The American Breed of Christian is something totally nuts. I'm a Christian, and I can tell you some of those religious Americans I've met scare me. Truly something else, really *really* narrow-minded, extreme fundamentalist and take the bible literally (WTF?).
I never understood the vitrol some people on/. show towards religion, until I met some of their Christians. It explained a lot, very irritating people, kept shoving god into every discussion or action.
Note: I'm sure there are very many normal Christians there too, just that a minority really really give the rest a bad name (I hope to god they are a minority).
And what's with tele-evangelism? It's like they turned religion into some sort of pay-for entertainment. I didn't get it at all.
In which case the average life is worth between 800-1600 Euros? I disagree. I'd argue your life can't be measured in worth. The best you can do is see what has been invested in it, both in time, and money (education, feeding etc...), and what is the value of that which you can contribute back to the world.
I had a job doing python development for a media company. Mostly for internal/backend systems. Did it for years, but the recession resulted in my unemployment. I have since found 5 other jobs who want python dev's, so there seems to be demand, and demand seems to be increasing as time goes on.
Which will result in them blaming their losses on Piracy, probably demand a bailout, and followed by taxes/leves on the general populace and/or more crazy laws to "stop piracy". It's a self perpetuating cycle.
Really? I was thinking about the same thing (LEO satellites), but I thought that shooting them into orbit is easier than making something that is:
a) light enough to be lofted into orbit cheaply
b) Powerful enough to sustain lots of connections, presumably with high bandwidth
c) Has a power source that can sustain the satellite for years (those extra efficient solar panels used on satellites are generally very expensive, if they even sell them to civilians, and god help you if you try to get nuclear material for a RTG).
4) Can survive in a hostile environment for long periods (From what I've heard, even LEO has enough radiation to mess up non-hardened computer electronics).
If you don't mind a low bandwidth worldwide satellite link, then become a HAM operator, and then you can communicate via the OSCAR HAM satellites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR and AX.25 standard for packet data transmission.
Seems the Hams have been busy lofting their own satellites into orbit for decades now, and it is truly an international effort.
Which will not do anything much except ruin the economies of said countries (and make China jump for joy, as we have to rebuy all the electronic stuff to get on our feet again).
Nearly all military tech is EMP resistant, so all you'll do is piss off countries who now have no other functioning system except the military (which is still more advanced than Iran's). Their economies most likely severely contracting due to the loss of data/technology will result in massive unemployment, who will be ample ground for military recruitment.
To put it simply, Iran would be in for a world of pain if they did something like that. Crazy as the authorities may be, I think they love their power more than the urge to bring Armageddon upon them. I think they can be considered a rational actor. Their suppression of dissent shows that their primary concern is staying in power (with all the perks that entails) rather than being suicidal.
Thanks for the tips. That Atom motherboard sounds good, but what is it's power draw like? I heard that it's chipset draws loads of power. Would it really provide a benefit to a PIII motherboard? How does it compare?
I picked £100 because that is 3 times the cost of the current motherboard (were I to buy a PIII board+CPU new from storage stock) at my local.
Likewise I don't think your "reverse question" is valid. I expect a netbook to be more expensive than a bare motherboard+CPU, there are batteries,PSU, screen, disk/ssd, ram, charging circuit etc...., all built in, and all of which cost extra. I don't expect to find a netbook that cheap, but it felt reasonable for just the bare motherboard+CPU.
Thanks for your help though! Those Atom boards sounds interesting.
One form factor I'm hoping for is just a plain Motherboard, perhaps something Mini-ITX sized. Most of my personal servers are using old CPU's (Best is a PIII 500MHz), and I would not mind replacing them with some low power ARM systems.
Problem is almost all the cheap computers are in netbook format. If I just want the motherboard, or a box without a screen, they assume you're in the embedded/industrial market, with prices to match (Assuming they are even willing to sell them to you individually).
Is there somewhere that would be selling this form-factor for less than £100?
Indeed, that was the main reason I bought a Thinkpad X41 convertible tablet. Originally I was worried that the touchscreen would just be a gimmick, but in the end I grew to love the ability to flip the screen over and annotate PDF's while in lectures, then flip again to normal laptop mode for coding. Web browsing is awesome when in tablet mode, as is watching movies on your lap (note that it can't play hi-def h264, you'd need the X61 with core 2 duo for that). To say nothing of Drawing, it uses a wacom tablet, so GIMP, Krita etc... work perfectly with it, complete with pressure sensitivity. I'm fully sold on the idea, and I don't think I'll ever look back. This laptop has replaced all my other machines, bar my massive 3 screen desktop beast, but even that I use less now.
The X41 also has excellent Linux support, and the open source Xournal software truly is the best (free software) I've found for annotation on a tablet (PDF or otherwise). In fact I found it far superior to the Windows XP tablet edition software that my laptop came with by default.
I don't think I'd ever have a plain tablet though, this was a perfect blend for me, keyboard or tablet, depending on when needed, but that is more due to personal preference.
I'm curious, what is the modern replacement for a phone book? I remember when phonebooks held numbers of every registered line in the country, complete with the persons full name (this was before ex-directory/private numbers became widespread). When I was younger It used to be a staple part of any teen party to get drunk and prank call people with funny names from the phonebook.
I can't think of any online resource that provides the same service (looking up phone numbers) in the UK, is there one?
I remember using Stardock Systems Object Desktop back in the late 90's while I still had the odd windows machine. You had some amazing interfaces for win2k, one I had blew my mind, but it consumed over a 700MB of RAM with nothing else running but the OS. On a 512MB PIII machine it creaked and it was useless, but damn the way it looked and was animated was something, Closest I've seen to it on Linux is Enlightenment, but that still has a long way to go, not so much due to lack of technical features as much as getting designers to make amazing themes for it.
As far as I know, most car bodies are still metal, because there is nothing else as good for protecting occupants in a crash. Yes, most body panels of cars nowadays are fibreglass, etc... but I assure you, the firewall, base body and engine compartment is most likely still metal.
If the EMP Gun is a worry for you, you could always layer an extra grounded wire mesh around your engine to reduce it's effect, or as an old school solution, have a mechanical ignition setup for redundancy. It wouldn't give you the same performance etc... from the engine, but it's better than not having a functioning engine at that point in time.
It's the first. Whatever you specify in the robots.txt as no-follow etc... means not to spider the pages, so no scanning of them at all.
You use it for when you only want part of your site to appear in search results, such as just the front page (for example). The rest of the site should not be touched by the bot at all.
Saying that, all Russian jets were designed to take off and land on mud/grass fields. The logic being that the airplanes can operate even if the runways are bombed.
That is why Russian jets have oversized landing gear and (in the case of Mig-29 and SU-27) the ability to shut the main jet intakes during take off and landing (they suck air from above the wings, away from any debris/grass/mud that might go in).
Apparently some Russian jets can also burn standard diesel (like you get at the pumps for cars) rather than Jet fuel. It's not as good, but if you have nothing else on offer, it'll do (the SU-25 was designed to run on diesel quite well, if I remember correctly).
I wish I could transplant laptop parts, but unfortunately there is no standard, and I strongly suspect that the layout would be too different for a simple transplant. Cutting away the T42's innards to make space will probably just weaken the structure to the point when it's weaker than the machine I'm transplanting from. Plus from what I see, the T410 has a widescreen, which would not fit on the 4:3 T42's chassis.
Unless that was a joke, in which case there may have been a whooshing sound somewhere above me... I've disassembled, rebuilt and hacked/modified so many Thinkpads that your idea doesn't sound that crazy to me.
In fact when I think about it, Thinkpads are by far the most flexible and easy to hack/mod machines I've ever used. Not to mention IBM offering service manuals to download, truly a pleasure to work on them. It's a shame to see the end.
The X61 looks good, and it could well be an upgrade path after the X41, but what after that?
Is there really no other Thinkpad-like quality laptop out there? I guess most people don't care about quality, which is why IBM was losing money on the Thinkpads until Lenovo took over.
I get the same impression, I bought a new T60 to replace my old T42, and it was a far worse machine (I had the machines side by side at this point).
Ok it had a core 2 duo processor and 4GB RAM, but the case felt so cheap and flimsy, I felt that it wouldn't survive more than a year or 2 (my T42 was 7 years old at this point, and I had older Thinkpads that still were in excellent condition). They relocated the status L.E.Ds to the front (where I'll never see them), put some cheap wifi switch at the front as well, and generally made the laptop like like those ugly generic HP ones I can get at my local store. They also changed the adapter socket, so all the Thinkpad adapters I had spare were useless with it.
After a day I put the T60 back in the box and returned it, I bought a X41 tablet instead (last of the ones made under IBM) and am using that now. My only question is what should I do after this? I don't think I'll be buying any more Thinkpads (unless Lenovo make some radical corrections to their direction with the Thinkpad line).
What is there that you can buy that has the Thinkpad quality to it, supports Linux as well as the Thinkpads did? Some said Apple machines, but I like the nipple mouse, and my laptops need to take quite a bit of punishment without breaking. The Apple machines might be well built, but any damage will show up quite easily on that nice brushed aluminium casing. Not to mention I've really started liking the convertible tablet formfactor, which Apple don't do.
I just use the Linux native "import" printscreen command.
It will let me select any rectangle I want to save in a screen capture (hold mouse button down and drag to make rectangle). If I click on a window from a program that is currently active, it will automatically do a screen shot of just that window. If I click anywhere else it saves a screenshot of my entire screen.
It has been an invaluable program that has made making Linux documentation and how-to's so much easier for me. It would be such a pain to have to constantly shuttle between a graphics editor for cropping, OpenOffice for the documentation and the desktop with the application I'm documenting.
This has been a Linux feature for years, and yes, Ubuntu decided to replace it with the brain-dead windows "Just copy the entire screen" command, I guess to make it familiar to people coming from Windows. Gnome/Ubuntu's screen-shot command is a step backwards from what Linux has.
Might be an idea to try it out, rather than trying to get a windows program to work in Linux (which is what OneNote sounds like it is based on what you described).
The problem is not the people, it is how they are educated. For example, they are taught from school onwards that a "PC" has windows on it, with MS office, and that a "Mac" exists that is not a PC, and looks totally different, but does a similar task.
This is why most people I know will sit in front of a Mac and accept that it is not going to work like windows, and are even more tolerant of kinks, quirks and differences.
To do a car analogy, it's like someone being taught that a Honda is a "car", and there is this other thing called a "motorbike" that looks different and is used by fewer people. This Honda has a unique interface like no other car (but may be similar to them). If people drive Honda's all their lives, then they get into another car, they will freak out and get confused, because in their mind All cars should work like the Honda. If they were to get on a motorbike, they would realise "yes, I was told, different to cars" and will actually expect the unexpected, they will be aware that it's different and they will engage and try to learn how to operate it.
I've see this with people. My former gf's mum was like this. My former gf tried to switch her to Ubuntu, but her mum freaked out at the different buttons, the different "look" and the different order of her icons. After a couple of days she flat our refused to use Ubuntu. This same person would then go on to get a Mac, and spend 4 months trying to learn how to use it. The Mac's interface was more alien to her than Ubuntu's, but in her mind Macs were supposed to work differently to PC's, so this was ok and she just needed to learn. To her Ubuntu was still a "PC" and therefore must look and act exactly like Windows unless something is badly wrong.
My brother was in the same boat, at school they were teaching him this PC=="MS Win & Office" thing, and he would always have trouble when he borrowed my machine. So I went and taught him how to use an OS, Word processing and other office software, in general. NOT Windows, Word and he rest of MS Office. Now he is comfortable using pretty much any OS, in fact he prefers Ubuntu now, only booting windows in a VM for his "e-textbooks", that only work on IE with windows, and he isn't interested in computers (being a humanities student).
I've developed Windows programs on Linux using Python and WxWidgets. WXwidgets will use the underlying OS'es toolkit to actually render the GUI, so it uses Cocoa (Carbon in development) on OSX, GTK on windows and the native Windows toolkit (who'se name I don't know).
Has worked perfectly fine for me, both for developing solely for Windows from Linux, and for developing cross platform code that looks native on the three main OSes. Coupled with py2exe and py2dmg, binary distribution and installation is a breeze!
I have to say, I am having the same experience (with the exception that I never liked skinny/flat girls). As I get older, girls who I would have had no problem sleeping with when I was younger (e.g. 16 years old), would now just seem somewhat creepy. The formula given in xkcd is quite accurate in my experience.
I love my Microsoft keyboard. I love my Microsoft mouse.
I loved their Z-80 Softcard on my Apple II.
It's too bad they insist on making second-rate software. Their hardware is excelent.
I don't know about the Z-80 softcard, but I know that Microsoft keyboards and mice were(are?) made by Logitech. I don't think Microsoft actually made any hardware, they just sold re-branded things (or possibly sold things built to their requirements by a third company).
IMO (having spent about half my life the "West" and the other half in "Eastern Europe") the primary difference seems to be one of respect for knowledge.
In the West while I was at school it was "cool" to be stupid. Kids who smoked, did drugs, didn't do any work, rejected knowledge/lessons, skipped school etc... were by far the most popular, with many followers. The hard working kids that did well on the other hand, were mocked as "teachers pets", "dorks" etc... and were generally social outcasts.
On the other hand when I was in Eastern Europe, if you were knowledgeable in a subject (especially something seen as hard, like Maths/physics etc...) you ended up being popular, while those that smoked/did drugs/skipped school etc... as above were seen as troublemakers to be avoided. People there seemed to appreciate your knowledge. I guess it's because it's seen as a reliably useful skill (i.e. employable), as opposed to just looking pretty, which only works for the top 1% that manage to become celebrities, the rest usually ending up as whores/gold diggers or thugs/bouncers.
That's not to say athletics was discouraged, on the contrary you were expected to take part in at least one physical activity, but it wasn't a case of athletics being the be-all-end-all of life
The only people with enough documentation to know are the US Government, who seized all of his work materials when he died.
Not fully true. About half of his papers were taken by the U.S government,and the rest were taken by his family to Belgrade (along with his Urn) in accordance with his last wishes.
Eventually the Government gave back most of his papers, but kept some of the more interesting stuff (like a good chunk of the plans for his death ray). These are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
I went there as a kid, and it was Tesla's work that got me interested in Electronics. I got to see his original papers (no touching tough), as well as replicas (and some original) experiments/demonstrations of his. There was also a huge Tesla Coil that they would fire up for demonstrating wireless power transmission. Nothing fascinated me more back then than the ability to hold an unconnected fluorescent tube and have it light up in my hands, it was awesome!
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The American Breed of Christian is something totally nuts. I'm a Christian, and I can tell you some of those religious Americans I've met scare me. Truly something else, really *really* narrow-minded, extreme fundamentalist and take the bible literally (WTF?).
I never understood the vitrol some people on /. show towards religion, until I met some of their Christians. It explained a lot, very irritating people, kept shoving god into every discussion or action.
Note: I'm sure there are very many normal Christians there too, just that a minority really really give the rest a bad name (I hope to god they are a minority).
And what's with tele-evangelism? It's like they turned religion into some sort of pay-for entertainment. I didn't get it at all.
In which case the average life is worth between 800-1600 Euros? I disagree. I'd argue your life can't be measured in worth. The best you can do is see what has been invested in it, both in time, and money (education, feeding etc...), and what is the value of that which you can contribute back to the world.
I had a job doing python development for a media company. Mostly for internal/backend systems. Did it for years, but the recession resulted in my unemployment. I have since found 5 other jobs who want python dev's, so there seems to be demand, and demand seems to be increasing as time goes on.
Which will result in them blaming their losses on Piracy, probably demand a bailout, and followed by taxes/leves on the general populace and/or more crazy laws to "stop piracy". It's a self perpetuating cycle.
Really? I was thinking about the same thing (LEO satellites), but I thought that shooting them into orbit is easier than making something that is:
a) light enough to be lofted into orbit cheaply
b) Powerful enough to sustain lots of connections, presumably with high bandwidth
c) Has a power source that can sustain the satellite for years (those extra efficient solar panels used on satellites are generally very expensive, if they even sell them to civilians, and god help you if you try to get nuclear material for a RTG).
4) Can survive in a hostile environment for long periods (From what I've heard, even LEO has enough radiation to mess up non-hardened computer electronics).
If you don't mind a low bandwidth worldwide satellite link, then become a HAM operator, and then you can communicate via the OSCAR HAM satellites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR and AX.25 standard for packet data transmission.
Seems the Hams have been busy lofting their own satellites into orbit for decades now, and it is truly an international effort.
I don't think they do during the boost phase.
Which will not do anything much except ruin the economies of said countries (and make China jump for joy, as we have to rebuy all the electronic stuff to get on our feet again).
Nearly all military tech is EMP resistant, so all you'll do is piss off countries who now have no other functioning system except the military (which is still more advanced than Iran's). Their economies most likely severely contracting due to the loss of data/technology will result in massive unemployment, who will be ample ground for military recruitment.
To put it simply, Iran would be in for a world of pain if they did something like that. Crazy as the authorities may be, I think they love their power more than the urge to bring Armageddon upon them. I think they can be considered a rational actor. Their suppression of dissent shows that their primary concern is staying in power (with all the perks that entails) rather than being suicidal.
Thanks for the tips. That Atom motherboard sounds good, but what is it's power draw like? I heard that it's chipset draws loads of power. Would it really provide a benefit to a PIII motherboard? How does it compare?
I picked £100 because that is 3 times the cost of the current motherboard (were I to buy a PIII board+CPU new from storage stock) at my local.
Likewise I don't think your "reverse question" is valid. I expect a netbook to be more expensive than a bare motherboard+CPU, there are batteries,PSU, screen, disk/ssd, ram, charging circuit etc...., all built in, and all of which cost extra. I don't expect to find a netbook that cheap, but it felt reasonable for just the bare motherboard+CPU.
Thanks for your help though! Those Atom boards sounds interesting.
One form factor I'm hoping for is just a plain Motherboard, perhaps something Mini-ITX sized. Most of my personal servers are using old CPU's (Best is a PIII 500MHz), and I would not mind replacing them with some low power ARM systems.
Problem is almost all the cheap computers are in netbook format. If I just want the motherboard, or a box without a screen, they assume you're in the embedded/industrial market, with prices to match (Assuming they are even willing to sell them to you individually).
Is there somewhere that would be selling this form-factor for less than £100?
Indeed, that was the main reason I bought a Thinkpad X41 convertible tablet. Originally I was worried that the touchscreen would just be a gimmick, but in the end I grew to love the ability to flip the screen over and annotate PDF's while in lectures, then flip again to normal laptop mode for coding. Web browsing is awesome when in tablet mode, as is watching movies on your lap (note that it can't play hi-def h264, you'd need the X61 with core 2 duo for that). To say nothing of Drawing, it uses a wacom tablet, so GIMP, Krita etc... work perfectly with it, complete with pressure sensitivity. I'm fully sold on the idea, and I don't think I'll ever look back. This laptop has replaced all my other machines, bar my massive 3 screen desktop beast, but even that I use less now.
The X41 also has excellent Linux support, and the open source Xournal software truly is the best (free software) I've found for annotation on a tablet (PDF or otherwise). In fact I found it far superior to the Windows XP tablet edition software that my laptop came with by default.
I don't think I'd ever have a plain tablet though, this was a perfect blend for me, keyboard or tablet, depending on when needed, but that is more due to personal preference.
I'm curious, what is the modern replacement for a phone book? I remember when phonebooks held numbers of every registered line in the country, complete with the persons full name (this was before ex-directory/private numbers became widespread). When I was younger It used to be a staple part of any teen party to get drunk and prank call people with funny names from the phonebook.
I can't think of any online resource that provides the same service (looking up phone numbers) in the UK, is there one?
I remember using Stardock Systems Object Desktop back in the late 90's while I still had the odd windows machine. You had some amazing interfaces for win2k, one I had blew my mind, but it consumed over a 700MB of RAM with nothing else running but the OS. On a 512MB PIII machine it creaked and it was useless, but damn the way it looked and was animated was something, Closest I've seen to it on Linux is Enlightenment, but that still has a long way to go, not so much due to lack of technical features as much as getting designers to make amazing themes for it.
As far as I know, most car bodies are still metal, because there is nothing else as good for protecting occupants in a crash. Yes, most body panels of cars nowadays are fibreglass, etc... but I assure you, the firewall, base body and engine compartment is most likely still metal.
If the EMP Gun is a worry for you, you could always layer an extra grounded wire mesh around your engine to reduce it's effect, or as an old school solution, have a mechanical ignition setup for redundancy. It wouldn't give you the same performance etc... from the engine, but it's better than not having a functioning engine at that point in time.
It's the first. Whatever you specify in the robots.txt as no-follow etc... means not to spider the pages, so no scanning of them at all.
You use it for when you only want part of your site to appear in search results, such as just the front page (for example). The rest of the site should not be touched by the bot at all.
Saying that, all Russian jets were designed to take off and land on mud/grass fields. The logic being that the airplanes can operate even if the runways are bombed.
That is why Russian jets have oversized landing gear and (in the case of Mig-29 and SU-27) the ability to shut the main jet intakes during take off and landing (they suck air from above the wings, away from any debris/grass/mud that might go in).
Apparently some Russian jets can also burn standard diesel (like you get at the pumps for cars) rather than Jet fuel. It's not as good, but if you have nothing else on offer, it'll do (the SU-25 was designed to run on diesel quite well, if I remember correctly).
I wish I could transplant laptop parts, but unfortunately there is no standard, and I strongly suspect that the layout would be too different for a simple transplant. Cutting away the T42's innards to make space will probably just weaken the structure to the point when it's weaker than the machine I'm transplanting from. Plus from what I see, the T410 has a widescreen, which would not fit on the 4:3 T42's chassis.
Unless that was a joke, in which case there may have been a whooshing sound somewhere above me... I've disassembled, rebuilt and hacked/modified so many Thinkpads that your idea doesn't sound that crazy to me.
In fact when I think about it, Thinkpads are by far the most flexible and easy to hack/mod machines I've ever used. Not to mention IBM offering service manuals to download, truly a pleasure to work on them. It's a shame to see the end.
The X61 looks good, and it could well be an upgrade path after the X41, but what after that?
Is there really no other Thinkpad-like quality laptop out there? I guess most people don't care about quality, which is why IBM was losing money on the Thinkpads until Lenovo took over.
I get the same impression, I bought a new T60 to replace my old T42, and it was a far worse machine (I had the machines side by side at this point).
Ok it had a core 2 duo processor and 4GB RAM, but the case felt so cheap and flimsy, I felt that it wouldn't survive more than a year or 2 (my T42 was 7 years old at this point, and I had older Thinkpads that still were in excellent condition). They relocated the status L.E.Ds to the front (where I'll never see them), put some cheap wifi switch at the front as well, and generally made the laptop like like those ugly generic HP ones I can get at my local store. They also changed the adapter socket, so all the Thinkpad adapters I had spare were useless with it.
After a day I put the T60 back in the box and returned it, I bought a X41 tablet instead (last of the ones made under IBM) and am using that now. My only question is what should I do after this? I don't think I'll be buying any more Thinkpads (unless Lenovo make some radical corrections to their direction with the Thinkpad line).
What is there that you can buy that has the Thinkpad quality to it, supports Linux as well as the Thinkpads did? Some said Apple machines, but I like the nipple mouse, and my laptops need to take quite a bit of punishment without breaking. The Apple machines might be well built, but any damage will show up quite easily on that nice brushed aluminium casing. Not to mention I've really started liking the convertible tablet formfactor, which Apple don't do.
I just use the Linux native "import" printscreen command.
It will let me select any rectangle I want to save in a screen capture (hold mouse button down and drag to make rectangle). If I click on a window from a program that is currently active, it will automatically do a screen shot of just that window. If I click anywhere else it saves a screenshot of my entire screen.
It has been an invaluable program that has made making Linux documentation and how-to's so much easier for me. It would be such a pain to have to constantly shuttle between a graphics editor for cropping, OpenOffice for the documentation and the desktop with the application I'm documenting.
This has been a Linux feature for years, and yes, Ubuntu decided to replace it with the brain-dead windows "Just copy the entire screen" command, I guess to make it familiar to people coming from Windows. Gnome/Ubuntu's screen-shot command is a step backwards from what Linux has.
Might be an idea to try it out, rather than trying to get a windows program to work in Linux (which is what OneNote sounds like it is based on what you described).
The problem is not the people, it is how they are educated. For example, they are taught from school onwards that a "PC" has windows on it, with MS office, and that a "Mac" exists that is not a PC, and looks totally different, but does a similar task.
This is why most people I know will sit in front of a Mac and accept that it is not going to work like windows, and are even more tolerant of kinks, quirks and differences.
To do a car analogy, it's like someone being taught that a Honda is a "car", and there is this other thing called a "motorbike" that looks different and is used by fewer people. This Honda has a unique interface like no other car (but may be similar to them). If people drive Honda's all their lives, then they get into another car, they will freak out and get confused, because in their mind All cars should work like the Honda. If they were to get on a motorbike, they would realise "yes, I was told, different to cars" and will actually expect the unexpected, they will be aware that it's different and they will engage and try to learn how to operate it.
I've see this with people. My former gf's mum was like this. My former gf tried to switch her to Ubuntu, but her mum freaked out at the different buttons, the different "look" and the different order of her icons. After a couple of days she flat our refused to use Ubuntu. This same person would then go on to get a Mac, and spend 4 months trying to learn how to use it. The Mac's interface was more alien to her than Ubuntu's, but in her mind Macs were supposed to work differently to PC's, so this was ok and she just needed to learn. To her Ubuntu was still a "PC" and therefore must look and act exactly like Windows unless something is badly wrong.
My brother was in the same boat, at school they were teaching him this PC=="MS Win & Office" thing, and he would always have trouble when he borrowed my machine. So I went and taught him how to use an OS, Word processing and other office software, in general. NOT Windows, Word and he rest of MS Office. Now he is comfortable using pretty much any OS, in fact he prefers Ubuntu now, only booting windows in a VM for his "e-textbooks", that only work on IE with windows, and he isn't interested in computers (being a humanities student).
I've developed Windows programs on Linux using Python and WxWidgets. WXwidgets will use the underlying OS'es toolkit to actually render the GUI, so it uses Cocoa (Carbon in development) on OSX, GTK on windows and the native Windows toolkit (who'se name I don't know).
Has worked perfectly fine for me, both for developing solely for Windows from Linux, and for developing cross platform code that looks native on the three main OSes. Coupled with py2exe and py2dmg, binary distribution and installation is a breeze!
http://xkcd.com/314/
I have to say, I am having the same experience (with the exception that I never liked skinny/flat girls). As I get older, girls who I would have had no problem sleeping with when I was younger (e.g. 16 years old), would now just seem somewhat creepy. The formula given in xkcd is quite accurate in my experience.
Mod parent up! (If only I had mod points)
I love my Microsoft keyboard. I love my Microsoft mouse.
I loved their Z-80 Softcard on my Apple II.
It's too bad they insist on making second-rate software. Their hardware is excelent.
I don't know about the Z-80 softcard, but I know that Microsoft keyboards and mice were(are?) made by Logitech. I don't think Microsoft actually made any hardware, they just sold re-branded things (or possibly sold things built to their requirements by a third company).
IMO (having spent about half my life the "West" and the other half in "Eastern Europe") the primary difference seems to be one of respect for knowledge.
In the West while I was at school it was "cool" to be stupid. Kids who smoked, did drugs, didn't do any work, rejected knowledge/lessons, skipped school etc... were by far the most popular, with many followers. The hard working kids that did well on the other hand, were mocked as "teachers pets", "dorks" etc... and were generally social outcasts.
On the other hand when I was in Eastern Europe, if you were knowledgeable in a subject (especially something seen as hard, like Maths/physics etc...) you ended up being popular, while those that smoked/did drugs/skipped school etc... as above were seen as troublemakers to be avoided. People there seemed to appreciate your knowledge. I guess it's because it's seen as a reliably useful skill (i.e. employable), as opposed to just looking pretty, which only works for the top 1% that manage to become celebrities, the rest usually ending up as whores/gold diggers or thugs/bouncers.
That's not to say athletics was discouraged, on the contrary you were expected to take part in at least one physical activity, but it wasn't a case of athletics being the be-all-end-all of life
The only people with enough documentation to know are the US Government, who seized all of his work materials when he died.
Not fully true. About half of his papers were taken by the U.S government,and the rest were taken by his family to Belgrade (along with his Urn) in accordance with his last wishes.
Eventually the Government gave back most of his papers, but kept some of the more interesting stuff (like a good chunk of the plans for his death ray). These are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
I went there as a kid, and it was Tesla's work that got me interested in Electronics. I got to see his original papers (no touching tough), as well as replicas (and some original) experiments/demonstrations of his. There was also a huge Tesla Coil that they would fire up for demonstrating wireless power transmission. Nothing fascinated me more back then than the ability to hold an unconnected fluorescent tube and have it light up in my hands, it was awesome!
Yeah, it left quite an impression on me ^^