Watermatresses where a fad. There's a few unfortunate realities that make them unpleasant.
First and foremost among these, people sweat. Even under normal conditions, people sweat while sleeping. In summer when its warm, when the people engage in uhm... 'exersize' and so they sometimes sweat quite a bit.
Fact; a watermatress prevents ventilation, it prevents moisture from escaping your bed trough the matress. Which means you're a lot more uncomfortable.
Fact; mites and stuff that likes to live in beds (eating scraps of dead skin falling off you) but that many people react alergically to *love* it warm and moist. Precisely what a waterbed provides.
It doesn't need to be that bad. You can do various much-smarter things.
For example, you can interpolate. If you are sending a stream of position-data for a player, for example, a single lost packet in the middle can be interpolated around. This will in most cases work better than waiting for a retransmit.
A player that moves (0,10) - (5,15) - (x,y) - (15,25) can be assumed to have been on (10,20) at the time of the missing packet. That is a very fair guess, and will likely work out fine. There are details. (there always is) like making sure all clients agree if the player was hit at that time or not. (perhaps in reality he was at (8,22) and narrowly escaped a bullet according to his local copy of the game)
You can also add redundancy much more intelligently than simply sending everything double. To take a trivial example, you can send a single checksum-packet after a series of packets that enables the reconstruction of any lost packet. So for example send 5 packets, then a single checksum-packet, and aslong as max 1 packet is lost, you lost nothing.
That's not nessecarily true, it depends on the preciseness of your timing, and the aditionally introduced jitter that you cannot control.
An example.
Assume a user types a character on the average every 100ms.
If you could time to the ms then you could encode 2 secret bits on each packet by delaying the packet by 0,1,2 or 3 ms
Decoding the stream would be a simple matter of taking the sequence of delays and run mod4 on them.
If noise made this impractical (i.e. single-ms timing is impossible) then you could do the same thing by adding 0, 10, 20 or 30 ms delay to every packet, using delay mod 10 for decoding.
The delay you need to add is completely unrelated to the typing-speed of the user. It is related only to the accuracy with which you can cause and measure delay.
If the user pressed a single key once an hour, you could *still* delay that packet by 0, 10, 20 or 30ms and thus transport 2 "hidden" bits. The only assumption being that you can cause and measure delay accurately enough that you can detect which of the 4 happened.
VB macros within files will not be accessible and users will not be able to view or modify them. However, the files themselves can be edited without affecting or changing the macros.
This must be some new and novel definition of "compatible" of which I was previously unaware.
MS-Office --- the office-suite that is not even compatible to the same version of itself.
The relevant question is, what services should the state offer, and how should it pay for them.
Besides, there's a difference between spending and investing. Buying education is definitely investing. (arguably one of the best investments there is) The state doesn't need higher taxes if it invests in education. On the contrary, the education tends to (more than) pay for itself.
Anyone can, asfar as I know, open an institution of higher learning. If they want state-support for the school, they'll need to have their curriculums approved and teachers with formal qualifications, but other than that nothing prevents it, far as I know.
Doesn't tend to happen much. Thing is, it's a government goal to have study-places for everyone that is qualified (there's a standard you need to reach to be "qualified for studies", national standard-tests). Not everyone get the study they wish for, but everyone gets *some* study (if they wish).
So, the way it works out is that the most prestigious/best studies tend to be desired by the best students. Which mean they get the best students. Which tend to mean they can teach at a higher/more advanced level. Because it's easier to teach a group of A students advanced topics than a group of B and C students.
I don't see a problem in the fact that our government (which means me, indirectly trough taxes) pay for the education of some people who then later go on to work (and pay taxes) in other countries.
First, we've got positive net-migration of highly-qualified people. Significantly more Ph.Ds move in than out.
Second, I consider education important in a global perspective. Even if Norway *was* a net exporter of highly qualified people, (which it isn't) I wouldn't mind, I'd consider that a good contribution. Something the world needs in any case. Our export-balance is like gazillions in the plus, who fucking cares if it'd be only 0.9 gazillions. (there's no national debt either, on the contrary)
Third, the alternative would be to have some smart, but poor, students unable to get the best education because of financial constraints. I personally would consider that grossly unfair. People don't choose their parents. Everyone deserves (in my opinion) the chance to do well, if they themselves study well. *even* if their parents *didn't*.
Just because tuition is covered, that doesn't ensure that only the brightest students get into the best schools. I could still see a lot of schools accepting students because of their parental influences. Maybe because their parents gave a large donation to the school. Maybe because they feel it's good publicity to have the child of some famous person attending their school.
That would indeed be the case if that was how it worked. It isn't.
It doesn't work like that. When you want to study, you send an application. Not to the school directly, but to a central application-handling central. You prioritize your wishes. For example, you could say your first choice is CS at the U of Bergen, your second choice CS at the U of Oslo, etc.
Now, the schools are free to say what is relevant to them. They can decide (for example) that Maths and Physics are going to count more than languages if it's an engineering-school. (and vice-versa if it was language-studies) but they don't themselves choose the students. They get the best students according to their criteria.
If you want to get into the best schools, you need the best grades. That's the end of it.
That is precicely what I argue. And it's not splitting hairs.
I'm arguing that Windows is superior to some people, not because the product Windows is better than the competing products, but as a simple consequence of network-effects. It is better because Quicken runs under it. Because half a gazillion games run under it. Because Photoshop runs under it.
The reason that is actually important, and not just hair-splitting is because of the consequences. A consequence is that any attack on Windows market-dominance needs to attack these network-effects. Mindlessly trying to match the feature-set of Windows is not going to help -- because people don't choose windows for those features.
What *will* help is, for example, getting those programs ported to other platforms. Or writing equivalent programs. Ensuring good import-capabilities in alternative programs (they need to be able to read/write the file-formats used by MS-Windows programs).
It also means that MS is, to a significant degree not master of their own destiny. Lot of companies are in a position where they can substantially hurt MS by the simple act of delivering a port of their products to other platforms.
Even if people like you exist, this doesn't prove me wrong. OK, so it moderates my statement a bit. *MOST* of the value of Ms-Windows lie in network-effects.
Out of curiosity, what functionality does MS-Windows have that you consider worth $200 more than what is available from the best free competitor ?
Yes. But those "times" are unlikely to add up to even 0.1% of the times where initrd are employed.
All distros I know off set up a initrd-thing even for bog-standard root on locally attached (ide|sata|scsi) devices.
I don't see the point of it. Yes. It makes perfect sense in some scenarios. It does however *not* make any sense whatsoever in most standard, simple, cases. Why it's nevertheless done beats me.
It's much more clever sending the best students to the best schools, instead of sending those with the richest parents.
For some reason the US never fully catched on to that. (yes, yes, I *am* aware that your grades count for ivy league, but it's not *all* that counts)
It's pretty similar in Norway. If there are more applicants to a school than there are places, then the best qualified (as in those with the best grades and/or in some cases those with the best scores on intake-tests) get in. That's it. It makes no difference whatsoever if your father is Bill Gates or lives on welfare. (other than indirectly, rich well-educated parents is still an advantage because it tends to help you learn more and thus get better grades)
But this highligths the fragility of Windows "value".
Like you say: Windows doesn't (for most people) have value because of itself. But only because of third-party support for it. This means the value of Windows falls proportionally with the increased availability of those third-party apps (or compatible ones good enough for your purposes).
Doesn't help much. Windows is, to most people "free". I know it isn't but to most people, it comes with the Computer, they never see an itemized bill for it.
I don't know anyone who has ever deliberately purchased a copy of (any version) of Windows. Indeed, many have more licenses than they know what to do with due to having bougth laptops or similar that come bundled with Windows which they never used. (for example due to running Linux)
Besides, it would drag Windows even deeper into the "crappy shit" kind of image-problem that it already has more than enough of.
Thing is, there already exists several free (both senses) OSes. The only one you can successfully sell is MS-Windows and even that only works because of inertia and monopoly-effects.
Nobody I know argues that Ms-Windows is so much better as to be "worth" what it costs. Instead, if they use Windows, they argue that they need it because some software they need runs only there. Or because that is what everyone has. Or because it's the only thing they know. In other words, the entire "value" of Ms-Windows lie in network-effects and not in the actual product.
A new OS has none of this value. Infact it will have less of it than Linux. Linux has some software, some recognition, some users. The new OS has neither. Linux can be had for $0.
Selling something that is poorer than Linux for a higher price than Linux is a no-go. (by "poorer" I don't mean primarily technically, I mean from the perspective of network-effects which is the dominant factor, unfortunately.)
If it wants internet access it can ask. If it wants to read other files, it can ask. If it wants to read my e-mail address book or modify another program or the core os or read my IM buddy list, it can ask.
We already know what happens when we bombard users with dialog-boxes. They are perceived as noise. As disturbances. As something standing between the user and what he/she wants to do.
The primary focus becomes to get rid of them so you can do what you want to do. Typically the user will click "Yes", "Ok", "Whatever", "Bugger the hell off and let me use my computer" is more like what they mean.
Thing is, the user have learnt, trough experience, that though the dialog-boxes frequently present a choice, it's really no choice at all. There's one "correct" choices (the one that makes the dialog-box go away) the other choices are "wrong" and will only lead to the dialog-box reappearing.
9 out of 10 times, if 3 seconds after a user clicked something on a dialog-box, you ask what it said, they don't know. They never read it. This tendence goes *UP* with increasing frequency of questions.
I can understand it too. For work-reasons I got a new XP-laptop from Dell some time back. It has antivirus, automatic-updates and a shitload of absolute crap installed on it. Half of which is "evaluation copies" that you don't even have a license for beyond the first 90 days or whatever.
The first month of use there where dialog-boxes demanding answer HERE, NOW literally dozens of times. "blablah antivirus has new updates, want to download ? (yes,no,later)". "blablah antivirus has finished downloading the updates. Want to install ? (yes,no,later)" "There are important updates for your computer, download now ? (yes,no)", "The updates have been downloaded, install ? (yes,no)" "The updates have been installed, the computer needs to reboot for the changes... reboot now (yes,no)" (then if you click no, it asks again 30 minutes later. *NO* fucking option for making it shut up for the rest of the day or whatever.
Yes, many of these you can after a while get rid of by vigorous ticking of "Don't ask again" boxes. It's still ridicolous. Even *more* so when it's software that you don't even own that's doing the nagging. And that's with a business-dell. Don't even get me started on my wifes Vaio. The "Lifestyle" for the person whose lifestyle consists of clicking "yes,no,bugger_off" a whole lot, and occasionally, for short periods between this, being allowed to use the computer you bougth.
In the village where he teaches, a year or two back they got hold of a single mobile phone.
There's no electricity in the village. Nor is there mobile-phone coverage.
Nevertheless, it has paid for itself a thousand times over.
It goes like this.
They grow and sell various farm-products. They sell most of their stuff on a market 4 hours walk away. It's possible to recharge the mobile-phone at the market. There's a spot with mobile-phone coverage half an hours walk from the village.
End effect ? The villagers know the prices at the market, what is in high demand and what has oversupply so the prices are low. This enables them to make more intelligent choices about what to bring to the market at which times.
End effect ? The market is better supplied. They are better paid.
Hint: Not all regions and countries are identical.
There are places like you describe. Those aren't likely to be the first targets of such projects.
Education is however the only solution. Water. Food. Education. That's about the priority. You can not solve peoples problems for them for ever. You can however help them learn how to solve them themselves. A much much much better use of resources.
Why do you think so ? Girls also are not -- as this study demonstrates -- as dumb as some like to believe.
Wanting something pretty is perfectly fine -- but "real" diamonds aren't "prettier" than manufactured ones. Infact it's coming to a point where even the experes -- with a microscope -- are having a harder and harder time telling the difference.
Wanting something fun is also fine. You buy a PS2 or a vacation on Bahamas because its fun. Not because it's all that useful, in the larger scheme of things. The "fun" of owning a piece of carbon is debatable.
Part of what can be nice about presents is, sometimes, preciesly that they're *NOT* useful. That says you took time and money ONLY to be nice to a person you love, and not to be "useful", which is why a new dishwasher ain't terribly romantic even though useful.
My fiancee already turned into my wife, by the way. And neither I nor her spent any money buying useless pieces of carbon in the process. We *did* both spend money (and more importantly, time) to show oneanother that we care. If you've got any amount of creativity in you, then there's much better ways of doing that.
It's true, offcourse, if taken 100% literally. If *all* light is bent around you, you see nothing.
But in reality, the amount of light you need to see perfectly well is a tiny percentage of the light hitting your body. Even if you left the area of the iris perfectly visible, that would only result in two 4mm (or so) black circles. You honestly think this would be all that much inferior to "true" invisibility ?
In daylight you could do a lot better. The sun shines with about 1000W/m^2. I don't know the lower limit, but certainly 1W/m^2 is more than sufficient for reading, so you could make the area of the iris only redirect 99.9% of the incoming light, letting the remaining 0.1% trough to the eye.
If even that is not good enough for you, there's always the option of amplifying the light in the area of your eyes by a factor of 2, and thereafter re-route half of it around you. This lets you see perfectly, and leaves you perfectly invisible.
This is the premise that your entire argument rests upon, that women have the ability to choose what they want to do.
Yes. And it's a sound premise. Women do, infact, generally have the ability to choose what they want to do.
Now, if they also gets to act on those wishes differ. As does it for men. Sometimes there's stuff blocking you from doing what you want to do. You may not be rich enough. Or pretty enough. Or have the rigth nationality. Or have the rigth sex.
When in fact, culture and society restricts us immensely in what we are expected to choose to do.
That noone *expects* you to do a certain thing is a very weak argument. There's a LOOOONG way between not-expecting something and *preventing* it. You may not *expect* that a random person you meet on the street talks 5 languages fluently. This in no way *prevents* him/her from doing precisely that.
Sure. Lots of people (most people) choose to act in accordance with expectations. I agree with you that this is a large part of the reason why women today choose to become teachers whereas in the past they did not. (generally speaking, there's always going to be exceptions)
But that turns it into a chicken and egg problem. Nobody expects something that is completely uncommon. Our expectations are shapes more by past experiences than by any other thing. In other words, it could very well be argued that the reason most people don't expect girls to grow up and become Ph.d in Comp.Sci is that so few girls have done exactly that. That is *not* the same as saying those who have nevertheless made that choice (such as my ex-girlfriend) have been discriminated against. On the contrary, on 9 out of 10 job-offerings in the area it'll *explicitly* be stated that given similar qualifications, females will be prefered.
Almost without fail, men will poorly comply with a female's requests if they are made in a dominate manner, the female must literally coax action from her subordinates rather than having any ability to directly assert what needs to be done.
I'm sorry. This doesn't match my experiences at all. Perhaps I live in a different culture than you do ? (Norway)
I've had plenty of female teachers, professors, bosses. None of which had any more problem than the males simply stating what needs to be done, and have it respected. (as well as if coming from a male in the same position anyway)
In a partnership dictating orders won't work. And arguably *shouldn't* work. Personally I tend to view those partnerships where one part (mostly the female) seem willing to blindly obey "orders" as dysfunctional. But maybe that's just me.
Your assertion that females are free to choose their best-suited field is simply wrong.
If so, you've not demonstrated it. Simply claiming that it's "not expected" won't cut it. By the way, everything you write applies equally to males. Do you think people "expected" me to stay at home for a year care for my son while my wife went working ?
and those girls who do choose to go into computer science are either mocked and thought less of, or if they are even remotely attractive, they are idealized and turned into objects of--most times unwanted--affection.
Unlike the boys in CompSci which are treated as attractive, outgoing, social, friendly, competitive and sexy? Stereotypes are just that, and I fail to see why thei're more relevant for girls than for boys.
So long as our culture expects women to be submissive, we will never be able to assert our true desires.
Which culture is that ? And why do you feel that being "expected" to act in a certain manner is the same as being forced to act in that manner ? Do you need to care what the general population "expects" ?
OK. A 10000 write flash is a bad idea as cache for a harddisk. I somehow don't think those people desining these things haven't thougth about that though.
For most uses 10.000 writes is perfectly fine. I'm willing to bet that 99% of all harddisc sold never reach anything close to that number. Remember that it's 10000 times write to the entire surface, wear-leveling will make sure of that.
For a 500GB hard-disc to be written to 10.000 times you'd need to (combined, over the lifetime of the disc) write 5000 TB to it, I'm convinved the typical hard-disc doesn't see 1% of that. 5000TB is 10MB/s for 500000 seconds, or not even a week. So obviously you could easily wear out such a disc. And some machines would, like those swapping a lot, or those doing database-work with lots of writes.
The typical home-machine though, gets a OS and aplications installed, then it slowly fills up with files which are then rarely replaced, the average file on my harddisc is certainly atleast a year old (i.e. not a single bit in it has changed the last year)
Your calculation is correct -- IF you've got no more than about 4GB worth of data worthy of being properly backed up, then the online-solution is the better one.
Which means that for 95% of the target audience (i.e. people with a high techknowledge and interest) the online-solution is going to suck major.
Even if I backed up *only* my digital photos and own written documents (i.e ignored the movies and oggs since they can be recreated from the CDs (though at a cost of 100 hours of work or something), even then I'd end up with like 100-200GB of data to back up. So, by your calculation the online-solution will be a factor of 50 or so more expensive.
It's an order of magnitude to expensive for large amounts of data, plain and simple.
But that keeps the problem squarely in the negative. Which pretty much guarantees a failure as children go.
We should *control* what the kids are *allowed* to eat so as to *prevent* them from becoming obese (as they would, implied, surely become if allowed any measure of influence on their own lives...)
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First and foremost among these, people sweat. Even under normal conditions, people sweat while sleeping. In summer when its warm, when the people engage in uhm... 'exersize' and so they sometimes sweat quite a bit.
Fact; a watermatress prevents ventilation, it prevents moisture from escaping your bed trough the matress. Which means you're a lot more uncomfortable.
Fact; mites and stuff that likes to live in beds (eating scraps of dead skin falling off you) but that many people react alergically to *love* it warm and moist. Precisely what a waterbed provides.
For example, you can interpolate. If you are sending a stream of position-data for a player, for example, a single lost packet in the middle can be interpolated around. This will in most cases work better than waiting for a retransmit.
A player that moves (0,10) - (5,15) - (x,y) - (15,25) can be assumed to have been on (10,20) at the time of the missing packet. That is a very fair guess, and will likely work out fine. There are details. (there always is) like making sure all clients agree if the player was hit at that time or not. (perhaps in reality he was at (8,22) and narrowly escaped a bullet according to his local copy of the game)
You can also add redundancy much more intelligently than simply sending everything double. To take a trivial example, you can send a single checksum-packet after a series of packets that enables the reconstruction of any lost packet. So for example send 5 packets, then a single checksum-packet, and aslong as max 1 packet is lost, you lost nothing.
An example.
Assume a user types a character on the average every 100ms.
If you could time to the ms then you could encode 2 secret bits on each packet by delaying the packet by 0,1,2 or 3 ms
Decoding the stream would be a simple matter of taking the sequence of delays and run mod4 on them.
If noise made this impractical (i.e. single-ms timing is impossible) then you could do the same thing by adding 0, 10, 20 or 30 ms delay to every packet, using delay mod 10 for decoding.
The delay you need to add is completely unrelated to the typing-speed of the user. It is related only to the accuracy with which you can cause and measure delay.
If the user pressed a single key once an hour, you could *still* delay that packet by 0, 10, 20 or 30ms and thus transport 2 "hidden" bits. The only assumption being that you can cause and measure delay accurately enough that you can detect which of the 4 happened.
This must be some new and novel definition of "compatible" of which I was previously unaware.
MS-Office --- the office-suite that is not even compatible to the same version of itself .
Hilarious.
Seriously, come on, this is a red herring.
The relevant question is, what services should the state offer, and how should it pay for them.
Besides, there's a difference between spending and investing. Buying education is definitely investing. (arguably one of the best investments there is) The state doesn't need higher taxes if it invests in education. On the contrary, the education tends to (more than) pay for itself.
Doesn't tend to happen much. Thing is, it's a government goal to have study-places for everyone that is qualified (there's a standard you need to reach to be "qualified for studies", national standard-tests). Not everyone get the study they wish for, but everyone gets *some* study (if they wish).
So, the way it works out is that the most prestigious/best studies tend to be desired by the best students. Which mean they get the best students. Which tend to mean they can teach at a higher/more advanced level. Because it's easier to teach a group of A students advanced topics than a group of B and C students.
I don't see a problem in the fact that our government (which means me, indirectly trough taxes) pay for the education of some people who then later go on to work (and pay taxes) in other countries.
First, we've got positive net-migration of highly-qualified people. Significantly more Ph.Ds move in than out.
Second, I consider education important in a global perspective. Even if Norway *was* a net exporter of highly qualified people, (which it isn't) I wouldn't mind, I'd consider that a good contribution. Something the world needs in any case. Our export-balance is like gazillions in the plus, who fucking cares if it'd be only 0.9 gazillions. (there's no national debt either, on the contrary)
Third, the alternative would be to have some smart, but poor, students unable to get the best education because of financial constraints. I personally would consider that grossly unfair. People don't choose their parents. Everyone deserves (in my opinion) the chance to do well, if they themselves study well. *even* if their parents *didn't*.
That would indeed be the case if that was how it worked. It isn't.
It doesn't work like that. When you want to study, you send an application. Not to the school directly, but to a central application-handling central. You prioritize your wishes. For example, you could say your first choice is CS at the U of Bergen, your second choice CS at the U of Oslo, etc.
Now, the schools are free to say what is relevant to them. They can decide (for example) that Maths and Physics are going to count more than languages if it's an engineering-school. (and vice-versa if it was language-studies) but they don't themselves choose the students. They get the best students according to their criteria.
If you want to get into the best schools, you need the best grades. That's the end of it.
I'm arguing that Windows is superior to some people, not because the product Windows is better than the competing products, but as a simple consequence of network-effects. It is better because Quicken runs under it. Because half a gazillion games run under it. Because Photoshop runs under it.
The reason that is actually important, and not just hair-splitting is because of the consequences. A consequence is that any attack on Windows market-dominance needs to attack these network-effects. Mindlessly trying to match the feature-set of Windows is not going to help -- because people don't choose windows for those features.
What *will* help is, for example, getting those programs ported to other platforms. Or writing equivalent programs. Ensuring good import-capabilities in alternative programs (they need to be able to read/write the file-formats used by MS-Windows programs).
It also means that MS is, to a significant degree not master of their own destiny. Lot of companies are in a position where they can substantially hurt MS by the simple act of delivering a port of their products to other platforms.
Out of curiosity, what functionality does MS-Windows have that you consider worth $200 more than what is available from the best free competitor ?
Simple: Yes.
The GPL (any version!) contains no provision whatsoever that prevents the storage of GPLed binaries on read-only media.
(hint: "ROM" is short for what ?)
Out of curiosity, which law, precisely, would that be ?
Yes. But those "times" are unlikely to add up to even 0.1% of the times where initrd are employed.
All distros I know off set up a initrd-thing even for bog-standard root on locally attached (ide|sata|scsi) devices.
I don't see the point of it. Yes. It makes perfect sense in some scenarios. It does however *not* make any sense whatsoever in most standard, simple, cases. Why it's nevertheless done beats me.
It's much more clever sending the best students to the best schools, instead of sending those with the richest parents.
For some reason the US never fully catched on to that. (yes, yes, I *am* aware that your grades count for ivy league, but it's not *all* that counts)
It's pretty similar in Norway. If there are more applicants to a school than there are places, then the best qualified (as in those with the best grades and/or in some cases those with the best scores on intake-tests) get in. That's it. It makes no difference whatsoever if your father is Bill Gates or lives on welfare. (other than indirectly, rich well-educated parents is still an advantage because it tends to help you learn more and thus get better grades)
Like you say: Windows doesn't (for most people) have value because of itself. But only because of third-party support for it. This means the value of Windows falls proportionally with the increased availability of those third-party apps (or compatible ones good enough for your purposes).
I don't know anyone who has ever deliberately purchased a copy of (any version) of Windows. Indeed, many have more licenses than they know what to do with due to having bougth laptops or similar that come bundled with Windows which they never used. (for example due to running Linux)
Besides, it would drag Windows even deeper into the "crappy shit" kind of image-problem that it already has more than enough of.
Thing is, there already exists several free (both senses) OSes. The only one you can successfully sell is MS-Windows and even that only works because of inertia and monopoly-effects.
Nobody I know argues that Ms-Windows is so much better as to be "worth" what it costs. Instead, if they use Windows, they argue that they need it because some software they need runs only there. Or because that is what everyone has. Or because it's the only thing they know. In other words, the entire "value" of Ms-Windows lie in network-effects and not in the actual product.
A new OS has none of this value. Infact it will have less of it than Linux. Linux has some software, some recognition, some users. The new OS has neither. Linux can be had for $0.
Selling something that is poorer than Linux for a higher price than Linux is a no-go. (by "poorer" I don't mean primarily technically, I mean from the perspective of network-effects which is the dominant factor, unfortunately.)
We already know what happens when we bombard users with dialog-boxes. They are perceived as noise. As disturbances. As something standing between the user and what he/she wants to do.
The primary focus becomes to get rid of them so you can do what you want to do. Typically the user will click "Yes", "Ok", "Whatever", "Bugger the hell off and let me use my computer" is more like what they mean.
Thing is, the user have learnt, trough experience, that though the dialog-boxes frequently present a choice, it's really no choice at all. There's one "correct" choices (the one that makes the dialog-box go away) the other choices are "wrong" and will only lead to the dialog-box reappearing.
9 out of 10 times, if 3 seconds after a user clicked something on a dialog-box, you ask what it said, they don't know. They never read it. This tendence goes *UP* with increasing frequency of questions.
I can understand it too. For work-reasons I got a new XP-laptop from Dell some time back. It has antivirus, automatic-updates and a shitload of absolute crap installed on it. Half of which is "evaluation copies" that you don't even have a license for beyond the first 90 days or whatever.
The first month of use there where dialog-boxes demanding answer HERE, NOW literally dozens of times. "blablah antivirus has new updates, want to download ? (yes,no,later)". "blablah antivirus has finished downloading the updates. Want to install ? (yes,no,later)" "There are important updates for your computer, download now ? (yes,no)", "The updates have been downloaded, install ? (yes,no)" "The updates have been installed, the computer needs to reboot for the changes... reboot now (yes,no)" (then if you click no, it asks again 30 minutes later. *NO* fucking option for making it shut up for the rest of the day or whatever.
Yes, many of these you can after a while get rid of by vigorous ticking of "Don't ask again" boxes. It's still ridicolous. Even *more* so when it's software that you don't even own that's doing the nagging. And that's with a business-dell. Don't even get me started on my wifes Vaio. The "Lifestyle" for the person whose lifestyle consists of clicking "yes,no,bugger_off" a whole lot, and occasionally, for short periods between this, being allowed to use the computer you bougth.
In the village where he teaches, a year or two back they got hold of a single mobile phone.
There's no electricity in the village. Nor is there mobile-phone coverage. Nevertheless, it has paid for itself a thousand times over.
It goes like this.
They grow and sell various farm-products. They sell most of their stuff on a market 4 hours walk away. It's possible to recharge the mobile-phone at the market. There's a spot with mobile-phone coverage half an hours walk from the village.
End effect ? The villagers know the prices at the market, what is in high demand and what has oversupply so the prices are low. This enables them to make more intelligent choices about what to bring to the market at which times.
End effect ? The market is better supplied. They are better paid.
Knowledge is power.
There are places like you describe. Those aren't likely to be the first targets of such projects.
Education is however the only solution. Water. Food. Education. That's about the priority. You can not solve peoples problems for them for ever. You can however help them learn how to solve them themselves. A much much much better use of resources.
Wanting something pretty is perfectly fine -- but "real" diamonds aren't "prettier" than manufactured ones. Infact it's coming to a point where even the experes -- with a microscope -- are having a harder and harder time telling the difference.
Wanting something fun is also fine. You buy a PS2 or a vacation on Bahamas because its fun. Not because it's all that useful, in the larger scheme of things. The "fun" of owning a piece of carbon is debatable.
Part of what can be nice about presents is, sometimes, preciesly that they're *NOT* useful. That says you took time and money ONLY to be nice to a person you love, and not to be "useful", which is why a new dishwasher ain't terribly romantic even though useful.
My fiancee already turned into my wife, by the way. And neither I nor her spent any money buying useless pieces of carbon in the process. We *did* both spend money (and more importantly, time) to show oneanother that we care. If you've got any amount of creativity in you, then there's much better ways of doing that.
It's true, offcourse, if taken 100% literally. If *all* light is bent around you, you see nothing.
But in reality, the amount of light you need to see perfectly well is a tiny percentage of the light hitting your body. Even if you left the area of the iris perfectly visible, that would only result in two 4mm (or so) black circles. You honestly think this would be all that much inferior to "true" invisibility ?
In daylight you could do a lot better. The sun shines with about 1000W/m^2. I don't know the lower limit, but certainly 1W/m^2 is more than sufficient for reading, so you could make the area of the iris only redirect 99.9% of the incoming light, letting the remaining 0.1% trough to the eye.
If even that is not good enough for you, there's always the option of amplifying the light in the area of your eyes by a factor of 2, and thereafter re-route half of it around you. This lets you see perfectly, and leaves you perfectly invisible.
Yes. And it's a sound premise. Women do, infact, generally have the ability to choose what they want to do.
Now, if they also gets to act on those wishes differ. As does it for men. Sometimes there's stuff blocking you from doing what you want to do. You may not be rich enough. Or pretty enough. Or have the rigth nationality. Or have the rigth sex.
When in fact, culture and society restricts us immensely in what we are expected to choose to do.
That noone *expects* you to do a certain thing is a very weak argument. There's a LOOOONG way between not-expecting something and *preventing* it. You may not *expect* that a random person you meet on the street talks 5 languages fluently. This in no way *prevents* him/her from doing precisely that.
Sure. Lots of people (most people) choose to act in accordance with expectations. I agree with you that this is a large part of the reason why women today choose to become teachers whereas in the past they did not. (generally speaking, there's always going to be exceptions)
But that turns it into a chicken and egg problem. Nobody expects something that is completely uncommon. Our expectations are shapes more by past experiences than by any other thing. In other words, it could very well be argued that the reason most people don't expect girls to grow up and become Ph.d in Comp.Sci is that so few girls have done exactly that. That is *not* the same as saying those who have nevertheless made that choice (such as my ex-girlfriend) have been discriminated against. On the contrary, on 9 out of 10 job-offerings in the area it'll *explicitly* be stated that given similar qualifications, females will be prefered.
Almost without fail, men will poorly comply with a female's requests if they are made in a dominate manner, the female must literally coax action from her subordinates rather than having any ability to directly assert what needs to be done.
I'm sorry. This doesn't match my experiences at all. Perhaps I live in a different culture than you do ? (Norway) I've had plenty of female teachers, professors, bosses. None of which had any more problem than the males simply stating what needs to be done, and have it respected. (as well as if coming from a male in the same position anyway)
In a partnership dictating orders won't work. And arguably *shouldn't* work. Personally I tend to view those partnerships where one part (mostly the female) seem willing to blindly obey "orders" as dysfunctional. But maybe that's just me.
Your assertion that females are free to choose their best-suited field is simply wrong.
If so, you've not demonstrated it. Simply claiming that it's "not expected" won't cut it. By the way, everything you write applies equally to males. Do you think people "expected" me to stay at home for a year care for my son while my wife went working ?
and those girls who do choose to go into computer science are either mocked and thought less of, or if they are even remotely attractive, they are idealized and turned into objects of--most times unwanted--affection.
Unlike the boys in CompSci which are treated as attractive, outgoing, social, friendly, competitive and sexy? Stereotypes are just that, and I fail to see why thei're more relevant for girls than for boys.
So long as our culture expects women to be submissive, we will never be able to assert our true desires.
Which culture is that ? And why do you feel that being "expected" to act in a certain manner is the same as being forced to act in that manner ? Do you need to care what the general population "expects" ?
For most uses 10.000 writes is perfectly fine. I'm willing to bet that 99% of all harddisc sold never reach anything close to that number. Remember that it's 10000 times write to the entire surface, wear-leveling will make sure of that.
For a 500GB hard-disc to be written to 10.000 times you'd need to (combined, over the lifetime of the disc) write 5000 TB to it, I'm convinved the typical hard-disc doesn't see 1% of that. 5000TB is 10MB/s for 500000 seconds, or not even a week. So obviously you could easily wear out such a disc. And some machines would, like those swapping a lot, or those doing database-work with lots of writes.
The typical home-machine though, gets a OS and aplications installed, then it slowly fills up with files which are then rarely replaced, the average file on my harddisc is certainly atleast a year old (i.e. not a single bit in it has changed the last year)
Which means that for 95% of the target audience (i.e. people with a high techknowledge and interest) the online-solution is going to suck major.
Even if I backed up *only* my digital photos and own written documents (i.e ignored the movies and oggs since they can be recreated from the CDs (though at a cost of 100 hours of work or something), even then I'd end up with like 100-200GB of data to back up. So, by your calculation the online-solution will be a factor of 50 or so more expensive.
It's an order of magnitude to expensive for large amounts of data, plain and simple.
We should *control* what the kids are *allowed* to eat so as to *prevent* them from becoming obese (as they would, implied, surely become if allowed any measure of influence on their own lives...)