Which makes sense, they're invented by human beings.
With the necessary consequence, by reductio ad absurdum, that we know nothing about nothing, and all our technology just happens to work by pure luck.
No, the necessary consequence is that we cannot rely on "human inventions" as being 100% accurate or complete descriptions of the universe.
Newton's laws of motion are strictly speaking inaccurate but they work for technology up to a certain level. Same with Relativity: until we find a case where they don't quite work, we take them as being the most accurate description of the world we have.
It is ridiculous to assert that because we don't know everything, that therefore we know nothing.
On the other hand evolutionists rarely notice that a process of natural selection doesn't create something "new", it only causes a (mathematically preexisting) potential arrangement of atoms, one of an infinite set, to actually appear. The set of all possible carbon-based DNAs hasn't changed since the Big Bang, or even before it. Natural selection only makes some of them appear as actual combinations of carbon atoms, it neither adds nor subtracts from the full set.
While strictly true, that is entirely unhelpful. A rock is different from a worm or a human being, however much you try to reduce them all to being just collections of atoms (or quantum events, or whatever).
Nice, fairly subtle troll there. Amusing Word v. Libre Office dig, obligatory "Linux is no good for games" but with the subtle "fancy software" reference to equate it to a somewhat dull toy. Altogether 9/10.
I just got asked by a person I know who is just an average user with little knowledge of computers if they should get a ChromeOS or Windows 8 system. You can bet your ass I didn't recommend Windows.
And, unless that person has very limited usage requirements, I hope you didn't recommend ChromeOS either.
The correct answer is "get a cheap Windows laptop and let me install Linux on it".
So if photoshop worked well in 1999 on a 300mhz P4, then custom native libs, and gui in adk, its perfectly viable to have a good version running on a large tablet 9in +.
At home we have various computing devices, but even just for doing homework the kids need to use the laptop and not a tablet, netbook, iPad or whatever.
It may well be that eveyday users end up with a sort of docking tablet instead of a laptop, but for the moment that's an expensive and slightly pointless alternative to just buying a cheap tablet and cheap laptop.
Don't forget the web though. Native software is becoming less relevant each passing year as more and more functionality is moved over to web applications and "the cloud".
Tell me about it! One hour using Google Docs (or whatever it's called now) and I was hooked. Copy-pasting a formula from one cell to another on a spreadsheet barely took a couple of seconds. It was like visiting the office of the future in Epcot.
I'll give you a clue: I bet your accounting, customer relations management and payroll/HR software all run on Windows. Not to mention sales order processing and stock control.
That's where the inertia comes from. That and the fact that Word/Excel probably integrate with all of them quite well too.
I now think that ultimately, a unified interface is where we'll have to go, not necessarily because of today's corporate cost-cutting, but to reduce the learning curve as our most common devices become integrated. When I'm 85, I don't want to have to learn seven different UIs to make a pot of coffee, check my email, and get a weather forecast.
Give an iPad to a child and you will see what the learning curve is––practically zero.
Sit them in front of a command line, and it might take them a little longer, despite the immense power of a shell. That power will be lost in the "unified interface" movement, along with a lot of productivity.
Only on slashdot...
If you gave most children a command line to work with they'd laugh at you. The myth that all kids are uber-hackers from birth is just absurd. Kids will find their way around an iPad to where they can download shit easily enough, but it doesn't mean they understand what they're doing.
As a kid, I was brought up with TV in a way my parents weren't. But I didn't magically become an electrical engineer through osmosis or something.
I don't WANT to have to "learn to adapt".
Especially not for some imbecilic tweaks in the UI that remove functionality and stop me from working efficiently.
For me, time is money. And all the time I have to waste trying to dick around in the new UI, instead of getting work done, is money Microsoft is stealing from me.
But I suppose it's OK when Ubuntu does it because you haven't paid for it?
my monthly bill for my phone, and data plan hovers around $100 dollars a month.
In the UK it would be about 35GBP max with a free iPhone 5/equivalent, and there are quite reasonable plans for 10-15GBP a month. I am amazed that there is a single area where the UK is significantly cheaper than the US, except for whelks or something
It's safe to assume giving the limited uptake of 4G at current prices that the surcharge will have diminished to zero by the time rivals arrive.
Seeing is believing. Meanwhile, if the spectrum and the infrastructure were all still state-owned we wouldn't need to be speculating, the price would be fixed in an equitable manner already.
If you want to go back to the bad old days of waiting weeks for a phone then feel free to do so
You cannot compare telecoms in the 1970s with today. It's like saying that back in the Old Labour days, a home computer cost the equivalent of a car, so look at the fantastic efficiencies created by Margaret Thatcher and the Tories.
Where you have wired/cable/fibre connections, someone needs to pay for getting it to your house, and I'm fucked if I'm paying Richard Branson 25 grand for the privelege. Like the National Grid, it's a common good that should be equally available to everybody, irrespective of location or income.
Why, precisely, should telecoms companies be able to make money out of literal thin air?
Do you pine for the days of union closed shops and secondary action too?
Frankly, in view of the recent alternatives, with posh twats like Tony Blair and Cunt Cameron growing ever richer through diligently applied selfishness and amorality, yes.
Who on earth is going to pay such a high price to travel on a train when they could drive in half the time? I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a taxi for that price. I can't imagine they get *any* passengers in the first class carriage.
Well, they must get some... Anyway, I think you're forgetting about business travellers. They can (quite convincingly) argue that the cost is worth it for a long trip, because they can actually work during the journey, unlike in a car or even a plane. On a train you can phone, use the internet, effectively hold business meetings with colleagues, and so on.
I personally would only take the train somewhere if I was being paid expenses, as you say for personal use (if you don't book weeks in advance) it is just too expensive.
Competition seems to be working in the energy sector as well: the infrastructure is separated from the suppliers so you can buy electricity from whomever you want. (The surprise there is that people complain about having a free market, and can't seem to be bothered to select the best offer: they would prefer to pay a set price even if that price is higher than what they'd pay on the free market).
In the UK, ALL the power companies are corrupt, inefficient, guilty of mis-selling, hiding information from customers, obstructing rivals and obfuscating their pricing structures as far as humanly possible.
And no, I really, really do not have any interest in shopping in the glorious non-free marketplace that has been created. I want them to supply electricity and gas and for me to pay them sufficient to keep up on maintaining the infrastructure. Which I'd happily do for a nationalised company.
Although, that said, despite the phone network being a similar situation, that seems to have worked out surprisingly well (despite the fact that we're mostly stuck with using BT for the local-loop, and they are utterly utterly incompetent).
I'm no great fan of BT, but I shudder to think what it would be like if a load of different private companies tried to do it instead. At least now BT have to get a supply to your door. I personally couldn't give a toss about competition between phone companies, I'd be quite happy if one nationalised company was responsbile for the whole lot: any "unprofitable" services like providing decent broadband or 3G coverage to rural areas would just be part of the service, in the same way that you pay the same for a stamp on a letter to go from Land's End to John O'Groats as you do from Manchester to Liverpool.
"Massive debt" is just a scare phrase used by rightwingers who think that corporate and government economic behaviour is exactly analogous to that of a careful householder who pays their credit card bills on time and never has a mortgage.
Deficit reduction doesn't have to be just about making cuts.
Unfortunately the Tories appear to believe it is.
Exactly. In ten years' time, people are going to find George Osborne's name in the history books, hopefully as the only Chancellor of the Exchequer in modern times to have been hanged for treason.
If the Con-Dem coalition was a plc the shareholders would have stormed the platform at the last shareholdrs' meeting and fallen on Cameron with knives like the killers of Julius Caesar.
So here is a hint: arm yourself with a USB cable and hook up your peripherals. Try it!
The advantage of mobile gaming is that it's mobile. You can stick your phone in your pocket and play on the train, toilet or wherever. Once you start plugging in controllers, cables, keyboards, large screens, etc you might just as well use a proper console or PC as it will be a lot more powerful and there will be some genuinely high quality games available for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Which makes sense, they're invented by human beings.
With the necessary consequence, by reductio ad absurdum, that we know nothing about nothing, and all our technology just happens to work by pure luck.
No, the necessary consequence is that we cannot rely on "human inventions" as being 100% accurate or complete descriptions of the universe.
Newton's laws of motion are strictly speaking inaccurate but they work for technology up to a certain level. Same with Relativity: until we find a case where they don't quite work, we take them as being the most accurate description of the world we have.
It is ridiculous to assert that because we don't know everything, that therefore we know nothing.
On the other hand evolutionists rarely notice that a process of natural selection doesn't create something "new", it only causes a (mathematically preexisting) potential arrangement of atoms, one of an infinite set, to actually appear. The set of all possible carbon-based DNAs hasn't changed since the Big Bang, or even before it. Natural selection only makes some of them appear as actual combinations of carbon atoms, it neither adds nor subtracts from the full set.
While strictly true, that is entirely unhelpful. A rock is different from a worm or a human being, however much you try to reduce them all to being just collections of atoms (or quantum events, or whatever).
Signed,
God.
Or were you being serious?
I just got asked by a person I know who is just an average user with little knowledge of computers if they should get a ChromeOS or Windows 8 system. You can bet your ass I didn't recommend Windows.
And, unless that person has very limited usage requirements, I hope you didn't recommend ChromeOS either.
The correct answer is "get a cheap Windows laptop and let me install Linux on it".
Those were the geek glory days, before every pleb had a PC connected to our internet.
So if photoshop worked well in 1999 on a 300mhz P4, then custom native libs, and gui in adk, its perfectly viable to have a good version running on a large tablet 9in +.
Even in 1999 you'd have had a 15 inch screen.
It may well be that eveyday users end up with a sort of docking tablet instead of a laptop, but for the moment that's an expensive and slightly pointless alternative to just buying a cheap tablet and cheap laptop.
Windows is like Facebook: it's amazing how complete and satisfying your life can be while using neither.
Your life can be complete and satisfying without ever touching a fucking computer, what's your point?
Don't forget the web though. Native software is becoming less relevant each passing year as more and more functionality is moved over to web applications and "the cloud".
Tell me about it! One hour using Google Docs (or whatever it's called now) and I was hooked. Copy-pasting a formula from one cell to another on a spreadsheet barely took a couple of seconds. It was like visiting the office of the future in Epcot.
That's where the inertia comes from. That and the fact that Word/Excel probably integrate with all of them quite well too.
I now think that ultimately, a unified interface is where we'll have to go, not necessarily because of today's corporate cost-cutting, but to reduce the learning curve as our most common devices become integrated. When I'm 85, I don't want to have to learn seven different UIs to make a pot of coffee, check my email, and get a weather forecast.
Give an iPad to a child and you will see what the learning curve is––practically zero. Sit them in front of a command line, and it might take them a little longer, despite the immense power of a shell. That power will be lost in the "unified interface" movement, along with a lot of productivity.
Only on slashdot...
If you gave most children a command line to work with they'd laugh at you. The myth that all kids are uber-hackers from birth is just absurd. Kids will find their way around an iPad to where they can download shit easily enough, but it doesn't mean they understand what they're doing.
As a kid, I was brought up with TV in a way my parents weren't. But I didn't magically become an electrical engineer through osmosis or something.
That's just it.
I don't WANT to have to "learn to adapt". Especially not for some imbecilic tweaks in the UI that remove functionality and stop me from working efficiently. For me, time is money. And all the time I have to waste trying to dick around in the new UI, instead of getting work done, is money Microsoft is stealing from me.
But I suppose it's OK when Ubuntu does it because you haven't paid for it?
Dangerous line of argument there.
You have free beer for us? That's awfully generous of you!
Free beer yesterday or tomorrow, no free beer today.
my monthly bill for my phone, and data plan hovers around $100 dollars a month.
In the UK it would be about 35GBP max with a free iPhone 5/equivalent, and there are quite reasonable plans for 10-15GBP a month. I am amazed that there is a single area where the UK is significantly cheaper than the US, except for whelks or something
It's safe to assume giving the limited uptake of 4G at current prices that the surcharge will have diminished to zero by the time rivals arrive.
Seeing is believing. Meanwhile, if the spectrum and the infrastructure were all still state-owned we wouldn't need to be speculating, the price would be fixed in an equitable manner already.
Yeah but now they need the cash for vitally important projects like a state funeral for Dear Leader.
They should have asked Her Heartbroken Supporters to chip in to pay for the fucking thing if they're that bothered about the humourless old cow.
If you want to go back to the bad old days of waiting weeks for a phone then feel free to do so
You cannot compare telecoms in the 1970s with today. It's like saying that back in the Old Labour days, a home computer cost the equivalent of a car, so look at the fantastic efficiencies created by Margaret Thatcher and the Tories.
Where you have wired/cable/fibre connections, someone needs to pay for getting it to your house, and I'm fucked if I'm paying Richard Branson 25 grand for the privelege. Like the National Grid, it's a common good that should be equally available to everybody, irrespective of location or income.
Why, precisely, should telecoms companies be able to make money out of literal thin air?
Do you pine for the days of union closed shops and secondary action too?
Frankly, in view of the recent alternatives, with posh twats like Tony Blair and Cunt Cameron growing ever richer through diligently applied selfishness and amorality, yes.
Who on earth is going to pay such a high price to travel on a train when they could drive in half the time? I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a taxi for that price. I can't imagine they get *any* passengers in the first class carriage.
Well, they must get some... Anyway, I think you're forgetting about business travellers. They can (quite convincingly) argue that the cost is worth it for a long trip, because they can actually work during the journey, unlike in a car or even a plane. On a train you can phone, use the internet, effectively hold business meetings with colleagues, and so on.
I personally would only take the train somewhere if I was being paid expenses, as you say for personal use (if you don't book weeks in advance) it is just too expensive.
Competition seems to be working in the energy sector as well: the infrastructure is separated from the suppliers so you can buy electricity from whomever you want. (The surprise there is that people complain about having a free market, and can't seem to be bothered to select the best offer: they would prefer to pay a set price even if that price is higher than what they'd pay on the free market).
In the UK, ALL the power companies are corrupt, inefficient, guilty of mis-selling, hiding information from customers, obstructing rivals and obfuscating their pricing structures as far as humanly possible.
And no, I really, really do not have any interest in shopping in the glorious non-free marketplace that has been created. I want them to supply electricity and gas and for me to pay them sufficient to keep up on maintaining the infrastructure. Which I'd happily do for a nationalised company.
Although, that said, despite the phone network being a similar situation, that seems to have worked out surprisingly well (despite the fact that we're mostly stuck with using BT for the local-loop, and they are utterly utterly incompetent).
I'm no great fan of BT, but I shudder to think what it would be like if a load of different private companies tried to do it instead. At least now BT have to get a supply to your door. I personally couldn't give a toss about competition between phone companies, I'd be quite happy if one nationalised company was responsbile for the whole lot: any "unprofitable" services like providing decent broadband or 3G coverage to rural areas would just be part of the service, in the same way that you pay the same for a stamp on a letter to go from Land's End to John O'Groats as you do from Manchester to Liverpool.
"Massive debt" is just a scare phrase used by rightwingers who think that corporate and government economic behaviour is exactly analogous to that of a careful householder who pays their credit card bills on time and never has a mortgage.
Deficit reduction doesn't have to be just about making cuts.
Unfortunately the Tories appear to believe it is.
Exactly. In ten years' time, people are going to find George Osborne's name in the history books, hopefully as the only Chancellor of the Exchequer in modern times to have been hanged for treason.
If the Con-Dem coalition was a plc the shareholders would have stormed the platform at the last shareholdrs' meeting and fallen on Cameron with knives like the killers of Julius Caesar.
maybe in your culture killing people is rewarded and enjoying love and relationships is frowned upon
Maybe in our culture we know the difference between a game and real life.
Hint: I don't want to play a game about taking a shit or going to work in a burger bar for 10 hours.
So here is a hint: arm yourself with a USB cable and hook up your peripherals. Try it!
The advantage of mobile gaming is that it's mobile. You can stick your phone in your pocket and play on the train, toilet or wherever. Once you start plugging in controllers, cables, keyboards, large screens, etc you might just as well use a proper console or PC as it will be a lot more powerful and there will be some genuinely high quality games available for it.