I think you are one third correct. Either the situation is complex or the user does not know the terms to express the problem. In these cases technical support is not all that great, and neither will watson.
In the vast number of customer service questions, Watson will be great, because the power of the first level technical support is nothing.Let me give you an example. There was an incident at the ATM, I called the bank, and first of all it took a long time to fake the menu system to get me to a representative. With Watson I could conceivable say ATM and get some help. I wanted customer service to note the incident and alert the manager of the local branch. The representative could not do that. A Watson type system could not possible be less powerless to solve problems.
Situation two, canceling accounts. Many places don't want to cancel accounts, and so some human somewhere in the world is tasked with preventing this. They are simply following a script, and normally stating the next step is a call to the credit card company for a chargeback will solve the problem. A Watson type system would be just as good, and possibly properly configured could have better retention.
As far as technical support, I refer you to the IT crowd.
Bu the time Apple came out with the iPad, everyone knew it was going to be a hit. If one wanted to make money, it was important to be the first one in before the market became flooded with ipad optimized fart apps.
The android phone, once it got into general productions under several OEM, was a good bet because there were many people who did not a iPhone or did not want service with the limited number of available phone companies.
The problem with Honeycomb is that Google is still playing it's stupid control games, rewarding one OEM with first dibs on the OS so that everyone else with cow tow in hopes they will be first next time. If 5 or 6 models appeared, and there was guaranteed OS upgrade support on those model for the next two years, I am sure there would huge sales and many more apps. As it is there is one lame model that is selling hardly enough for anyone to notice.
Business is not war. War by definition is a zero sum game. That is, war is used to distribute a resource that for all intents and purposes is fixed in quantity. For instance, war is often used to redistribute land. Now it is used to redistribute petroleum. The war on drugs redistributes drugs to the rich and powerful, leaving the poor with nothing.
Business is different. Business is about creating value where none exists. It is about taking a junk mushroom and turning it into a premium product. It is about taking a piece of land no one wants and turning it into a resort. In the process inefficient companies die, but they are not causalities of war. They are simply relics of a bad past that we are happy to see left behind.
So why is this important? If it is war then we fight to maintain market share, a perceived limited resource, which is what the American automakers diid, which is why MS is doing, which is what all those insurance companies and banks are doing. However if it is not a war then we are in a situation of an expanding and fruitful economy that will grow as we innovate. This si the world in which we have jobs and new toys. This is IBM. This is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation.
If we are at war, we do not innovate, we copy. It is the difference between Google using graph theory to create a index method different from Yahoo and Alta Vista and Google creating an phone not unlike the iPhone. It is the difference between Alta Vista that stood on market share and did not innovate, and Yahoo who understood there was room in search for more than one way to serve the customer.
I would agree with that for all industries, with qualifiers.'
I graduated college during a time when, like now, the number of jobs for college graduates were few and far between. If you have computer skills you probably had a good job, but there were a lot of people graduating with those skills. That said the people who had jobs were those that were able to gain real experience prior to graduating. Some of those, like me, were able to get a paying job. Others had intern. Of course the paying jobs were not that great. Additionally a number of students did not finish college choosing rather to work.
Looking back on it, if I were a more career minded person, an unpaid internship with a major player could have served me better than working as I did. Not that I would change anything, but i would never tell a kid to not an internship simply because it did not pay money. Experience is worth something. If the choice is working with competent people and not working at all, I might choose the unpaid work. The key, to me, is to do this while one is in school. An internship is like being unemployed, and in a competitive job market being unemployed is death. Being in school is not being unemployed. Only having an unpaid internship almost is.
Namecheap is the firm I went to when I switched from Godaddy. Godaddy, from their behavior, seemed to think that they owned my domain and I was just leasing it. Not cool with me.
I find it much easier to use the namecheap interfaces. It is possible to order a domain through a shared hosting provider, but I prefer to order the domain and web hosting seperately.
No, there are more than two choices. But the TSA is not a good approach to overall security. It does not enhance security. Plane hijacking is enhanced by ideas unrelated to the TSA. One is the idea that some passengers will be sacrificed to a hijacking, because the alternative is everyone dies. This is the reinforced cockpit door that will not open under threat. The other is that by and large weapons and explosives should not be on the plane, not even pilots. Their job is to fly the plane, not play cop. If they want to be a cop, they should go and be a cop.
What the TSA does is create a new vector for attack. Here is what it looks like a airports. A hundred people, many of them unscreened, are standing around the security area. Some waiting to get screened, some waiting for arrivals or seeing of departures. There is no great distance between the unscreened maybe-passengers and the screened passengers. It would be no problem, with the current TSA setup, to get a couple carry ons into the screening area with explosives and kill a couple hundred people. Not as dramatic as taking down a plane, but still a security risk created by the TSA.
The old way of screening, coupled with trained observers, would be much better at reducing this risk. First, there would be no group of hundreds in an area prior to the passenger being scanned for explosives. You have more luck on a busy street, so airports would not be a preferential taget. Second, when most of the people are not put through the added stress of being molested, it will be easier to detect those that are under stress.
So yes, like the war, this is a jobs and money-for-the-boys program created by conservatives to take taxes from the middle class and give it to themselves and their friends. I have not seen a single competent security expert that claims that this has helped the overall security situation.
Here is the teardown. The claim is that significant circuitry is required to insure that the data transmission remains fast and reliable. It sounds like a kludge to provide a cheaper copper connection rather than paying for fiber inputs and outputs in peripheral and host devices.
We will see how this works. The Apple method has been to provide a reliable and high speed external bus so users could hook anything up essentially plug and play. This was back to the SCSI days. Those cable were more reliable than these. Though the move to USB certainly reduced costs, it was not as elegant as the FIrewire. It will be a while for current users to upgrade to thunderbolt. Hopefully by that time we will see other manufacturers.
Furthermore ATT dropped unlimited data long ago. Unlimited data only makes sense when one has low bandwidth devices or limited number of devices. With droid selling like crazy and the iPhone coming out with an update, Verizon was going to be a negative profit situation in the data center. What we will have to wait and see if the current users are grandfathered in like ATT did.
Verizon is the top US provider, complete with the pay our prices or leave, and at one time the most stringent criteria for allowed customers the privilege of handing over hard earned cash for often minimal services. Although I am not a decibel of free market solutions, I do think that cricket and sprint can lead the way out of any monopoly situation. Given the number of kids that are getting weaned on cricket, the only thing keeping them from being a major market mover is the excessive costs of android phones.
There are two questions here. The first is is your cat, or any animal, a commodity. That is, if I were a house clener, and I accidentally killed you cat, would it be like me breaking a glass, where I could just give you $50 and that would be the end of it, or would there be I somehow was a cruel and insensitive person dropping the vacuum cleaner on it.
Second, who is going to pay for the care of the animals. If you kitty is lost, do we just immediately euthanize it or do we have a facility keep the pet in hope that the owner comes and gets it. If a pet is just a retail item, it is hardly worth the expense to have such a facility. In my city, such a facitility costs $2 per woman, child, and man living in the city.
Which is to say the issue is not whether pets are well cared for, or if pets provide value. Of course most pers are reasonable well cared for and most pets provide value. But many pets bought through retail outlets are simply thrown away, flushed, or abandoned. And I am not making a judgement here. These are just animals and we kill and throw away animals all the time. The question is if we care about our animals, if we are proud that our animals have good pampered lives, and has excellent health care, do we want them sold like disposable paper plates.
When one see the number of dogs that are given up because they don't get along with the kids, or the number of cats that are given up because the little box is too hard to clean, or the number of reptiles and birds that die in transport, it is difficult to justify the retail sales of pets. And from a fiscal point of view, it is hard to justify the burden that is placed on the tax payer to care for these animals when such burden should be placed on the retail establishments that sell these animals.
Which if this was all that was said, this would be fine. However, I think it continues the argument that corporations are somehow persone who deserve protection under the constitution. Corporation are not person for two reasons. First, they cannot die, second, they cannot feel significant consequences. If a corporation no longer exists, they people simply go somewhere else. The US is built on the idea that aristocracies should not exist, that others should have equal opportunity for pursuit of happiness, and giving civil rights to something that cannot die and does not feel consequences is a violation of that principle.
This distinction is important for the further. If we get thinking machine, and if the idea of civil liberties still exist, it will be important. It is even important know with the assignment of patents and copyrights to the corporation. What is going to happen later when a famous author transfers to a robot then demands that the copyright on the work should be extended until his mind dies, which is never. What happens when some sociopath puts his mind in a robot, and the robots kills people. The robot is punished, and the sociopath is free to go on 'killing'.
We really have two or three corrupt justices that have been bought out by a few psychotics at high levels of the corporate world. The justices have been seduced by drugs and golf courses, and even though we might occasionally get a decision that makes sense, many more are going to set presidencies that will echo like dred scott.
I would say that coverage for a certain area, in my opinion, is much more important than speed. I recently tried sprint. I was on the coverage map, and I even checked for antennas. They seemed reasonably close. However when I go the device there was minimal connectivity, and even though they said the device was returnable, there was drama at the store.
Lesson is I would not use this for anything. I may in the market for 4G broadband service and my plan to to check for nearby antennas to where I am going to mostly use it. Whoever has the coverage, I wil use.
A paper represents a data point. The validity of the paper is many ways determined by the number of other scientistsbwho cite and validate the paper. Science breaks down when there is little of the later and an excess of the former. In the past each paper represented a fair amount of value in terms of duplicating copy, transmission, and publishing, so I think it made sense to be cautious on what is published. Today the physical costs of publishing online are minimal, so peer review should really focus on novel procceses in experiments and interesting results from valid experiments, not micromanaging.
it is instructive to remember that modern physics, in some sense, began with a postcard, a tweet if you will, of formula that effectively quantized energy. If ideas a put out there, and scientist take them with a grain of salt, we will see much advancement
Most appliances are only about 33% efficient at most. The vast majority of the energy is release as heat. Ergo, most appliance get hot. This means if that if one is cooling, then the cooling system has to remove waste heat from the appliance as well as heat coming in from the outside environment. This is done at an efficiency of 33%, which in approximate general hand waving terms means that for every watt of power used by the appliance 2 watts is necessary to remove it. This is two watts continuously as the cable box never is turned off or put to sleep, unlike the TV or refrigerator or dryer which is only run occasionally.
Of couse during cold weather that heat from the appliances is put to productive use. Whether the box is a net gain or loss depends on your climate. What is true is that cable boxes and the like are going to tend to produce the least amount of useful work per watt used. It is this kind of inefficiency that cause consumers to need heavily subsidized power plant provided apparently cheap power, instead of the more long term fiscally responsible increasing efficient appliances. For a family with a few boxes, efficiency could save them a few hundred dollars a year. The fake that no one wants this saving is a failure of the free market. Boxes are given away, so cable companies have no incentive to spend more money on efficient boxes, and consumer tend to see high electricity prices as a failure of technology, not as a personal failure to be fiscally responsible.
The fact is that business should be paying for tools is uses. If one has an enterprise level machining company, you are not going to be driving up and down streets looking for free tools. You are going to be buying high quality tools with maintenance contracts. Same thing if you ar running a print shop. You will not get a $100 consumer inkjet. You will get a high throughput giclee printer again with service contract. Even if non-functional equipment is going to cost only $1000 a day in lost revenue, the cost of pro equipment is usually justified.
Which is what is missing in the browser market. With linux, there are providers of solutions to the enterprise customer. That is what is cool about linux, you can get a custom solution because the code is open and modular. I guess that IE is good enough, or enterprise does not care enough, to pay for the same support for the browser. Certainly someone could come up with and sell a enterprise broswer based on Gecko, with all the bells and whistles the enterprise wants.
As far as the mozilla hate,remember it is free and you get what you pay for. Which is nothing. This is unlike Google and IE where there are some potential significant costs in terms of personal data. As I said before, I use Camino with no plug ins and no expectations beyond that it will load pages and block cookies, flash, and most ads. I aprreciate the developers that give me such a useful tool for no money. May their intangible awards be infinite. If a free product is too stressful, I suggest you find a paid product, or perhaps don't obsessionally upgrade.
The situation is this. The land is fertile because of periodic flooding. Rational people would have developed a system to allow this to continue to happen on some basis instead of choosing to use dangerous and expensive fertilizers. In addition, rational people would not build structures on place where flooding is guaranteed to occur every few generations and then complain that flooding occurs. My tax dollars are not there to pay for others dumb decisions.
As far as the specific idea that flood control decisions were bad, let me state two facts. First, one issue is the damage to the long term damage to the land due to the polluted waters. This is a serious and valid concern. OTOH, if the US would not allow people to use fertilizer and herbicides indiscriminately, this would not be a concern. The reason why farmers are not just going to be able to plant crops next season is because a green lawn is more important than food security.
Second, people make money catching fish, and people eat fish. Just like the recent gulf oil spill where the loudest whiners were not the environmentalist by the fisherfolk whose livelihoods were going to be destroyed, the decision to control waterflow is a fight between people who want to farm and people who want to fish. Both these groups a economically important, so both groups must be treated with a balanced hand.
It would be nice to think that we could tax people enough to pay for a perfect system in which everyone is protecting from their own stupidly. Even if the later were possible, the former would be impractical if for no other reason that stupid people tend to be those that think taxes only support undocumented immigrant set fires and killing god fearing americans. The issue of having to flood farmland is not going to be solved by denying that we have bad environmental decisions in the past, but by owning thost bad decisions and trying to make better ones.
First, as an engineer you have problem solving skills that many of the population does not have. After all, that is what engineering is about, working the problem, be it finding parts, or working on traffic flows, or calculating impedance's, or calculating stress.
That problem solving skill is critical to programming, which, at a high level, may not involve committing code.Even before writing any machine readable code, there is a great deal of design work to be done. Understanding the problem, building prototypes, decided if those prototypes are suitable given available resources. For instance, depending on the language one uses the design in going to be different. A couple years ago I had the experience, in a class for high school students, watching a recent computer science grad trying to implement a program in Robo Pro, which has no variables. Watching him trying to fit the tools to the his solution, rather than the other way around, really made me realize why senior managers were needed to help the new programmer.
So this is what I would say. Programmers and codes are now widely available. If one wants to get a CS degreee and become a software developer that is great. One can look at the states of software and hardware and know that we always need more good engineers that can create excellent products. You may already be there. Short of this there is benifits to knowing the languages and processes your programmers are using, not becuase you are going to contribute code, but because you then know what kind of requests and requiments are appropriate given the constraints that are being made by the language and processes. For instance Ruby on Rails is very high level language, and as such imposes many more constraints to how a web site is developed than if that website were developed in lower level interpreted language, like say forth. We deal with the constraints due to the overall effeciency of the development process.
So I would not sweat the contributing code. No would I micromanage process. What I would do is learn the tools that are being used. To do this you will have to design and write code. But maybe make it your own personal project.
The question I would have is why do you want a degree? Many of my friends without college degree, some who did go to excellent high schools, and taught themselves skills, have jobs. I assume that the issue is that the two jobs you have is not programming, and they do not pay enough to support 'the life'. People assume a degree in computer science will get a person a job programming computers. Not true. Many, many, many jobs that are available with no professional experience requires a masters. I know more people programming with engineering degrees that with computer science bachelors.
No accredited colleges is going to award a degree without core classes. Since the high school you went to was good, I assume you have a full load of AP classes and are able to get some, at least freshman credit. If not these core requirements can be taken a community college and transferred. You might also look at online schools that test to fudge these requirements. These degrees may or may not be accepted by the employer. I wonder if you have thought about contributing to open source projects to get some experience and see how code it written on large projects, and integrated, then opening up a consulting type situation. People do make good money doing this, and the hours can be flexible.
Just as an aside, two of my friends in college were in a similair situation. They were late 20's, had decent jobs, and made decent money, though often had to work overtime to get it. They had lives, did not live at thier parents house, had cars, had lovers, and both gave up the life to go to school. I don't know if life after school was better for them, but I do think that going through the full process of college, including the evil core classes, made them people who were not laborers but problem solvers. This in terms gave them opportunities they did not have before. I never understood how they did school, I would not have been able to do it at 30 with a job and a life. But they did.
So all this is about Bing? MS no longer is pushing IE as a MS Windows cross platform application front end. The only thing that they might profit off is if every IE user switched to Bing. Of course this would only be true of home users, enterprise would already be standardized on a search engine and push all browsers to the engine.
It is not so much abstraction, but required basic skills. What one needs to do today is different from what a person had to do 20 years ago. Today only a small subset has to be able to manage memory, or write sort routines, or think carefully about parameter passing. Now the skills are designing objects, applying design patterns, writing short segments of procedural code, and, increasingly, writing code the will run parallel. I can code, but that last one is nearly beyond me, but will be critical for anyone who wants to do serious work.
I too started with basic in middle school but it did not teach me much. In high school we did fortran, which taught me mad skills, then I taught myself C and C++. I still think C is important for people who want to do serious programming as it does not have the cruches of the other languages, is simple enough to be put in a two hundred page book, and will teach everything one needs to know about debugging and basic design.
In terms of instant gratification, I would suggest writing web apps in python. Most of the GUI stuff is taken care of by the browser, Python takes care of parameter passing to and from the user, and one can teach all the concepts, aside form parralel programming. A kid can write any number of games and if one has access to a web server, it can be run anywhere there is internet access. Such a thing can be great motivational tool.
There are some android phones that are going to be designed to meet a price point rather than maximum quality. Like MS computers by mass market manufacturers like Dell, customers are going to tolerate a lack of high quality due to the low price. This is also a winning deal for the manufacturers as tech support is no longer hugely expensive.
What is going to be interesting to see is if the MS Windows Mobile phones continue to be more reliable than Android phones if and when the MS Windows phones begin to sell and quantity and expand to bottom line mass market manufactures.
There was a time when the cost of a long distance call was exorbitant. Fortunately the phone company ran validation over the same lines of communication, and it was possible to reverse engineer the tones ATT used to get free long distance. The lesson learned is that if the user has access to the validation channel, and the validating code is simple and unencrypted, then it will be hacked and abused. Given the limitations of the cell phone microphone and the network, I would wonder how complex the tone could be, and how easy it would be to hack to steal product or money.
IMHO, Mozilla was created to leverage the assets of Netscape to prevent a world in which proprietary MS protocals controlled the web. There was no business model in which Mozilla had to be the market share leader. There was no need to play games in which users had to be lured to give up personal data. A cross platform browser allowed users freedom to choose a machine that suited them and then run an appropriate Mozilla variant. I myself use Camino.
MS needs a browser based OS to maintain market share in the world of sub-$500 internet devices. We have seen these fail, and everyone is saying lack of mobile broadband is going to kill them, but these are going to be targeted at home user with WiFi that want inexpensive machines that can move around the house. The benefit is going to be reliability, and MS want to take users away from Apple in this lucrative market and return them to MS.
Likewise Google has to have a mobile OS to continue to collect information. The mobile OS is prefect for Google because everything a user does is recorded, track, mined, and sold. Google already has significant market share, so, as we see, the internet devices are being sold at a healthy profit, and the benefit to the user are free applications after the fact. This gives MS hope as it can often intimidate manufacturers to sell at a less healthy profit in return for marketing support that will create the volume that MS wants.
So we have one company that wants a WebOS to keep it office franchise alive, another that wants to keep the advertising money flowing. Where would mozzila be? They have no market share concerns, they have no free apps, and there is no open hardware platform for a table or internet computer. So one can buy an expensive laptop, pay the internet tax, and then install this great Mozilla OS. We have seen how well this works for Linux. Or one can buy the allegedly open Android or Chrome tablet and install Mozilla. What is the point? Chrome is not a bad OS.
As we have seen on the iPhone, software developers don't want to develop for the web browser. They want native Apps. The machine needs to do both, unless one is in the business of locking in users like MS or Google.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
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On of the best and simplest arguments agains the gold economy I have ever run across. Very good. Inflation encourages investment and avoid liquidity traps. It encourages borrowing by making the money paid back in a sense less than borrowed. Uncontrolled inflation, and crashes, such as exists with gold, makes investment in real goods extremely unpopular. Even at zero interest, investment is good due to inflation. It is funny that during the 70's everyone was afraid of inflation and from 1980-1992 the US deficit was allowed to expand at remarkable peacetime rates to curb inflation. The thing is, if you were a fiscally responsible person, you ended up being really well off by the late 80's.
The US is at 10% unemployment with more families living with fewer funds, resulting with many people who do not have minimum food or shelter. It is unclear if China has such a problem.
This economic cycle we see happens independent of the economy. The U.S. was a manufacturing joke in the 18th century, by the 20th century was the world leader, and now is in decline. The cause of this is that as a country enters it's manufacturing phase, labor is reletively unskilled and has few ex[ectations. Management is inefficient, and techniques not well understood. As time goes on labor becomes more skilled, management becomes less of impediment to efficiency, and local techniques are adapted from global techiques. Further, as there is no legacy constraints, products can be innovated to meet current needs instead of legacy needs.
This is the method by which countries have achieved higher standard of living for the past few hundred years. We may or may not see this expand to Africa and Indian sub continent. Manufacturing requires a local relatively sophisticated educational systemin which students are modeled into shape. Sustained manufacturing requires a highly educated creative group that can innovate process and products. India has education, but does may not equally educate everyone. Much of Africa is too flush with oil money to care.
One can either be in a walled garden that is crumbling, or a garden in which the walls are being built not logically, but in panicked fits. The later is the MS model and results in all of the drawbacks with few of the benefits. All walled gardens will crumble and a new freedom is the use of other browsers. There is no reason for any ipad user to run safari. Other browsers like iCab and Atomic Web can not only be used but also be placed on the dock. There is no way to set another browser to autoload, but with shenanigans like this I hope that default browser can be changed in future editions.
It is also useful to note that many sites open with a splashpage encouraging use of Apps. I think this is a crummy practice, but it has nothing to do with the mobile browser. It has only to do with the additional control provided by Apps. Believing that some platforms are immune is simply allowing the negative consequences to stack up.
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In the vast number of customer service questions, Watson will be great, because the power of the first level technical support is nothing.Let me give you an example. There was an incident at the ATM, I called the bank, and first of all it took a long time to fake the menu system to get me to a representative. With Watson I could conceivable say ATM and get some help. I wanted customer service to note the incident and alert the manager of the local branch. The representative could not do that. A Watson type system could not possible be less powerless to solve problems.
Situation two, canceling accounts. Many places don't want to cancel accounts, and so some human somewhere in the world is tasked with preventing this. They are simply following a script, and normally stating the next step is a call to the credit card company for a chargeback will solve the problem. A Watson type system would be just as good, and possibly properly configured could have better retention.
As far as technical support, I refer you to the IT crowd.
The android phone, once it got into general productions under several OEM, was a good bet because there were many people who did not a iPhone or did not want service with the limited number of available phone companies.
The problem with Honeycomb is that Google is still playing it's stupid control games, rewarding one OEM with first dibs on the OS so that everyone else with cow tow in hopes they will be first next time. If 5 or 6 models appeared, and there was guaranteed OS upgrade support on those model for the next two years, I am sure there would huge sales and many more apps. As it is there is one lame model that is selling hardly enough for anyone to notice.
Business is different. Business is about creating value where none exists. It is about taking a junk mushroom and turning it into a premium product. It is about taking a piece of land no one wants and turning it into a resort. In the process inefficient companies die, but they are not causalities of war. They are simply relics of a bad past that we are happy to see left behind.
So why is this important? If it is war then we fight to maintain market share, a perceived limited resource, which is what the American automakers diid, which is why MS is doing, which is what all those insurance companies and banks are doing. However if it is not a war then we are in a situation of an expanding and fruitful economy that will grow as we innovate. This si the world in which we have jobs and new toys. This is IBM. This is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation.
If we are at war, we do not innovate, we copy. It is the difference between Google using graph theory to create a index method different from Yahoo and Alta Vista and Google creating an phone not unlike the iPhone. It is the difference between Alta Vista that stood on market share and did not innovate, and Yahoo who understood there was room in search for more than one way to serve the customer.
I graduated college during a time when, like now, the number of jobs for college graduates were few and far between. If you have computer skills you probably had a good job, but there were a lot of people graduating with those skills. That said the people who had jobs were those that were able to gain real experience prior to graduating. Some of those, like me, were able to get a paying job. Others had intern. Of course the paying jobs were not that great. Additionally a number of students did not finish college choosing rather to work.
Looking back on it, if I were a more career minded person, an unpaid internship with a major player could have served me better than working as I did. Not that I would change anything, but i would never tell a kid to not an internship simply because it did not pay money. Experience is worth something. If the choice is working with competent people and not working at all, I might choose the unpaid work. The key, to me, is to do this while one is in school. An internship is like being unemployed, and in a competitive job market being unemployed is death. Being in school is not being unemployed. Only having an unpaid internship almost is.
I find it much easier to use the namecheap interfaces. It is possible to order a domain through a shared hosting provider, but I prefer to order the domain and web hosting seperately.
What the TSA does is create a new vector for attack. Here is what it looks like a airports. A hundred people, many of them unscreened, are standing around the security area. Some waiting to get screened, some waiting for arrivals or seeing of departures. There is no great distance between the unscreened maybe-passengers and the screened passengers. It would be no problem, with the current TSA setup, to get a couple carry ons into the screening area with explosives and kill a couple hundred people. Not as dramatic as taking down a plane, but still a security risk created by the TSA.
The old way of screening, coupled with trained observers, would be much better at reducing this risk. First, there would be no group of hundreds in an area prior to the passenger being scanned for explosives. You have more luck on a busy street, so airports would not be a preferential taget. Second, when most of the people are not put through the added stress of being molested, it will be easier to detect those that are under stress.
So yes, like the war, this is a jobs and money-for-the-boys program created by conservatives to take taxes from the middle class and give it to themselves and their friends. I have not seen a single competent security expert that claims that this has helped the overall security situation.
We will see how this works. The Apple method has been to provide a reliable and high speed external bus so users could hook anything up essentially plug and play. This was back to the SCSI days. Those cable were more reliable than these. Though the move to USB certainly reduced costs, it was not as elegant as the FIrewire. It will be a while for current users to upgrade to thunderbolt. Hopefully by that time we will see other manufacturers.
Verizon is the top US provider, complete with the pay our prices or leave, and at one time the most stringent criteria for allowed customers the privilege of handing over hard earned cash for often minimal services. Although I am not a decibel of free market solutions, I do think that cricket and sprint can lead the way out of any monopoly situation. Given the number of kids that are getting weaned on cricket, the only thing keeping them from being a major market mover is the excessive costs of android phones.
Second, who is going to pay for the care of the animals. If you kitty is lost, do we just immediately euthanize it or do we have a facility keep the pet in hope that the owner comes and gets it. If a pet is just a retail item, it is hardly worth the expense to have such a facility. In my city, such a facitility costs $2 per woman, child, and man living in the city.
Which is to say the issue is not whether pets are well cared for, or if pets provide value. Of course most pers are reasonable well cared for and most pets provide value. But many pets bought through retail outlets are simply thrown away, flushed, or abandoned. And I am not making a judgement here. These are just animals and we kill and throw away animals all the time. The question is if we care about our animals, if we are proud that our animals have good pampered lives, and has excellent health care, do we want them sold like disposable paper plates.
When one see the number of dogs that are given up because they don't get along with the kids, or the number of cats that are given up because the little box is too hard to clean, or the number of reptiles and birds that die in transport, it is difficult to justify the retail sales of pets. And from a fiscal point of view, it is hard to justify the burden that is placed on the tax payer to care for these animals when such burden should be placed on the retail establishments that sell these animals.
This distinction is important for the further. If we get thinking machine, and if the idea of civil liberties still exist, it will be important. It is even important know with the assignment of patents and copyrights to the corporation. What is going to happen later when a famous author transfers to a robot then demands that the copyright on the work should be extended until his mind dies, which is never. What happens when some sociopath puts his mind in a robot, and the robots kills people. The robot is punished, and the sociopath is free to go on 'killing'.
We really have two or three corrupt justices that have been bought out by a few psychotics at high levels of the corporate world. The justices have been seduced by drugs and golf courses, and even though we might occasionally get a decision that makes sense, many more are going to set presidencies that will echo like dred scott.
Lesson is I would not use this for anything. I may in the market for 4G broadband service and my plan to to check for nearby antennas to where I am going to mostly use it. Whoever has the coverage, I wil use.
it is instructive to remember that modern physics, in some sense, began with a postcard, a tweet if you will, of formula that effectively quantized energy. If ideas a put out there, and scientist take them with a grain of salt, we will see much advancement
Of couse during cold weather that heat from the appliances is put to productive use. Whether the box is a net gain or loss depends on your climate. What is true is that cable boxes and the like are going to tend to produce the least amount of useful work per watt used. It is this kind of inefficiency that cause consumers to need heavily subsidized power plant provided apparently cheap power, instead of the more long term fiscally responsible increasing efficient appliances. For a family with a few boxes, efficiency could save them a few hundred dollars a year. The fake that no one wants this saving is a failure of the free market. Boxes are given away, so cable companies have no incentive to spend more money on efficient boxes, and consumer tend to see high electricity prices as a failure of technology, not as a personal failure to be fiscally responsible.
Which is what is missing in the browser market. With linux, there are providers of solutions to the enterprise customer. That is what is cool about linux, you can get a custom solution because the code is open and modular. I guess that IE is good enough, or enterprise does not care enough, to pay for the same support for the browser. Certainly someone could come up with and sell a enterprise broswer based on Gecko, with all the bells and whistles the enterprise wants.
As far as the mozilla hate,remember it is free and you get what you pay for. Which is nothing. This is unlike Google and IE where there are some potential significant costs in terms of personal data. As I said before, I use Camino with no plug ins and no expectations beyond that it will load pages and block cookies, flash, and most ads. I aprreciate the developers that give me such a useful tool for no money. May their intangible awards be infinite. If a free product is too stressful, I suggest you find a paid product, or perhaps don't obsessionally upgrade.
As far as the specific idea that flood control decisions were bad, let me state two facts. First, one issue is the damage to the long term damage to the land due to the polluted waters. This is a serious and valid concern. OTOH, if the US would not allow people to use fertilizer and herbicides indiscriminately, this would not be a concern. The reason why farmers are not just going to be able to plant crops next season is because a green lawn is more important than food security.
Second, people make money catching fish, and people eat fish. Just like the recent gulf oil spill where the loudest whiners were not the environmentalist by the fisherfolk whose livelihoods were going to be destroyed, the decision to control waterflow is a fight between people who want to farm and people who want to fish. Both these groups a economically important, so both groups must be treated with a balanced hand.
It would be nice to think that we could tax people enough to pay for a perfect system in which everyone is protecting from their own stupidly. Even if the later were possible, the former would be impractical if for no other reason that stupid people tend to be those that think taxes only support undocumented immigrant set fires and killing god fearing americans. The issue of having to flood farmland is not going to be solved by denying that we have bad environmental decisions in the past, but by owning thost bad decisions and trying to make better ones.
That problem solving skill is critical to programming, which, at a high level, may not involve committing code.Even before writing any machine readable code, there is a great deal of design work to be done. Understanding the problem, building prototypes, decided if those prototypes are suitable given available resources. For instance, depending on the language one uses the design in going to be different. A couple years ago I had the experience, in a class for high school students, watching a recent computer science grad trying to implement a program in Robo Pro, which has no variables. Watching him trying to fit the tools to the his solution, rather than the other way around, really made me realize why senior managers were needed to help the new programmer.
So this is what I would say. Programmers and codes are now widely available. If one wants to get a CS degreee and become a software developer that is great. One can look at the states of software and hardware and know that we always need more good engineers that can create excellent products. You may already be there. Short of this there is benifits to knowing the languages and processes your programmers are using, not becuase you are going to contribute code, but because you then know what kind of requests and requiments are appropriate given the constraints that are being made by the language and processes. For instance Ruby on Rails is very high level language, and as such imposes many more constraints to how a web site is developed than if that website were developed in lower level interpreted language, like say forth. We deal with the constraints due to the overall effeciency of the development process.
So I would not sweat the contributing code. No would I micromanage process. What I would do is learn the tools that are being used. To do this you will have to design and write code. But maybe make it your own personal project.
No accredited colleges is going to award a degree without core classes. Since the high school you went to was good, I assume you have a full load of AP classes and are able to get some, at least freshman credit. If not these core requirements can be taken a community college and transferred. You might also look at online schools that test to fudge these requirements. These degrees may or may not be accepted by the employer. I wonder if you have thought about contributing to open source projects to get some experience and see how code it written on large projects, and integrated, then opening up a consulting type situation. People do make good money doing this, and the hours can be flexible.
Just as an aside, two of my friends in college were in a similair situation. They were late 20's, had decent jobs, and made decent money, though often had to work overtime to get it. They had lives, did not live at thier parents house, had cars, had lovers, and both gave up the life to go to school. I don't know if life after school was better for them, but I do think that going through the full process of college, including the evil core classes, made them people who were not laborers but problem solvers. This in terms gave them opportunities they did not have before. I never understood how they did school, I would not have been able to do it at 30 with a job and a life. But they did.
So all this is about Bing? MS no longer is pushing IE as a MS Windows cross platform application front end. The only thing that they might profit off is if every IE user switched to Bing. Of course this would only be true of home users, enterprise would already be standardized on a search engine and push all browsers to the engine.
I too started with basic in middle school but it did not teach me much. In high school we did fortran, which taught me mad skills, then I taught myself C and C++. I still think C is important for people who want to do serious programming as it does not have the cruches of the other languages, is simple enough to be put in a two hundred page book, and will teach everything one needs to know about debugging and basic design.
In terms of instant gratification, I would suggest writing web apps in python. Most of the GUI stuff is taken care of by the browser, Python takes care of parameter passing to and from the user, and one can teach all the concepts, aside form parralel programming. A kid can write any number of games and if one has access to a web server, it can be run anywhere there is internet access. Such a thing can be great motivational tool.
What is going to be interesting to see is if the MS Windows Mobile phones continue to be more reliable than Android phones if and when the MS Windows phones begin to sell and quantity and expand to bottom line mass market manufactures.
There was a time when the cost of a long distance call was exorbitant. Fortunately the phone company ran validation over the same lines of communication, and it was possible to reverse engineer the tones ATT used to get free long distance. The lesson learned is that if the user has access to the validation channel, and the validating code is simple and unencrypted, then it will be hacked and abused. Given the limitations of the cell phone microphone and the network, I would wonder how complex the tone could be, and how easy it would be to hack to steal product or money.
MS needs a browser based OS to maintain market share in the world of sub-$500 internet devices. We have seen these fail, and everyone is saying lack of mobile broadband is going to kill them, but these are going to be targeted at home user with WiFi that want inexpensive machines that can move around the house. The benefit is going to be reliability, and MS want to take users away from Apple in this lucrative market and return them to MS.
Likewise Google has to have a mobile OS to continue to collect information. The mobile OS is prefect for Google because everything a user does is recorded, track, mined, and sold. Google already has significant market share, so, as we see, the internet devices are being sold at a healthy profit, and the benefit to the user are free applications after the fact. This gives MS hope as it can often intimidate manufacturers to sell at a less healthy profit in return for marketing support that will create the volume that MS wants.
So we have one company that wants a WebOS to keep it office franchise alive, another that wants to keep the advertising money flowing. Where would mozzila be? They have no market share concerns, they have no free apps, and there is no open hardware platform for a table or internet computer. So one can buy an expensive laptop, pay the internet tax, and then install this great Mozilla OS. We have seen how well this works for Linux. Or one can buy the allegedly open Android or Chrome tablet and install Mozilla. What is the point? Chrome is not a bad OS.
As we have seen on the iPhone, software developers don't want to develop for the web browser. They want native Apps. The machine needs to do both, unless one is in the business of locking in users like MS or Google.
On of the best and simplest arguments agains the gold economy I have ever run across. Very good. Inflation encourages investment and avoid liquidity traps. It encourages borrowing by making the money paid back in a sense less than borrowed. Uncontrolled inflation, and crashes, such as exists with gold, makes investment in real goods extremely unpopular. Even at zero interest, investment is good due to inflation. It is funny that during the 70's everyone was afraid of inflation and from 1980-1992 the US deficit was allowed to expand at remarkable peacetime rates to curb inflation. The thing is, if you were a fiscally responsible person, you ended up being really well off by the late 80's.
This economic cycle we see happens independent of the economy. The U.S. was a manufacturing joke in the 18th century, by the 20th century was the world leader, and now is in decline. The cause of this is that as a country enters it's manufacturing phase, labor is reletively unskilled and has few ex[ectations. Management is inefficient, and techniques not well understood. As time goes on labor becomes more skilled, management becomes less of impediment to efficiency, and local techniques are adapted from global techiques. Further, as there is no legacy constraints, products can be innovated to meet current needs instead of legacy needs.
This is the method by which countries have achieved higher standard of living for the past few hundred years. We may or may not see this expand to Africa and Indian sub continent. Manufacturing requires a local relatively sophisticated educational systemin which students are modeled into shape. Sustained manufacturing requires a highly educated creative group that can innovate process and products. India has education, but does may not equally educate everyone. Much of Africa is too flush with oil money to care.
It is also useful to note that many sites open with a splashpage encouraging use of Apps. I think this is a crummy practice, but it has nothing to do with the mobile browser. It has only to do with the additional control provided by Apps. Believing that some platforms are immune is simply allowing the negative consequences to stack up.