In general, I think this is pretty true of web apps and business applications, but when its things that will generally push a system to its limits performance wise (in particular, games, 3D rendering, Compositing, etc), people do tend to notice. For example pretty much anyone who regularly plays Team Fortress 2 can quite easily tell that its an incredibly badly optimised game (written an already badly optimised engine), simply due to the fact that if they load up Call of Duty 4/5/6/7 with the same graphics settings, they will get literally twice the frame rate, or even Left 4 Dead which is the same engine.

Also my point with compositing, the built in lens blur effects in Adobe After Effects take exponentially longer to render than a number of better third party plugins.

This isn't directly at the parent post, but more in general at the people who are disagreeing with my post.
I'm not saying that a 4 year old couldn't use Blender, my point is, how is that in any way helpful to their development? Children at that age need physical things that they can play with and understand like silly putty, paint, crayons, lego, etc. If you do want to get a little more technical then sure, some Mechano wouldn't be a bad idea, but how on earth do you expect them how to understand fairly complex abstract concepts in a virtual world that most grown adults struggle with when they haven't even had a chance to see how the real world thing they are re-creating works?

Well ye if they were 10 years old or so, sure. But at the moment, the kid will only just barely understand how to use a mouse and keyboard and navigate the machine at all. So why not just get him real silly putty instead?

Blender? for a 4 year old? are you actually serious?

The thread below this pretty much sums up my feelings here.

AFAIK, a quick browse on wikipedia shows that they discover the control room on E07.

I'm currently attending college in the UK, and planning to go to University next year to do CompSci. The course I am currently sitting involves such difficult assessments as: Installing Windows XP, Installing Windows 2000, writing a basic C++ application that barely breaks 300 lines of code, and formatting an Excel Spreadsheet.

This qualification (along with Higher Maths) is enough to get into a fairly large number of British universities, a significant percentage of which are not degree mills.

Where did we go so wrong?

oooops

I think you missed the "Post Anonymously" box there mate

In a word, no.

Yup, my laptop running 10.04 with an Nvidia GeForce 8400M has no issues what so ever with fullscreen flash.

I read your comment thinking "what a dick", but then I reached the last paragraph, and I just feel sorry for you. By the sounds of it, you're so wrapped up in "being successful", that the fact you think you won't be just makes you miserable. The problem you have is that you directly equate "being successful" to "screwing people over". Its possible to do one without the other. I'm not of course saying you can become a multi-billionaire, but why would you want/need more money than you can possibly ever spend? Its possible to run your own buisness, selling to a small niche of the market without screwing people over. Quite simply put, someone else already is, so its easy to undercut them in price while beating them in quality of service. You won't steal their whole customer base, but you can certainly make a size-able dent and a fair bit of money in the process.

Cheer up. ;)

I just happened to listen to that on my pretty much awful Dell Laptop speakers, and I could still hear the difference. That is truly depressing.

Human beings have no business driving. I know this statement bothers a lot of people, but the statistics bear it out.

What statistics? Its not like we have a huge pool of data on the number of crashes for autonomous cars driving on normal roads to benchmark it against. Personally, I feel that humans will for a long time still be better driving a car than a machine. Computers are good at dealing with expected information very quickly (trains, monorails, undergrounds, etc) with a small number of variables. But driving a car just has so many potential things that can change, that I genuinely feel it would be nearly impossible to create a computer system that can take into account everything that can change on the roads to thee same level as even a bad driver, at least in the foreseeable future.

Clearly you have not used Opera recently. I've personally been using it as my main browser for about 2 years, and the sheer degree of polish in the windows version is just totally unsurpassed by any browser, aside from it being bloody quick. Use it for a week, you won't go back.

(note: That is the windows version I am talking about. The linux version's UI is a bit off and it is a little slow to load)

Same here. My 3 year old Dell Laptop has a broadcom wifi chipset and this has been the single biggest source of hassle i've had with linux on it.

I've built systems that can handle hundreds of thousands of users, yes thanks.

No. He asked if you've built systems that are actually used by millions of users. The first user system I ever wrote could theoretically handle hundreds of thousands of users, but it was only ever used by 7.