By my calculations DVD is about 5 cents/gb, hard drives are about 10 cents/gb, and USB drives are about 50 cents/gb.
DVD is slow and bulky requiring a DVD drive to run. Even in clean storage the disks can fail, and you for any computer bakcup multiple disks are going to be required. They are not really suitable for the modern computer.
My OS and computer backups are on hard drives. I boot the computer, select the partition, and go. For backups the software automatically wipes and reloads the computer to the last known status, usually either a snapshot for machines that I want to remain static, or a recent backup for my work machines. Files that change frequently are also backed up online, and reloaded if I have a failure. For software on optical media, a image is created, save on a harddisk or USB, and loaded as needed
Most of my software is downloaded. Software that would require more than a DVD or two is shipped on USB. I have not seen software on DVD for well over a year.
as a result are more likely to commit crimes and get arrested.
What I find interesting is people really believe that certain people commit more crimes. This misconception probably comes from the fact that people think everyone has an equal chance of being arrested.
This is not really the case. One of the people I knew in high school was a drug dealer. Never go arrested, even joined the military. He was white. Some of my upper class acquaintances would get into a lot of trouble, drugs, underage drinking, vandalism. More than likely they would be taken home and their parents would pay for any damages. OTOH, i recall one work mate who could at least once a week when he was walking to work would be stopped, interrogated, and searched because the cops had some report of a young black male doing something, so they just stopped every young black male. He was careful and never had anything on him, but if he every did you can be sure he would be arrested.
We also can see a difference in terms of the demographics of those who go and live on a college campus versus those who don't. We have all seen that colleges will make an effort to contain the damage of, say a rape. Therefore young adults who can go to college might have an advantage.
My black friends are stopped for things that I would never be stopped for. Arrests and convictions are really a function of who the cops are looking for, not who is committing crimes, and who the state attorneys think they can get a conviction. The police are not going to raid the country club where every is doing cocaine and everyone can afford expensive lawyers. They are going to the cheap apartments where they can get the people who don't have the means to defend themselves.
Racism is pretending that one race is more honest than the other, and can handle disadvantage more than the other. There are an awful lot of whites that are poor and uneducated, and do crime. It is just that the cops leave them alone.
I know this sounds a bit tin foil hate, but this is what I have observed over the years.
And for many people that may be a fair tradeoff. In an environment of free Wireless, commercial ISPs are going to have to compete even harder to gain customers. This means, as now, some ISPs are going to have even more censorship, and some are going to have less. You are free to buy as you wish, or not. Free wireless will certainly result in faster speeds for everyone who pays, as it has in Kansas City, and more choices in censorship and monitoring.
So yes, for once you will get what you pay for. No longer can a service say they give you 10mb/s, and then only deliver 1. In an environment where there are free choices, even monitors censored choices, lying about speed will result in significant loss of customers
My issue with MS is licensing and the time it wastes, as well as version support. For instance, on a Windows 7 machine I use, which is licensed, a dialog keeps popping up telling me my software my not be genuine. Why do I want to waste my time with this. I buy a computer to be productive, not fulfill someones else marketing scheme.
So far Google has not been so bad in focusing on end users. It's development of current product, like Docs, has been disappointing but these are still useful in a limited basis, and are worth the price of free. I can see buying a chrome book if they are a good value. This would mean around $300, battery life on the order of 10 hours, 32GB SSD, and sim card so it can be used wireless with most vendors. Hard disks are unacceptable for mobile devices. I would also say more than three or so pounds would put in the class of transportable rather than mobile.
Google seems to be having problems getting into the economy niche currently occupied by low end MS Windows machines. I don't know if anyone sees Google as a premium product. The S3 is selling as the number 2 phone in the US, but that is at the same price as the basic iPhone 5, so presumably people are paying more for the iPhone 5, even thought the S3 will have equal memory as top iPhone 5 for around $280 instead of $400. And the Note does not appear to be selling.
equipment, medical attention, and decent salaries. But television. Really, this is the military that can find 8% of wasteful spending to cut?
This reminds me of Ron Paul who does want to fund the defense of the US, but sponsored room so that soldiers who we pay to defend the country can play video games. I know that we have to pay for recreation for these people, but really. The NFL exists to sell beer and hookers I don't see why the taxpayer has to subsidize them beyond what we already do.
The bottom line is that soldiers have chosen to do a job. I can't tell you how many times my choices have prevented me from participating in a national event. But we are grownups and we deal.
Again, full funding for necessary equipment. But this is not a tea party.
You know, Houston did this long ago, so I am not sure how it is news, since really if conservative Houston can deal without them, anyone can.
The issue for many people is not really money. Yes, criminals can and should pay a larger percentage of the taxes. However, there are two other factors. First is the contract. It seems to many that due to the costs, these camera companies are bounty hunters and therefore the revenue stream to the city is not what is expected. Second is the idea of the surveillance culture. I personally don't want to live in a city in which there is so much fear and mistrust that we must spy on each other all the time.
All in all not news and not interesting. I suppose the next headline will be that San Diego elects a gay mayor, if it every gets around to doing so.
In missile defense it is a matter of calculating capability of enemy and acceptable losses.
In the recent example of Israel and it's alleged shield, the success depending on the ability to acquire a threat quickly, access the target, and make a judgement to destroy or ignore. Based on information in the media, a enemy who could launch a hundred missile quickly from diverse location could overwhelm the system, take it out if locations were known, and then be free to attack targets. A country like Iran could do this, easily.
Protecting against global threats using ICBM is more complex but possible. It requires the ability to detect and identify launches in real time, then respond and destroy threats during the boost phase. Even so there is a danger of momentum carrying debris to populated areas and causing destruction and fatalities. One way this can be done is with airborne lasers. This could potentially defend the US against a country like Korea with a few old style ICBM.
If we can't destroy a threat during boost phase, then all is probably lost. Once payload is destroyed, there could be a hundred projectiles, one which is live, and no way to distinguish. We would spend all our resources destroying half of then, and the love projectile takes out Denver.
Of course none of this accomplishes the faith based fantasy put forth by US conservatives of protection against the reds. That takes diplomacy of the order shown by JFK.
Exactly. Any dominate company can and likely will be displaced, it simply is a question of the time frame.
Apple and Google may look at the fact that Nokia did not play well the mobile phone companies in the US and that RIM did not provide a continuously innovative phone, but rather depended on the conservatism of business customers.
Both need to look at the Blackberry at the end of it's reign, where many people bought Blackberry's just so they could be in the corporate uniform, not really using any of the features. These customers did not generate continuing revenue for RIM, and jumped shipped as soon as it was clear there was a new uniform.
The Google platform provides inexpensive computing power. MS used to do this, but no longer feels the need. MS could probably buy enough towers in US to form i's own network and give cheap service to phone users. MS could probably go into developing countries and outfit them with MS product. But they don't, and won't, anymore than they did with MS Windows..
Looking at Blackberry, it might have a shot. It looks like a good product, and people probably have some nostalgia that may encourage them to buy the phone. The market is fragmented right now, unless you have the myth of a monolithic Android OS. Samsung and Apple split about half the market. Other major players fight over the other half. This leaves a lot of opportunity for Blackberry.
That some kid is whining because he can't afford but bandwidth to download p0rn fast enough?
Right now there is enough speed on the mobile networks, at least in the city, to do what you want to do. Virgin 4G is pretty fast, when it is working. Even ATT LTE is pretty fast, but the limits makes it useless for anything real.
As far as WiFi, again we have to look at where the money is. The cities could do what is suggested, but they have been thwarted.
Eventually, hopefully, we will not have our mobile technology that was designed primarily to allow telephones to jump from access point to access point. WIFi may not be the best technology given range and power. And some sort of shaping technology will have be made to insure that people like the poster don't saturate the bandwidth when they want to get the latest blue movie.
Phone companies should be required to provide Anonymous call rejection and toll free call rejection. This would solve the problem. The subscriber should have the option to divert these calls to voicemail or reject them outright.
The only issue here is that phone companies refuse to enact these simple and common sense solutions. They either refuse to allow the subscriber to manage call, as is true for most cell phones, or they charge for it. Really this is a business model issue, not something the end user can deal with. The FTC just has to put forth regulations.
Back in the day of 900 number, it was clear that the phone companies were using them as a profit center. The average phone user did not want the feature, yet it was turned on by default. If you do not think about turning off the 900 number, and wait too long, the phone company can charge for the service.
Of course the high profit venture has gone from 900 numbers to texting. The phone companies are once again in a position to help, but they won't.
Which is why WiFi has become such an issue. Providers who are charging a fair amount of money don't want people to be able to just get WiFi anywhere. They want people to have some incentive to pay for it.
Technologically this is a complex problem to solve,but can be done. First, the access points can have a guest access feature. Apple and others have done this. The guest access should be locked down by default and not expose other users, or the logged in users, data or information. This is hard to do right, and is the primary reason why a normal person should not share an access point with strangers, but we can work on making such a feature more secure. There is no reason why I should not be able to just be somewhere, and if there is an access point, log in as a guest.
It is also true that bandwidth control is also an issue. Obviously having a guest streaming an HD movie or downloading a torrent is can cause problems for the other users, tragedy of the commons so to speak. Traffic shaping can overcome this issue. Obviously, like securing the network, it is unreasonable to expect that an average end user could manage this, even if default setting were set to facilitiate this, but it is not inconceivable that some firm could not make this work.
There is no reason for subscriber rate to go up in this scenario, but there is a question of what benefit does the average end user get in this scenario. Not much. The threat of increasing subscriber rates, and the expense that the ISP imposes on people who want to share, however, is a real issue. For instance it would be much more efficient for an apartment building to have WiFi, but one wonders if such an efficiency is feasible in light of the ISP wanting individual payments.
We also see cities who wish to put WiFi in dense areas. A absolutely wonderful idea, except that many business interests do not want it. The mobile companies want to to see mobile broadband which really never works as expected. Many firms do not want people just sitting around using their computers. It is a non starter.
I will just note that Mac OS X is full blown operating system and the original Mac Book air only had a 64GB SSD, yet there was plenty of room left over. I had 20 GB of music and videos on it, as well as development work. An OS does not have to take 20 or 30 GB.
Exactly what I was thinking. The issue is not modularity, but not defining interfaces. Modularity is nothing new, and I don't think there is anything wrong with the approach. The overall system, however, has to be defined. I can't imagine that Boeing did not do this. I suspect the pieces that did not fit together was mostly an issue of quality control and cost. For instance, I recently bought a long micro USB cable. The specs for the interface, the microB USB connector are well documented and any competent manufacturer should be able to make this product. However, the connector is not made properly and therefore does not work. Do I blame the people who make the USB standard? No, I blame shoddy workmanship and my desire to buy the cheapest cable possible.
My take is the following. Software is part of the process. A good scientific paper includes everything that one needs to reproduce the procedure. Otherwise it isn't science but propaganda.
In my younger days I was involved im developing software for custom data acquisition and analysis. I can recall two instances where results were skewed and hypothesis were developed based on the skew. If the software had been looked at by more researchers, and used in more labs, the errors may have been more quickly caught.
The thing with science is that it is often really new. It is easy to think that you are on the correct path, when you are not. The only things that keep science honest is to have other people checking your back.
MS is going to be competing with Google for the home user. I suspect that for the home user Google is good enough, and it is free. At one time many home users had free or inexpensive access to MS Office through enterprise licensing. I recall install such a free copy on my mothers machine years back. If such free licensing were still available, I could see home users accessing MS Office.
In small business MS is going to competing with Google and OO.org and the derivatives.
MS is still successful with MS Office due to file format lockin. You want to work with other firms, who are probably running MS Office.
Although Apple Pages is not online, all storage is now online by default. This means that one can work off any Mac or iPad. Also you pay for Pages once and load on all Macs and iPad registered to your account. So there is that.
Simcity is one of the few video games that I played and bought. They lost me when they required media to play the game. I don't pirate games, I buy then and play them. When you inconvenience me and treat me like a criminal, I don't buy them anymore.
So does my HP 49G+. That does not mean I don't appreciate that it comes with 2MB built in.
It is funny how the rules change. My old macs had plug and play for mass storage through a SCSI port, which despite rumors were 100% reliable, has rs-422 networking which worked automagically, yet were inferior to other machines because there was no internal expansion. It did not need internal expansion because of the versatile external expansion options.
There are things that everyone uses, is promoted by Make, but if you want to do electronics, there are other options. For instance, the basic stamp is not a bad setup. It includes a breadboard where you can do simple logic, or put in a FPGA to do more complex logic, for instance display the speed of the car. This is a simple way to get into the electronics, rather than just software.
there is also fishertechnics that provides a graphical programming language and wide variety of building accessories. One can build cars, robots, assembly lines, etc. It is on the expensive side, and like the other options will primarily deal with structural issues and programming. with additional equipment, it can be used to learn to use electronics and digital logic to accomplish simple tasks.
p.
I would definitely look beyond the standard players. The disadvantage is that support might be less than some of the other more popular players.
Google+ is only at the top because Google tried to log everyone who is logged onto Google onto Google+. I wonder how many 'active' users do anything on Google+. I know that I have linked a profile to Google+, occasionally do have to log onto Google to get something done, but have not done anything on Google+ since the first few weeks where I was checking it out.
Much of what the consumer sees as the modern PC came from Apple or MS working off of the Mac platform. You can argue where the ideas came from, but the implantation that the user is familiar came from Apple. Therefore looking at programs such as MacWrite, MacDraw, Excel, Pagemaker, Overvue, even Foxpro can provide context how applications evolve, become obsolete, get integrated into other application, and more generally adjust to user changing sophistication. In MacWrite the cool thing was to have 20 fonts in one documents. That was all it needed to do to be cool. Many users still function at level of sophistication, but it does not sell software. MacWrite to Pages would be a useful study for anyone who wants to write application software at a high level. The same is true in the contemporary age, where Apple and Google are defining the tradition from WIMP era to the touchscreen era, which resembles the original very simple WIMP interface, not the overly complex monster MS built.
Of course is none of this is what many consider computer science, which has more to do with algorithms and writing more advance compilers which can encapsulate more of the knowledge that has been built up thereby trading very cheap clock cycles for very expensive and unreliable human hours. Human interface design, though, is a valid branch of computer science and a much neglected one given the prevalence of truly awful interfaces forced onto the unsuspecting public. I am looking at you T-Mobile.
I am also aware that number of schools have 'computer science' courses in which they merely teach computer applications. i don't even know how such schools get students, as any decent high school has ample opportunities to learn these applications for free. I suppose the kids just waste all their time on facebook, and then end up paying thousands of dollars later to learn what they could have for free.
Tradewars. I have seen no other game where the winning strategy was to nuke the fuzz out of existence. GTA is tame by comparison. Most so called war simulation do not even let you take out school busses.
yes, but if you a user is so unsophisticated as to have/. such a simple question, then some direct professional help is needed, and this needs to be paid for.
One advantage of a shop is that the sales person can ask clarifying question. For instance the poster did not state the region or the type of machine. This is important give an informed response. A salesperson can ask these questions. If the salesperson chooses a more expensive product that does the job, isn't that better than going off on your own and buying a product that does not work.
Presuming that the poster lives in a major city and does not travel off major arteries, something like Boost or any of the pay as you go carriers will work. The best bet is still to go into a shop, buy a SIM card, and make sure it works.
It has not been unheard of in science that a fundamental measurement is initially in error. It has also been known for that error to not be correctly quickly, but rather slowly over time. It seems that many researchers will accept a value as accurate. However, when new measurements do not agree, sometimes the new more accurate value is not reported, but rather a value that is close to the original measurement, but shifted in the direction of the new better measurement. As no one really knows what the most accurate measurement, this is a rational way to approach the discrepancy. Over time a new consensus value is established.
As in all hard science, the results are not nearly as fascinating as the methods. It could be that we are measuring two different quantities. Or that some mistake was in the calculations, which is what many seem to expect. If the accepted value is not accurate, we may expect to see the measured size of the proton slowly shrinking over time until a new consensus value is reached.
As always a single measurement is simply that. A single measurement, a guess, a data point.
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DVD is slow and bulky requiring a DVD drive to run. Even in clean storage the disks can fail, and you for any computer bakcup multiple disks are going to be required. They are not really suitable for the modern computer.
My OS and computer backups are on hard drives. I boot the computer, select the partition, and go. For backups the software automatically wipes and reloads the computer to the last known status, usually either a snapshot for machines that I want to remain static, or a recent backup for my work machines. Files that change frequently are also backed up online, and reloaded if I have a failure. For software on optical media, a image is created, save on a harddisk or USB, and loaded as needed
Most of my software is downloaded. Software that would require more than a DVD or two is shipped on USB. I have not seen software on DVD for well over a year.
What I find interesting is people really believe that certain people commit more crimes. This misconception probably comes from the fact that people think everyone has an equal chance of being arrested.
This is not really the case. One of the people I knew in high school was a drug dealer. Never go arrested, even joined the military. He was white. Some of my upper class acquaintances would get into a lot of trouble, drugs, underage drinking, vandalism. More than likely they would be taken home and their parents would pay for any damages. OTOH, i recall one work mate who could at least once a week when he was walking to work would be stopped, interrogated, and searched because the cops had some report of a young black male doing something, so they just stopped every young black male. He was careful and never had anything on him, but if he every did you can be sure he would be arrested.
We also can see a difference in terms of the demographics of those who go and live on a college campus versus those who don't. We have all seen that colleges will make an effort to contain the damage of, say a rape. Therefore young adults who can go to college might have an advantage.
My black friends are stopped for things that I would never be stopped for. Arrests and convictions are really a function of who the cops are looking for, not who is committing crimes, and who the state attorneys think they can get a conviction. The police are not going to raid the country club where every is doing cocaine and everyone can afford expensive lawyers. They are going to the cheap apartments where they can get the people who don't have the means to defend themselves.
Racism is pretending that one race is more honest than the other, and can handle disadvantage more than the other. There are an awful lot of whites that are poor and uneducated, and do crime. It is just that the cops leave them alone.
I know this sounds a bit tin foil hate, but this is what I have observed over the years.
So yes, for once you will get what you pay for. No longer can a service say they give you 10mb/s, and then only deliver 1. In an environment where there are free choices, even monitors censored choices, lying about speed will result in significant loss of customers
So far Google has not been so bad in focusing on end users. It's development of current product, like Docs, has been disappointing but these are still useful in a limited basis, and are worth the price of free. I can see buying a chrome book if they are a good value. This would mean around $300, battery life on the order of 10 hours, 32GB SSD, and sim card so it can be used wireless with most vendors. Hard disks are unacceptable for mobile devices. I would also say more than three or so pounds would put in the class of transportable rather than mobile.
Google seems to be having problems getting into the economy niche currently occupied by low end MS Windows machines. I don't know if anyone sees Google as a premium product. The S3 is selling as the number 2 phone in the US, but that is at the same price as the basic iPhone 5, so presumably people are paying more for the iPhone 5, even thought the S3 will have equal memory as top iPhone 5 for around $280 instead of $400. And the Note does not appear to be selling.
This reminds me of Ron Paul who does want to fund the defense of the US, but sponsored room so that soldiers who we pay to defend the country can play video games. I know that we have to pay for recreation for these people, but really. The NFL exists to sell beer and hookers I don't see why the taxpayer has to subsidize them beyond what we already do.
The bottom line is that soldiers have chosen to do a job. I can't tell you how many times my choices have prevented me from participating in a national event. But we are grownups and we deal.
Again, full funding for necessary equipment. But this is not a tea party.
The issue for many people is not really money. Yes, criminals can and should pay a larger percentage of the taxes. However, there are two other factors. First is the contract. It seems to many that due to the costs, these camera companies are bounty hunters and therefore the revenue stream to the city is not what is expected. Second is the idea of the surveillance culture. I personally don't want to live in a city in which there is so much fear and mistrust that we must spy on each other all the time.
All in all not news and not interesting. I suppose the next headline will be that San Diego elects a gay mayor, if it every gets around to doing so.
In the recent example of Israel and it's alleged shield, the success depending on the ability to acquire a threat quickly, access the target, and make a judgement to destroy or ignore. Based on information in the media, a enemy who could launch a hundred missile quickly from diverse location could overwhelm the system, take it out if locations were known, and then be free to attack targets. A country like Iran could do this, easily.
Protecting against global threats using ICBM is more complex but possible. It requires the ability to detect and identify launches in real time, then respond and destroy threats during the boost phase. Even so there is a danger of momentum carrying debris to populated areas and causing destruction and fatalities. One way this can be done is with airborne lasers. This could potentially defend the US against a country like Korea with a few old style ICBM.
If we can't destroy a threat during boost phase, then all is probably lost. Once payload is destroyed, there could be a hundred projectiles, one which is live, and no way to distinguish. We would spend all our resources destroying half of then, and the love projectile takes out Denver.
Of course none of this accomplishes the faith based fantasy put forth by US conservatives of protection against the reds. That takes diplomacy of the order shown by JFK.
Apple and Google may look at the fact that Nokia did not play well the mobile phone companies in the US and that RIM did not provide a continuously innovative phone, but rather depended on the conservatism of business customers.
Both need to look at the Blackberry at the end of it's reign, where many people bought Blackberry's just so they could be in the corporate uniform, not really using any of the features. These customers did not generate continuing revenue for RIM, and jumped shipped as soon as it was clear there was a new uniform.
The Google platform provides inexpensive computing power. MS used to do this, but no longer feels the need. MS could probably buy enough towers in US to form i's own network and give cheap service to phone users. MS could probably go into developing countries and outfit them with MS product. But they don't, and won't, anymore than they did with MS Windows..
Looking at Blackberry, it might have a shot. It looks like a good product, and people probably have some nostalgia that may encourage them to buy the phone. The market is fragmented right now, unless you have the myth of a monolithic Android OS. Samsung and Apple split about half the market. Other major players fight over the other half. This leaves a lot of opportunity for Blackberry.
Right now there is enough speed on the mobile networks, at least in the city, to do what you want to do. Virgin 4G is pretty fast, when it is working. Even ATT LTE is pretty fast, but the limits makes it useless for anything real.
As far as WiFi, again we have to look at where the money is. The cities could do what is suggested, but they have been thwarted.
Eventually, hopefully, we will not have our mobile technology that was designed primarily to allow telephones to jump from access point to access point. WIFi may not be the best technology given range and power. And some sort of shaping technology will have be made to insure that people like the poster don't saturate the bandwidth when they want to get the latest blue movie.
The only issue here is that phone companies refuse to enact these simple and common sense solutions. They either refuse to allow the subscriber to manage call, as is true for most cell phones, or they charge for it. Really this is a business model issue, not something the end user can deal with. The FTC just has to put forth regulations.
Of course the high profit venture has gone from 900 numbers to texting. The phone companies are once again in a position to help, but they won't.
Technologically this is a complex problem to solve,but can be done. First, the access points can have a guest access feature. Apple and others have done this. The guest access should be locked down by default and not expose other users, or the logged in users, data or information. This is hard to do right, and is the primary reason why a normal person should not share an access point with strangers, but we can work on making such a feature more secure. There is no reason why I should not be able to just be somewhere, and if there is an access point, log in as a guest.
It is also true that bandwidth control is also an issue. Obviously having a guest streaming an HD movie or downloading a torrent is can cause problems for the other users, tragedy of the commons so to speak. Traffic shaping can overcome this issue. Obviously, like securing the network, it is unreasonable to expect that an average end user could manage this, even if default setting were set to facilitiate this, but it is not inconceivable that some firm could not make this work.
There is no reason for subscriber rate to go up in this scenario, but there is a question of what benefit does the average end user get in this scenario. Not much. The threat of increasing subscriber rates, and the expense that the ISP imposes on people who want to share, however, is a real issue. For instance it would be much more efficient for an apartment building to have WiFi, but one wonders if such an efficiency is feasible in light of the ISP wanting individual payments.
We also see cities who wish to put WiFi in dense areas. A absolutely wonderful idea, except that many business interests do not want it. The mobile companies want to to see mobile broadband which really never works as expected. Many firms do not want people just sitting around using their computers. It is a non starter.
I will just note that Mac OS X is full blown operating system and the original Mac Book air only had a 64GB SSD, yet there was plenty of room left over. I had 20 GB of music and videos on it, as well as development work. An OS does not have to take 20 or 30 GB.
Can't you just hook it up to the Internet and do a factory restore like iOS? Why do we need a restore partition?
Exactly what I was thinking. The issue is not modularity, but not defining interfaces. Modularity is nothing new, and I don't think there is anything wrong with the approach. The overall system, however, has to be defined. I can't imagine that Boeing did not do this. I suspect the pieces that did not fit together was mostly an issue of quality control and cost. For instance, I recently bought a long micro USB cable. The specs for the interface, the microB USB connector are well documented and any competent manufacturer should be able to make this product. However, the connector is not made properly and therefore does not work. Do I blame the people who make the USB standard? No, I blame shoddy workmanship and my desire to buy the cheapest cable possible.
In my younger days I was involved im developing software for custom data acquisition and analysis. I can recall two instances where results were skewed and hypothesis were developed based on the skew. If the software had been looked at by more researchers, and used in more labs, the errors may have been more quickly caught.
The thing with science is that it is often really new. It is easy to think that you are on the correct path, when you are not. The only things that keep science honest is to have other people checking your back.
In small business MS is going to competing with Google and OO.org and the derivatives.
MS is still successful with MS Office due to file format lockin. You want to work with other firms, who are probably running MS Office.
Although Apple Pages is not online, all storage is now online by default. This means that one can work off any Mac or iPad. Also you pay for Pages once and load on all Macs and iPad registered to your account. So there is that.
Simcity is one of the few video games that I played and bought. They lost me when they required media to play the game. I don't pirate games, I buy then and play them. When you inconvenience me and treat me like a criminal, I don't buy them anymore.
It is funny how the rules change. My old macs had plug and play for mass storage through a SCSI port, which despite rumors were 100% reliable, has rs-422 networking which worked automagically, yet were inferior to other machines because there was no internal expansion. It did not need internal expansion because of the versatile external expansion options.
there is also fishertechnics that provides a graphical programming language and wide variety of building accessories. One can build cars, robots, assembly lines, etc. It is on the expensive side, and like the other options will primarily deal with structural issues and programming. with additional equipment, it can be used to learn to use electronics and digital logic to accomplish simple tasks. p. I would definitely look beyond the standard players. The disadvantage is that support might be less than some of the other more popular players.
Google+ is only at the top because Google tried to log everyone who is logged onto Google onto Google+. I wonder how many 'active' users do anything on Google+. I know that I have linked a profile to Google+, occasionally do have to log onto Google to get something done, but have not done anything on Google+ since the first few weeks where I was checking it out.
Of course is none of this is what many consider computer science, which has more to do with algorithms and writing more advance compilers which can encapsulate more of the knowledge that has been built up thereby trading very cheap clock cycles for very expensive and unreliable human hours. Human interface design, though, is a valid branch of computer science and a much neglected one given the prevalence of truly awful interfaces forced onto the unsuspecting public. I am looking at you T-Mobile.
I am also aware that number of schools have 'computer science' courses in which they merely teach computer applications. i don't even know how such schools get students, as any decent high school has ample opportunities to learn these applications for free. I suppose the kids just waste all their time on facebook, and then end up paying thousands of dollars later to learn what they could have for free.
Tradewars. I have seen no other game where the winning strategy was to nuke the fuzz out of existence. GTA is tame by comparison. Most so called war simulation do not even let you take out school busses.
One advantage of a shop is that the sales person can ask clarifying question. For instance the poster did not state the region or the type of machine. This is important give an informed response. A salesperson can ask these questions. If the salesperson chooses a more expensive product that does the job, isn't that better than going off on your own and buying a product that does not work.
Presuming that the poster lives in a major city and does not travel off major arteries, something like Boost or any of the pay as you go carriers will work. The best bet is still to go into a shop, buy a SIM card, and make sure it works.
As in all hard science, the results are not nearly as fascinating as the methods. It could be that we are measuring two different quantities. Or that some mistake was in the calculations, which is what many seem to expect. If the accepted value is not accurate, we may expect to see the measured size of the proton slowly shrinking over time until a new consensus value is reached.
As always a single measurement is simply that. A single measurement, a guess, a data point.