If he means to finish booting and stop being slow, then he's justified in blaming Windows 7.

I did a comparison between it and the current distro of Kubuntu at the time it came out. I was initially amazed that it matched Kubuntu's time to desktop, at about 1:30 (+/- 15 seconds), then noticed it was slow, and kept hammering the hard drive until about 5:00. Kubuntu was done hitting the hard drive and being slow at the 1:30.

That was a new boot, without anything on it. Due to the fragmentation on the file system, it takes a lot longer to boot now (I have not recently measured it multiple times, but >2:30). Kubuntu takes a bit longer, but less time (+30 seconds perhaps)

Mind you that was a Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz, with I think 4GB of RAM and a fast hard drive (not an SSD) a few years ago.

AA is a hack because of insufficient resolution.

Tell me, which is better: playing on an old SVGA 800x600 with 4x AA, or playing on 1600x1200 with no AA?

Or higher AA, but I'm willing to bet, with a quarter the AA setting, that 1600x1200, will look better than that 800x600. I'd bet 3200x2400 would look even better.

More resolution is better than more AA. More AA is better than nothing, but it's still a hack.

I will also suggest openscad. I'm not great at it (I tend to use blender for quick one offs.)

However, it's amazing what you can do with it, when leveraging the community. I made a replacement gear for my lathe last week, and it worked great.

See?

It's good for everyone!

They make them. Seriously TI fabs the Z80s for the calculators.

Because aside from Konqueror, I don't know of a browser which makes this easy to do.

Unless I've missed something, I haven't seen another browser which prompts you about the cookie, can have accept/reject and one of this cookie or the entire domain (as well as all cookies) in a nice window.

Mind you, it's a pain for a short time before you get those lists setup, but after that, it's great in the cases you do go to a new site and want to allow it. Every other browser I've seen requires editing a configuration dialog/file to change that. Which even though I can do, frankly, it's too obnoxious to do. I stick with noscript and abp. When I want to really be secure, I use a different browser with a completely different and more secure setup.

Windows Live Messenger.

Also, no way to disable it aside from blocking the ad at the bottom. I had to install that specifically for a particular job.

Frankly, having taught some basic computer classes, while not absolute, I would suggest that in general, that some of the things that come with being elderly, and young, do play HIGHLY into the general computer competency.

When I taught classes with both old and young people, anyone under about 25, even if they claimed ignorance, had been exposed and generally only required a very small push to direct them to what they wanted to do. They understood the basics of operating especially a GUI. They've grown up with it in our culture. They have been exposed to concepts.

Contrast this with people who while smart, were older, especially if over 40. They simply often times lacked the familiarity, so something as basic as say, selecting a particular object on a menu took a lot of work to figure out what was going on. Repeat this for the many common GUI interfaces... and that familiarity meant that in general, being elderly does have a strong correlation with what's perceived as illiteracy.

I've also been the one doing tech support for PhDs. Really smart people... who haven't been exposed to things. One of the people I helped with things did projects on Quantum computing. One of the few people I know who impresses me with raw intelligence. Generally, though the experience was with things like Fortran (which works much faster than people think).

So it's nothing inherent about being elderly/young, except for the times they were exposed to, which clearly does have an effect on computer literacy. There are of course exceptions.

There are also things like my opinion, that in general, a younger person generally doesn't understand the way computers work as well as an older person with equivalent education for their time. This is due to the rise of things like Object Oriented Programming, Java, etc. Consequence of the times they are in.

Yes. I can. Or could until Asus closed their estore which had just about everything required except processors and ram.

Assembling laptops isn't hard. What is a pain in the ass is rebuilding phones from parts.

Sounds like all the Thinkpads and most of the Apple lappies I've had over the years. The stickers are a bit different...mostly either political, Anime/Manga or F/OSS related. But yeah, not a business look, more "geek in the house" look. My new Lenovo Ideapad is still virgin...for now. But it will look like "Ms. Geek's current lappie" soon enough. X60T was a really nice machine.

It's not an inherent limitation of the device.

It's that the keyboards almost universally are horrible for it, because they are designed for things like natural speaking. Their processing of symbols is subpar.

The same is true of most small bluetooth keyboards, or built in keyboards. Frankly, my Zaurus SL-5500 from 2003 has a better keyboard on a mobile than almost anything that's come since. (And in fact, the only things I can think of that rival it that I have encountered, are also Zaurus devices.)

I have found one that I don't think sucks so far, it's "hacker's keyboard" on android. (Most important things it has that seemingly every other keyboard lacks are tab and arrow keys... easily accessible. It has some limitations though, and you'll almost certainly want to enable portrait 5-line keyboard) Though I usually use it more with my table as opposed to with my phone, though it does work there just fine, I use the phone more for email/texting/etc, so having a keyboard (swype) which is better for those things as default means the other isn't used as much.

And now Meg Whitman is finishing the job.

They also collect uber-fail CEOs.

Must not forget, then, "Stand On Zanzibar" which posits what life would be like on a crowded, '60s-inflected world in 2010. Brunner did get one thing right: a worldwide, 24/7 news network called Engrelay Satelserv, English-language Relay Satellite Service. Say it with me in your best imitation of James Earl Jones: THIS IS CNN. From the perspective of two years after 2010 it reads more like a dip into an alternate Earth which zagged where ours zigged sometime in the '70s. Brunner was a genius.

James Hong is also still around. And I met both Hong and Joseph Turkel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007. Hong was getting a lot of love not just for Dr. Chew, but also for that immortal dude he played in "Big Trouble In Little China." But Turkel was barely visited, so we got to talk. Politics, Blade Runner, Old Hollywood, and other cool subjects. He signed an 8 x 10. I paid for it, because he was donating his share of the money to Doctors Without Borders, a truly deserving cause. He asked me "OK, what Tyrell quote do you want on it?" Since it was a picture of Tyrell with Batty before Batty sent Tyrell to his deserved demise, and since it was one of the best lines in the movie, I had him write "Revel in your time!" He appreciated the choice too. "Yeah, you never quite have enough time to do everything you want to do. We really are all replicants...not willing to accept just the years we have." It was poignant, because even though he seemed really vital and mentally active, Turkel was getting on in years.

I really am not happy with this. Although having Ridley Scott on board gives me wan hope this isn't going to totally suck, the prospect of a huge tentpole movie with a CGI retrofitted Los Angeles and everything in 3 FRIGGIN D just hurts when I think of it. I would prefer to see them completely strip it down, make it an almost indie movie which puts the action in the Los Angeles that exists RIGHT NOW, because there have been enough things added to the Downtown LA skyline that look like Blade Runner since the movie came out, and more is coming. If you don't believe me, google LA Live and The Library Tower. The Wilshire Grand Hotel is going to be torn down and replaced with a skyscraper that will have video walls.

Blade Runner was too special to remake. I hope this doesn't happen, like Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel in a live-action Cowboy Bebop won't happen, or Leonardo diCaprio in a white-washed version of Akira. But if it does, Ridley Scott will probably not allow the quality level to go too far down.