My little brother became interested in the game fairly recently as well. One program that he found helpful was Lego Chess. It features a very nice interface that children can relate to (Lego characters), and has a very useful tutorial for the game that introduces you to pawns, first and then works you up to the more useful peices as the program thinks you are ready. It also has an acually beatable AI that may still offer a challenge to the more experienced players. If you work through all of the tutorials it will even show you a few advanced moves that most people don't really know about.
OK first off, I am a pilot, I support and use many common Open Source projects (Fedora, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org) and I read the full article.
Now on to the rant!
This guy doesn't even attempt to understand the mechanics behind the scenes of an airline. There are anywhere from 20 to 550 people on a single flight. The fact that there are so many people alone is reason enough for so much security on an airline. As soon as you step onto the aircraft your safety is that airline's reasonability. The long wait is also caused by the number of people that are all on one flight. You if you can only process 5 people a minute, with the larger flights that means that it will take nearly an hour to process them all at peak efficency. Unfortuantly people show up late and not everything is going to happen at peak efficency, so you have to show up early if you want to make it to the aircraft still feeling safe. As far as making you wait in the terminal with stupid people, well he must just get bad flights. I have made a few good friends in my travels.
Now to the open source issue. The problems that he described aren't so much with the acutal process of open source but rather with people arguing over insignifigant things which leads to delays in parts of the programs that really matter. This unfortunatly is a problem that cannot be helped in a large democratic like environment. With any majority rules system of decision there will be conflicts of interests between the participants. I have not had any real problems with drivers on my own linux box, granted I do have some pretty old hardware. But the Linux environment is still under heavy development so I would let that slide. Mozilla Firefox has already become far better than their Microsoft IE and with Sunbird well on the way the Tunderbird/Sunbird combo will be much better than Outlook.
I agree with you that it would be difficult to cry bloody murder over a game that was that open ended but... I seem to already have that game. It's called 'Real Life', the story goes like this:
- You are born
- You grow up
- You go to school
- You get your diver's license
- You get the picture
They have market dominance in a market for small, stylish portable devices that lack the raw power of some other devices, but compete on "the complete package."
I disagree, both Nintendo and Apple have been working on the 'cool image' as you say but neither of them lack any of the power that the mainstream devices have. Apple's computers have lower MHz ratings than most PCs but they don't require as much because of the different way that their processors work (RISC vs CISC). Nintendo does have some problems with 3-rd party game developers not developing games for them. They don't get some of the nicer games, but I would hardly say that the Gamecube lacks power. Just look at Resident Evil 4 or the screens for the new Zelda game.
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No, not box of rocks, it Rocks your Box! Also, the GIMP is actually an acronym - the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
My little brother became interested in the game fairly recently as well. One program that he found helpful was Lego Chess. It features a very nice interface that children can relate to (Lego characters), and has a very useful tutorial for the game that introduces you to pawns, first and then works you up to the more useful peices as the program thinks you are ready. It also has an acually beatable AI that may still offer a challenge to the more experienced players. If you work through all of the tutorials it will even show you a few advanced moves that most people don't really know about.
OK first off, I am a pilot, I support and use many common Open Source projects (Fedora, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org) and I read the full article.
Now on to the rant!
This guy doesn't even attempt to understand the mechanics behind the scenes of an airline. There are anywhere from 20 to 550 people on a single flight. The fact that there are so many people alone is reason enough for so much security on an airline. As soon as you step onto the aircraft your safety is that airline's reasonability. The long wait is also caused by the number of people that are all on one flight. You if you can only process 5 people a minute, with the larger flights that means that it will take nearly an hour to process them all at peak efficency. Unfortuantly people show up late and not everything is going to happen at peak efficency, so you have to show up early if you want to make it to the aircraft still feeling safe. As far as making you wait in the terminal with stupid people, well he must just get bad flights. I have made a few good friends in my travels.
Now to the open source issue. The problems that he described aren't so much with the acutal process of open source but rather with people arguing over insignifigant things which leads to delays in parts of the programs that really matter. This unfortunatly is a problem that cannot be helped in a large democratic like environment. With any majority rules system of decision there will be conflicts of interests between the participants. I have not had any real problems with drivers on my own linux box, granted I do have some pretty old hardware. But the Linux environment is still under heavy development so I would let that slide. Mozilla Firefox has already become far better than their Microsoft IE and with Sunbird well on the way the Tunderbird/Sunbird combo will be much better than Outlook.
I agree with you that it would be difficult to cry bloody murder over a game that was that open ended but... I seem to already have that game. It's called 'Real Life', the story goes like this:
- You are born
- You grow up
- You go to school
- You get your diver's license
- You get the picture
This comic frequently ignores the laws of Physics and Biology, but it is hilarious none the less: www.egscomics.com
They have market dominance in a market for small, stylish portable devices that lack the raw power of some other devices, but compete on "the complete package."
I disagree, both Nintendo and Apple have been working on the 'cool image' as you say but neither of them lack any of the power that the mainstream devices have. Apple's computers have lower MHz ratings than most PCs but they don't require as much because of the different way that their processors work (RISC vs CISC). Nintendo does have some problems with 3-rd party game developers not developing games for them. They don't get some of the nicer games, but I would hardly say that the Gamecube lacks power. Just look at Resident Evil 4 or the screens for the new Zelda game.