helping to win over a lot of users. I think the major reason most people don't choose Mac or Linux is because they are worried about whether or not their documents will open correctly.