Cap'n Refsmmat

Moved from say, "General Science," to "Relativity." It's still on the site, just in a different section.

Yes, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm moving tomorrow and I'll have only a teensy bit of spare time over the next month. Is this the same idea as OpenScience was?

The page file is hard disk space used to hold stuff from RAM that isn't needed at the moment.

It would be relatively simple to have a touchscreen monitor that acts like a mouse when you tap its screen (sends a message to the CPU saying "click at coordinate x,y").

As for your very last paragraph: No. XML is a format where anybody can create their own markup language (MathML, XHTML, etc.). That means that Microsoft will create their own markup for documents, KOffice its own, and OpenOffice its own (although they did create a standard that KOffice is adapting).

There's a limit so that after a certain number of hours, you can't edit it. It's to prevent people from going back and blanking all of their posts.

So is mine. Comcast has a heck of a lot of DNS problems in their history. It'll clear up eventually.

It's a tad slow on loading for me, but no connection failures. What's your ISP?

Also, Microsoft is finally switching to an XML file format. While it may also be distributing a viewer for older versions of office, it's most likely going to cause quite a few problems until people get it sorted.

It is my experience that if you use, for example, PowerPoint's new features, and then open it up in an older version of PowerPoint, it attempts to substitute something else for the new feature, and typically screws it up.

Suggested reading for herme3: http://www.deathtocreationism.com/content/node/9 Before you can tell us macroevolution is impossible, you'd need to refute that article.

YOU are beyond my comprehension. Anyways, can you substantiate any single claim in that last post, or are you simply making statements with no evidence to hold them together at all?

You missed the point entirely. Microsoft changes the file formats for Word and all their other formats just enough so that when one company upgrades, it forces everyone else to upgrade or they will not be able to open documents and presentations. You also ignored this: Microsoft products aren't even backwards compatible; if one company gets the product it can't save in a format that allows the others to read it properly. A FREE office product manages to save in both formats. Notice the difference.

No, because the graphics card sends the information essentially as "pixel x,y color=384" format, and the monitor doesn't need to do any processing at all. The monitor just routes the input to the electron gun (or whatever type of display it has) and displays it.

Perhaps I should revise that statement. "You can't expect to understand how to use an OSes features properly the first time you boot up, especially if you have never used an OS from that family before."

Take a look at the new Vista, and see how much work they put into the GUI to make it use up so much computing power. Actually it's the other way around. Software is made to be compatible with Windows. Back when there was only Apple and Microsoft, Apple said "only we are allowed to make programs for Macintosh" so then the entire software industry built for Windows. Then you get the situation where Windows dominates. The problem is that different kernels/OSes have different libraries and entirely different systems for memory management and graphics. You can't just change a few lines to make something compatible with several OSes, unless you use your own library that is installed on all of the OSes. Not exactly. It has features that allow software to be more complex, more easily. Libraries will contain all of the stuff for features, so programmers don't have to do it themselves.

Graphics cards are highly optimized to do things like shading, transparency, and so on. The processor tells the graphics card "I wand x region shaded with y color with a bit of transparency at coordinate x,y" and then moves on, while the graphics card handles the hard graphics work.

He didn't say he didn't like it, he just doesn't know how to work with it. You can't expect an OS to work perfectly the first time you boot up.

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4584 This topic has been discussed extensively.

"Vista" sounds like one of those stupid inspirational words you see on posters. All Inspirons are either Pentium M or Celeron M. Mine is a Pentium. The reason they're complaining is because most people design their programs specifically for Winblows. Of course, for every Windows software there's typically a (free) Linux equivalent, so that's pretty nice. For example, I had to pay $100+ for Microsoft Office, but OpenOffice has the same features for FREE. You can get the GIMP for free, instead of Photoshop. Etc. etc.

http://maven.smith.edu/~vvouille/353b/linux.html for how to use the terminal. To open a terminal you have to use one of the buttons at the bottom of the screen and click the Terminal button. Easy enough. (USE GOOGLE!)

No. Blog. (although that may have been sarcasm on your part. I can't tell)

So is my Inspiron 600m. Especially when it has poor ventilation, for example if the vent is covered up by my knee.

But still, you really shouldn't keep it on your lap for long.

Yes indeed. However, if you haven't noticed, computers put out a LOT of heat (just try feeling the bottom of a laptop after a few hours) and that is wasted energy. Besides, $100-300 isn't anything to be sneezed at.