I would be very happy if you can give me some pointers into developping a "Postbank" banking client (the web-based version doesn't cut it, since it can not handle mass automated payments). We have not figured out how to do anything like this yet. We need the program
Press the bank to expose an XML-RPC or SOAP API of the functionality in the web interface. With that, it would be trivial writing a native interface, with all kinds of required automation.
Exposing it as a programatic interface shouldn't pose a security risk. It should have the same capabilities, and expose the same network service (http).
The average consumer has no concept of what security is or why they should care.
This is why security should be handled by the browser, not by careful stepping on the part of the user (i.e. don't click suspicious links, don't run suspicious content).
But they don't use PCs in arcade games; they're dedicated PCBs which must be engineered and manufactured. Then there are the programming costs, the expense of the EEPROMs and other silicon, the rest of the hardware engineering, and so forth. Don't forget advertising, shipping, etc. You haven't taken any of that into consideration.
I didn't because all of those factors play in my favor. Custom gaming hardware, much like console hardware, can be produced cheaper than regular PCs. In any case, if this is false, nothing prevents the usage of PCs as the arcade backend.
Custom fiberglass work is extremely cheap, if you don't require anything fancy. Green cars, the kind used in fuel efficiency competitions, have a shell made out of Perspex, costing in the range of a hundred euros. Perspex is quite soft, so gets scratched easily and wouldn't be a good choice for an arcade machine. It however proves my point.
The profit on my $5000 dream machine is about 40%. The usual for off-the-shelf parts.
As for current arcade machine value, it is off my point. I was trying to point that arcades must evolve or die. The fact that current, plain boring, setups cost so much just reinforces my point.
That's where you're wrong. Those huge mammoth simulators cost tens of thousands of dollars...
This is obviously wrong. I can put together, from shelf parts, a three headed cockpit with force feedback wheel, pedals and shift-gear based off a high-end PC for an ammount around five thousand dollars. Here, one needs to add the cockpit itself, made out of fiberglass or something like that, which wouldn't cost over a hundred bucks even if custom-made. Add mass production discounts, and it's in the range of a few thousand dollars, not tens of thousands of dollars.
The rest of the post is then based off wrong data...
or die. In my opinion, arcades would be much more successfull if they invested in high-quality hardware that can't be matched by consoles. And I don't mean high-quality graphics. I'm more inclined to full F1 car or fighter plance cockpits with multi-head display and 3D sound. How many people have the space for one of those at home?
If you were my employee, setting up my shop, and told me you accept losing 8% of my customers (or 8% of 8% that won't bother to turn JS on), because of laziness, you'd be fired instantly.
Are you for real? If they knit, they prefer to knight in groups. If they're decorating, they're usually doing it with their friends, including the shopping for items beforehand. They even go to the bathroom in groups. By nature, women are social. You're actually arguing this? Have you even read any scientific research about it?
I am for real. That is your image of women kitting and decorating. The ones I know do that at home, usually alone. I know quite a bunch of them, and I know they do it for the fun of it, much as hackers hack for the fun of it. I was trying to show that women do like time alone, and lonely jobs. It's easy finding other lonely hobbies.
Behavioural differences between sexes are part prejudice and part socially induced. Underneath, we are much the same. I guess women fleeing from computers is socially induced. It's not that they wouldn't like it: I proved some women like lonely hobbies and there are excellent female mathematicians out there, so there's no big roadblock, except social acceptance. A 10yr old girl spending too much time hacking into a computer is seen as a problem, whereas a boy is considered normal.
I won't go into discussing sociobiology. Sociobiology is still very very far from providing authoritative answers, as can be proven by constant changes of interpretation, during the last decades. It won't be authoritative until we reverse-engineer the brain. Activation pattern analysis of a mechanism whose design you don't know is obviously a wasted effort. Example: Can you prove that the distributed pattern isn't a protection mechanism? Female mammals are much more resistant to illness, because you can afford the loss of males in a population, but a loss of females results in reduced birth rate.
Women and men are different. I grant you that. But most of the difference is socially induced. Anyway, the end result is much the same. I just don't believe there are physiological differences strong enough to propel men and women into different jobs. Heck, women are even trying, with success, to get into construction work. History of the last century has been proving me right, and I'm sure it will continue to do so.
:-) Cool deduction, made me laugh, but nope. Khazunga was my nick when playing Descent, Rise of the Triad or Quake back in the University labs. There lies the accoustic connection. I'd KHAZUNG! my friends, which is way cooler than fragging them!
The tagline is something I picked up somewhere, while I was reading The Dilbert Principle, where there is a story about a manager who decided that it is possible to make no mistakes in a copy-shop. Heck, if you can make one copy right, you can make 10,000 copies right. My tagline reinforces the reverse of that: Whenever you really want to get something right one time, the first time, you can and do.
It could just be that nerdy males with fewer social skills tend to gravitate toward introverted tasks that don't require a lot of personal interaction with others.
Sorry, but it's not that women don't like "introverted tasks". Loads of women like knitting, decorating and doing other kind of manual work that requires little to no interaction with other human beings.
Thinking about it, the word Control sums it up. I keep on Linux, because I know what the system is doing, why it is doing it, and I can fix it if my setup doesn't behave. Every one of my windows boxes degrades over time, and I have no idea why. Before I switched, I'd love the feel of a freshly installed windows box: snappy, clean, everything in place. Now, my linux install keeps on and on feeling like the day I installed it: fast, predictable, secure.
So, I keep on Linux, because I like retaining control over my computer.
Nope. Think of it as an HTML extension for building interfaces using all the common UI widgets on a widget library. Much like XHTML, it is extensible, so you can use SVG for an all-vectorized UI if you wish. You'll need an SVG-enabled mozilla for this to work, though.
# Can you change the look of basic widgets with only a few lines of code?
# Can you change the look of an entire application based on some sort of stylesheet?
Naturally. It uses CSS3 as the styling standard.
Does it let you bind external code to it so a designer and coder can co-exist without stepping on eachother's toes?
Yup. The interface, much as in XAML is described in an XML file. Interface objects are instatiated upon interface description interpretation.
Can XUL files be run directly over the internet?
Yes. Check Mozilla Amazon Browser for an example. Use a mozilla browser and click the "Start MAB Now!" link in the top right of the page.
There really isn't a point in creating yet another standard. Working on getting a single one to work across everything would be a big boon to everybody, but it seems Moz/Opera are both sick of following in IE's wake.
XAML isn't a lot different from XUL, with two big differences. XAML won't be here for two years, whereas XUL has already been here for several years. XAML is proprietary, whereas XUL is open and provides open implementations. I can't see how you can defend XAML, really...
Most distros, including all significantly large ones, adhere to the most important part of the LSB: The filesystem hierarchy standard. As for the rest of the standard, it varies. Adoption of the LSB is not that bad, actually, even if people aren't talking about the LSB left and right.
It seems that the Doomsday theory gets more headlines than other theories suggesting, disease and climate change (a much slower, more boring process) were the cause. Even though the damage of a meteor strike would have been far more devastating and left the planet set back near square one as far as life.
Given todays' evolution theories, small changes are not likely to cause mass extinction. Give existing life time to mutate, and it will adapt, not die. Diseases are only known to cause life extinction in confined spaces, like islands. A planetwide disease killing a wide variety of species, where none had the ability to resist is rather unlikely. Even the black plague, capable of killing whole cities in the middle-ages left a small percentage of resistant individuals in the worst epidemics.
Meteor strikes, on the other hand, have a quite predictable outcome. The only variable left is the probability of one hitting the earth.
Mobility Radeon 7500, one of the best gaming laptop cards. Half a gig of RAM. Pentium M@1.5Ghz. The game ran flawlessly after a fresh install. It runs flawlessly under linux. And I was questioning the tools to track the problem down: there are heaps of free debuggers and profilers than can help me track the problem down if it happens on linux (which it didn't).
Which problem exactly requires one to wipe and reinstall windows?
Undebuggable strange behaviours. Case in point: My Thinkpad R40 laptop, running WinXP, which is hanging for ~0.5s every ~5s, when running Unreal Tournament 2004. Don't tell me it isn't the OS fault. I know the behaviour is caused by a misbehaved driver or application. However, there are absolutely no installed or free tools that allow me to track down the problem. In linux, this would be trivial.
My solution? Take the time to install accelerated ATI drivers for Gentoo, and run UT2004 on linux.
Now you *may* question the strength of my data but may I remind you that at least there is both empirical evidence as well as theoretical reason to believe patents encourage development. In order to claim we would be better off without patents you need to do more than simply point out my evidence is week but offer equally convincing reasons to believe they *aren't* beneficial.
I strongly questioned the validity of your data. Let me now question the benefits of patents. Current patents allow for most processes to be patented. Not marketeable applications of concepts, but the concepts themselves. They are what I call "too fine grained". The end result is that most granted patents don't translate into a product the market will accept. Any technologically advanced product today will be crossing inumerous patents. It's expensive to do the research on which patents you accidentally crossed. The triviality of granted patents (see the one-click-shopping case) makes it easy to cross a patent even if you do virtually no R&D. Further, it's prohibitively expensive to license all patents and still get a novel product out of the door, that can bridge the adoption gap.
Patents can easily do more harm than good. They are interesting if very well balanced. In the current state, they are delaying technology adoption for twenty years. I am not all against patents, but I consider they are not absolutely good. Poorly regulated patents are worse than no patents at all.
Drivers licenses have one huge difference against patents: The set of rules that maximizes public safety without compromise of efficient use of the commons is pretty obvious. If you want to trace a parallel to driving licenses: the current patent state is the equivalent of stating that everyone must drive slower than 20km/h. It fullfils the safety requisite, but at the expense of inefficient use of the commons.
And who will pay for those additional taxes? That's right, the customers will. Sorry chap.
You're assuming that selling price is somewhat proportional to manufacturing cost. This is false. The selling price is the highest value that the market will accept, not the manufacturing cost plus some percentually fixed profit margin.
All this BS back and forth is really irrelevant. As a factual matter of statistics countries that implement patent systems have a *MUCH* higher level of spending on R&D and much more technical progress.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Could your correlation be weaker than you propose? Could it be because patents are *universal* in western countries, and western countries are the most advanced? The correlation gets a lot weaker phrased like that... Unless you are proposing patents are the sole force causing western civilization to be more advanced today.
There is absolutely no reference for evaluating our patent-based society against an evolved society without patents. The closest approximation is our own society, in the past, before patent systems. The patent system was born in the late 18th century, but widespread by trade agreements only in the late 19th century. This timeframe is consistent with the birth of large corporations, which are the strongest supporters of patents. There's no proof that academic or individual R&D was being held back by the absence of patents. Academic R&D is by nature public, and individual R&D is fueled by ego and personal sense of accomplishment more than finantial reward.
Maybe they would have been made, maybe they wouldn't. But the fact is that they were made for material gain.
You failed to grasp the meaning of my post. You assume that, since inventors made a profit from the inventions, then profit was their main goal from the start. I don't quite see the two propositions as one and the same.
The Wright brothers are an excellent example of how patents reward the wrong people. The most important efforts into human powered flight were made by Sir George Cayley and Otto Lilienthal. Both worked with no reward in mind, fueled by the hacker spirit alone. Some people are like that...
You did not question my affirmation that patents can easily do more harm than good. Then again, I'm convinced that the US will pay the price of an incompetent patent system in a timeframe of 10 to 20 years. I just hope Europe doesn't follow the lead.
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Exposing it as a programatic interface shouldn't pose a security risk. It should have the same capabilities, and expose the same network service (http).
Custom fiberglass work is extremely cheap, if you don't require anything fancy. Green cars, the kind used in fuel efficiency competitions, have a shell made out of Perspex, costing in the range of a hundred euros. Perspex is quite soft, so gets scratched easily and wouldn't be a good choice for an arcade machine. It however proves my point.
The profit on my $5000 dream machine is about 40%. The usual for off-the-shelf parts.
As for current arcade machine value, it is off my point. I was trying to point that arcades must evolve or die. The fact that current, plain boring, setups cost so much just reinforces my point.
The rest of the post is then based off wrong data...
or die. In my opinion, arcades would be much more successfull if they invested in high-quality hardware that can't be matched by consoles. And I don't mean high-quality graphics. I'm more inclined to full F1 car or fighter plance cockpits with multi-head display and 3D sound. How many people have the space for one of those at home?
As in most things in life, check what the leaders are doing. Try selling on ebay, or buying on Amazon with javascript off. Then, you'll get my point.
If you were my employee, setting up my shop, and told me you accept losing 8% of my customers (or 8% of 8% that won't bother to turn JS on), because of laziness, you'd be fired instantly.
Behavioural differences between sexes are part prejudice and part socially induced. Underneath, we are much the same. I guess women fleeing from computers is socially induced. It's not that they wouldn't like it: I proved some women like lonely hobbies and there are excellent female mathematicians out there, so there's no big roadblock, except social acceptance. A 10yr old girl spending too much time hacking into a computer is seen as a problem, whereas a boy is considered normal.
I won't go into discussing sociobiology. Sociobiology is still very very far from providing authoritative answers, as can be proven by constant changes of interpretation, during the last decades. It won't be authoritative until we reverse-engineer the brain. Activation pattern analysis of a mechanism whose design you don't know is obviously a wasted effort. Example: Can you prove that the distributed pattern isn't a protection mechanism? Female mammals are much more resistant to illness, because you can afford the loss of males in a population, but a loss of females results in reduced birth rate.
Women and men are different. I grant you that. But most of the difference is socially induced. Anyway, the end result is much the same. I just don't believe there are physiological differences strong enough to propel men and women into different jobs. Heck, women are even trying, with success, to get into construction work. History of the last century has been proving me right, and I'm sure it will continue to do so.
The tagline is something I picked up somewhere, while I was reading The Dilbert Principle, where there is a story about a manager who decided that it is possible to make no mistakes in a copy-shop. Heck, if you can make one copy right, you can make 10,000 copies right. My tagline reinforces the reverse of that: Whenever you really want to get something right one time, the first time, you can and do.
So, I keep on Linux, because I like retaining control over my computer.
Most distros, including all significantly large ones, adhere to the most important part of the LSB: The filesystem hierarchy standard. As for the rest of the standard, it varies. Adoption of the LSB is not that bad, actually, even if people aren't talking about the LSB left and right.
Meteor strikes, on the other hand, have a quite predictable outcome. The only variable left is the probability of one hitting the earth.
Gaim is much much better than the original AIM. I use gaim on windows and I prefer it over AIM.
Mobility Radeon 7500, one of the best gaming laptop cards. Half a gig of RAM. Pentium M@1.5Ghz. The game ran flawlessly after a fresh install. It runs flawlessly under linux. And I was questioning the tools to track the problem down: there are heaps of free debuggers and profilers than can help me track the problem down if it happens on linux (which it didn't).
My solution? Take the time to install accelerated ATI drivers for Gentoo, and run UT2004 on linux.
Patents can easily do more harm than good. They are interesting if very well balanced. In the current state, they are delaying technology adoption for twenty years. I am not all against patents, but I consider they are not absolutely good. Poorly regulated patents are worse than no patents at all.
Drivers licenses have one huge difference against patents: The set of rules that maximizes public safety without compromise of efficient use of the commons is pretty obvious. If you want to trace a parallel to driving licenses: the current patent state is the equivalent of stating that everyone must drive slower than 20km/h. It fullfils the safety requisite, but at the expense of inefficient use of the commons.
There is absolutely no reference for evaluating our patent-based society against an evolved society without patents. The closest approximation is our own society, in the past, before patent systems. The patent system was born in the late 18th century, but widespread by trade agreements only in the late 19th century. This timeframe is consistent with the birth of large corporations, which are the strongest supporters of patents. There's no proof that academic or individual R&D was being held back by the absence of patents. Academic R&D is by nature public, and individual R&D is fueled by ego and personal sense of accomplishment more than finantial reward.
The Wright brothers are an excellent example of how patents reward the wrong people. The most important efforts into human powered flight were made by Sir George Cayley and Otto Lilienthal. Both worked with no reward in mind, fueled by the hacker spirit alone. Some people are like that...
You did not question my affirmation that patents can easily do more harm than good. Then again, I'm convinced that the US will pay the price of an incompetent patent system in a timeframe of 10 to 20 years. I just hope Europe doesn't follow the lead.