One of the frustrating things as a tax payer is not knowing how much I owe the government. I don't know if I'm overpaying or underpaying until the end of the year. Then I'm either screwed because I owe them a pile of cash or screwed because I wasted a lot of money that could have been better invested. Last year I gave the government 3000 extra which could have stayed as a cushion in a bank account or have been invested rather than getting it back with no interest.
Tax payers should be able to log into their IRS account and see what they owe throughout the year based on what their earnings are and how much has been taken out of their paychecks already. Throughout the year they can enter in deductions and extra earnings and whatnot so at the end of the year there isn't a surprise. It'd be nice to make extra payments if you want before April so that you don't get a huge tax bill or get no tax bill at all in April.
Prior to this bill no crime was committed by registering a free e-mail account when you are a sex offender. Now when Joe Sex Offender gets caught on a social network site using an illegal e-mail account he can be charged with at least one crime. Which is enough to throw him in prison for a longer time so the authorities can hold him while they investigate other crimes that he may have committed.
Then at trial he's being charged with multiple crimes and faces a much harsher punishment.
It will deter the "honest" sex offenders from using social networking sites thereby keeping them away from at least one source of temptation. The "dishonest" sex offenders will be more likely to be taken off the street if they're caught.
So this bill is a no-lose proposition. If a sex offender doesn't obey the law they're just as difficult to catch as before but they are slammed in sentencing if they do get caught. As worst it only makes things more difficult for the sex offender when they're caught. At best it keeps them off the social networking sites.
and he wants to know if he'll be able to play the banjo if the surgery is a success. The doctor reassures him that he will. The guy is amazed and says "that's incredible! I never could figure it out before."
I find that if a PC is dragging its feet it's either a memory or harddrive problem. I was doing some development on a 1.7Ghz system with a really old 40GB drive and it took forever to get the program loaded. I popped in a brand new harddrive and the program loads in a few seconds. The problem was largely getting information from the disk.
If you decide to just get rid of the laptop, get an external enclosure and use the drive as a backup drive for any other system.
If you've got less than 128MB of ram you may want to upgrade. Win95 doesn't need it but you apps might. Not enough physical ram can lead to increased drive usage which results in your drive starting to perform poorly.
Or, you could just be a good stepchild and spring for the $200-$400 for a new computer (either parts or prebuilt) for your stepdad for Christmas.
Somehow I don't think there's going to be lack of a standardized API much like OpenGL or DirectX even if it's possible to write code for the GPU as easily as the CPU.
The APIs at the most basic level allow Joe and Bob to build their own system, throw whatever graphics card they can find in it and have the same game run on both systems.
As soon as you start coding for a specific GPU you're going to be treating PCs like consoles. I don't care to have to buy multiple graphics cards to play various games.
APIs are for compatibility and general purpose use. The option of flexibility is great for industry use where you're running rendering farms all running identical hardware and custom software.
There are few good programmers out there that have no "great" ideas of their own that they're tossing around.
If you want them to work on your ideas you're going to have to pay them.
The ellusive qualitity programmer that can feasibly code for free probably has no car, no job, and still lives at home. The demographic that most fits is 15 year olds.
So if you're lucky you'll find some high schooler that has nothing better to do and no reason to worry about money. And on top of that actually knows how to program.
Otherwise you need to learn to program yourself just like most people who have great ideas for programming projects.
I didn't learn to program so other people could tell me what to make.
Instead of having to haul up screens and input devices for each specialized computer you only need one set for all them.
They could fly up dozens of these designed to do specific tasks and then hook them up to a docking station one at a time when needed.
No doubt there is at least one set somewhere in the shuttle and space station already. Why send up a monitor when you already have one available to you?
With a mortgage you're stuck paying it until it's done.
With cars you can do things to cut costs. Like carpool. Get an electric car. Buy used. Find a different job. Ride a bus. Telecommute. Your mortgage isn't going to adapt.
In your calculation that good chunk of the way leaves about $67,000 worth of gas you've saved over the life of the mortgage at 24mpg.
The biggest savings is in the ability to pay the mortgage off in 15 years as opposed to 30. If I lived in town that extra money going into the mortgage every month would be part of the minimum payment for the full 30 years.
The amount I'd save in gas doesn't come close to covering the amount needed to pay off that more expensive mortgage in 15 years.
People are freaking out about gas not realizing it's a flexible bill and there are better ways to save money.
Carpool is a simple Google Maps based app I wrote.
Your employer (or you) can create an account for your place of work. All the employees can then create an account and join the account created for the workplace. Just send your coworkers the username and public password for the place of business so they can join the group. The public password can't be used to log into the account. It's just to help maintain your privacy.
You can then see (or have the site tell you an approximation of) who would be best to carpool with.
Even though I live 50 miles out of town I always seem to find at least one coworker to carpool with which cuts my gas bill in half.
For the curious, I'd have to drive 1 million miles at $4 a gallon before I spend as much money in gas as I save on my mortgage.
The family Christmas photo for my family included me, my wife, our 9 month old and two cats.
Now it would be perfectly reasonable to expect me and my wife to sit still for 10 seconds while waiting for the camera to snap the picture.
So instead I took 7 pictures and then pieced them all together so it looked like we were all sitting together. Just in case anyone thought it was real I added a snowy scene out the window (we live in AZ) and a faint image of Santa walking in the snow.
It's a great way to put a scene together that would otherwise be impossible. Fake but accurate.
We got Netflix to save money on renting and/or buying DVDs. If Netflix can't deliver enough movies to make it worth the subscription fee then we may just cancel the service.
As someone else posted, it seems like most of the loss is from automated credits for late deliveries.
One of my favorite current abuses of PHP is running a game server written in PHP. The game is written in C# and communicates with the PHP server using sockets. The reason is pure laziness on my part. Maps are created through a PHP/AJAX web-app and stored in MySQL. The PHP server handles all the DB stuff and passes it down to the game client via binary strings. I didn't care to have to rewrite PHP code as C# code just for a simple server.
It would probably be more efficient to have a binary data type (a simple byte array) and a string data type.
I have around 300 DVDs. I have less than a dozen VHS tapes that I'd like to replace with DVDs at some point if I can find them cheap enough. If I could find a bargain bin of $5 blu-ray discs then I might consider upgrading my favorite DVDs. But even at $5 each that would be $1500 to replace them all. It's just never going to happen.
I can't justify spending more than $15 for a DVD unless it's an outstanding movie which is rare. Blu-Ray discs havn't even hit that price point.
As for HD, my motivation for upgrading the TV is safety. I don't like the idea of a big bulky CRT tv being within reach of a grabby little 2 year old's hands. So I'm planning to buy a larger HD LCD TV and mount it on the wall out of reach. It'll free up floor space and be safter.
The other hurdle is portable players. I can buy a DVD and watch it at home or in the car on a portable player. People aren't going to want to have to buy a movie twice just so their kids can watch it in the car. A home DVD player plus a portable DVD player is still much cheaper than a single Blu Ray player.
So I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Blu-Ray. They need cheaper players and bargain bin movies. Until then, it's going to be only for those people who like to spend their money on that sort of thing. Not the mass market.
The current version can't connect to the internet. The MIT students are trying to see if they can get networking on it without going past the $12 price point.
The thing hasn't been updated in a long time so their goal is to see if there's better tech that can be put together for the same price.
"Rather than a laptop, the unit will act as a desktop computer and plug directly into a standard television."
A big expense for cheap computers is the monitor. So instead they're going to make it work with a standard TV like the original Apples did.
Keyboards in bulk should be easy to get cheaply. You can get a keyboard for $4 on NewEgg. No doubt they cost NewEgg half that or less. Since these computers are using such old tech they could probably fit the entire computer into a standard size keyboard.
Running MMOs can take a lot of resources depending on what kind of functionality you want to provide. While in theory "anyone" could run their own server, logistically it won't happen.
And that's of course on top of the whole community issue. There needs to be enough flexibility so that my server has something different to offer than their server.
I had an old linksys router that didn't seem to work properly all of a sudden. After looking into it a bit I realized that I had mixed up a couple power supplies so it wasn't getting enough voltage. After plugging in the correct power supply it worked great again. Not so oddly enough.
I've been using a Linksys NR041 (costs about $30) for years and have never had a problem with it. It's a pretty basic router that does what I need it to (block and forward ports). Maybe the issue with more expensive consumer routers is that they're half assed versions of expensive routers. I'd rather have a basic router that does just enough but works than a half assed router that wants to pretend it can do things.
I do have a Conext UPS that everything is plugged into so that takes care of any power fluxuation issues.
The price point needs to be there as well. Companies need to pick a format and stick with it and get the price point low enough that people can afford the new media.
With the cartridge you could order as much storage as you needed for that particular game. Now companies are trying to find a one size fits all solution which will never exist. ###GB will never be enough for everyone.
My guess is that eventually solid state drives will replace the current one size fits all approach. You don't have to upgrade your computer every time a larger flash drive comes out.
Exactly. The reason I have broadband is for school work and because I run web-sites out of house. My cable company is nice enough to not block port 80. Web-sites + AdSense equals a lot more income than the cost of the connection. If the internet wasn't paying for itself we might very well go with something cheaper. Although it is only $30 a month plus it unlockes expanded basic cable for free. We have to pay for basic through the HOA. The cable guy told us that would happen and that they didn't care. A lot of cable companies put a filter on the line to prevent that sort of thing.
Note to others, purchase high speed internet before you purchase expanded basic if you're in an HOA that requires you pay for some sort of cable service. You might just unlock it for free.
A lot of people simply don't need to spend the $30-$50 for an internet connection they barely use. The same goes for cellphones. I used to have a cell phone. So did my wife. That was costing us about $80 a month. As soon as the contract expired we went with a trac fone which costs as much as we want it to with a minimum of about $7 a month to keep it active.
People spend a lot of money for a lot of different things and then are shocked to find out that others don't actually need them and put their money to good use elsewhere.
$80 a month put on your mortgage instead would save you a year or so paying it off (depending on your principle of course) and thousands of dollars over the life of the loan. So really, all that extra money you're spending is not just costing the amount you spend but the amount of interest you now have to pay because you didn't use the money to pay off debts.
Although my primary goal as a kid was to be a game programmer, by the time I was old enough to actually pursue the career I realized what a crappy job it is with long hours. So I do web development instead and was careful when choosing jobs to ensure I'd only be working mon-fri from about 9-5. That gives me plenty of free time to spend time with the family and work on my own personal game/web projects. I also make enough that my wife doesn't have to work and we can still have nice things.
As long as the pay is good and it doesn't ruin your life then it's a good job. An "exciting" job that ruins your homelife isn't worth having either. And unfortunatly, most high paying jobs either demand long hours or they're "boring" tech jobs.
The other thing people tend to forget is that all jobs are pretty boring. It's the people you work with that make them enjoyable.
http://cubia.dawnofthegeeks.com/ is a mirror of wikipedia that takes takes the mediawiki database and converts it into a static easy to manage database. To find an article in the DB the title is lc'd and MD5'd and the first two characters are the table and then the entire MD5 is the key for the entry in the table.
Throw in a MediaWiki parser and you have your own lightweight mirror. Every page has a link back to the original Wikipedia entry.
Not so surprisingly a 933Mhz system can't handle Wikipedia. But it can handle my version.
This setup also works on GoDaddy.
BTW, step 2 is "Ads"
Step 1: find a pile of free information on the net and host it Step 2: put ads on it Step 3: profit!
Script kiddies like to skip step 1 because they're too lazy to find a way to make the pile of information easily managable with limited resources.
Slashdot Mirror
So when secret ballots go away you can prove you voted the right way.
One of the frustrating things as a tax payer is not knowing how much I owe the government. I don't know if I'm overpaying or underpaying until the end of the year. Then I'm either screwed because I owe them a pile of cash or screwed because I wasted a lot of money that could have been better invested. Last year I gave the government 3000 extra which could have stayed as a cushion in a bank account or have been invested rather than getting it back with no interest.
Tax payers should be able to log into their IRS account and see what they owe throughout the year based on what their earnings are and how much has been taken out of their paychecks already. Throughout the year they can enter in deductions and extra earnings and whatnot so at the end of the year there isn't a surprise. It'd be nice to make extra payments if you want before April so that you don't get a huge tax bill or get no tax bill at all in April.
Prior to this bill no crime was committed by registering a free e-mail account when you are a sex offender. Now when Joe Sex Offender gets caught on a social network site using an illegal e-mail account he can be charged with at least one crime. Which is enough to throw him in prison for a longer time so the authorities can hold him while they investigate other crimes that he may have committed.
Then at trial he's being charged with multiple crimes and faces a much harsher punishment.
It will deter the "honest" sex offenders from using social networking sites thereby keeping them away from at least one source of temptation. The "dishonest" sex offenders will be more likely to be taken off the street if they're caught.
So this bill is a no-lose proposition. If a sex offender doesn't obey the law they're just as difficult to catch as before but they are slammed in sentencing if they do get caught. As worst it only makes things more difficult for the sex offender when they're caught. At best it keeps them off the social networking sites.
and he wants to know if he'll be able to play the banjo if the surgery is a success. The doctor reassures him that he will. The guy is amazed and says "that's incredible! I never could figure it out before."
I find that if a PC is dragging its feet it's either a memory or harddrive problem. I was doing some development on a 1.7Ghz system with a really old 40GB drive and it took forever to get the program loaded. I popped in a brand new harddrive and the program loads in a few seconds. The problem was largely getting information from the disk.
If you decide to just get rid of the laptop, get an external enclosure and use the drive as a backup drive for any other system.
If you've got less than 128MB of ram you may want to upgrade. Win95 doesn't need it but you apps might. Not enough physical ram can lead to increased drive usage which results in your drive starting to perform poorly.
Or, you could just be a good stepchild and spring for the $200-$400 for a new computer (either parts or prebuilt) for your stepdad for Christmas.
Somehow I don't think there's going to be lack of a standardized API much like OpenGL or DirectX even if it's possible to write code for the GPU as easily as the CPU.
The APIs at the most basic level allow Joe and Bob to build their own system, throw whatever graphics card they can find in it and have the same game run on both systems.
As soon as you start coding for a specific GPU you're going to be treating PCs like consoles. I don't care to have to buy multiple graphics cards to play various games.
APIs are for compatibility and general purpose use. The option of flexibility is great for industry use where you're running rendering farms all running identical hardware and custom software.
There are few good programmers out there that have no "great" ideas of their own that they're tossing around.
If you want them to work on your ideas you're going to have to pay them.
The ellusive qualitity programmer that can feasibly code for free probably has no car, no job, and still lives at home. The demographic that most fits is 15 year olds.
So if you're lucky you'll find some high schooler that has nothing better to do and no reason to worry about money. And on top of that actually knows how to program.
Otherwise you need to learn to program yourself just like most people who have great ideas for programming projects.
I didn't learn to program so other people could tell me what to make.
but some jackasses decided to mess with things they knew nothing about.
I'll get my towel.
Instead of having to haul up screens and input devices for each specialized computer you only need one set for all them.
They could fly up dozens of these designed to do specific tasks and then hook them up to a docking station one at a time when needed.
No doubt there is at least one set somewhere in the shuttle and space station already. Why send up a monitor when you already have one available to you?
With a mortgage you're stuck paying it until it's done.
With cars you can do things to cut costs. Like carpool. Get an electric car. Buy used. Find a different job. Ride a bus. Telecommute. Your mortgage isn't going to adapt.
In your calculation that good chunk of the way leaves about $67,000 worth of gas you've saved over the life of the mortgage at 24mpg.
The biggest savings is in the ability to pay the mortgage off in 15 years as opposed to 30. If I lived in town that extra money going into the mortgage every month would be part of the minimum payment for the full 30 years.
The amount I'd save in gas doesn't come close to covering the amount needed to pay off that more expensive mortgage in 15 years.
People are freaking out about gas not realizing it's a flexible bill and there are better ways to save money.
Carpool is a simple Google Maps based app I wrote.
Your employer (or you) can create an account for your place of work. All the employees can then create an account and join the account created for the workplace. Just send your coworkers the username and public password for the place of business so they can join the group. The public password can't be used to log into the account. It's just to help maintain your privacy.
You can then see (or have the site tell you an approximation of) who would be best to carpool with.
Even though I live 50 miles out of town I always seem to find at least one coworker to carpool with which cuts my gas bill in half.
For the curious, I'd have to drive 1 million miles at $4 a gallon before I spend as much money in gas as I save on my mortgage.
The family Christmas photo for my family included me, my wife, our 9 month old and two cats.
Now it would be perfectly reasonable to expect me and my wife to sit still for 10 seconds while waiting for the camera to snap the picture.
So instead I took 7 pictures and then pieced them all together so it looked like we were all sitting together. Just in case anyone thought it was real I added a snowy scene out the window (we live in AZ) and a faint image of Santa walking in the snow.
It's a great way to put a scene together that would otherwise be impossible. Fake but accurate.
We got Netflix to save money on renting and/or buying DVDs. If Netflix can't deliver enough movies to make it worth the subscription fee then we may just cancel the service.
As someone else posted, it seems like most of the loss is from automated credits for late deliveries.
The easy way would be to use the already calculated depth field from the frame in the video that best matches the photo.
One of my favorite current abuses of PHP is running a game server written in PHP. The game is written in C# and communicates with the PHP server using sockets. The reason is pure laziness on my part. Maps are created through a PHP/AJAX web-app and stored in MySQL. The PHP server handles all the DB stuff and passes it down to the game client via binary strings. I didn't care to have to rewrite PHP code as C# code just for a simple server.
It would probably be more efficient to have a binary data type (a simple byte array) and a string data type.
I have around 300 DVDs. I have less than a dozen VHS tapes that I'd like to replace with DVDs at some point if I can find them cheap enough. If I could find a bargain bin of $5 blu-ray discs then I might consider upgrading my favorite DVDs. But even at $5 each that would be $1500 to replace them all. It's just never going to happen.
I can't justify spending more than $15 for a DVD unless it's an outstanding movie which is rare. Blu-Ray discs havn't even hit that price point.
As for HD, my motivation for upgrading the TV is safety. I don't like the idea of a big bulky CRT tv being within reach of a grabby little 2 year old's hands. So I'm planning to buy a larger HD LCD TV and mount it on the wall out of reach. It'll free up floor space and be safter.
The other hurdle is portable players. I can buy a DVD and watch it at home or in the car on a portable player. People aren't going to want to have to buy a movie twice just so their kids can watch it in the car. A home DVD player plus a portable DVD player is still much cheaper than a single Blu Ray player.
So I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Blu-Ray. They need cheaper players and bargain bin movies. Until then, it's going to be only for those people who like to spend their money on that sort of thing. Not the mass market.
The current version can't connect to the internet. The MIT students are trying to see if they can get networking on it without going past the $12 price point.
The thing hasn't been updated in a long time so their goal is to see if there's better tech that can be put together for the same price.
"Rather than a laptop, the unit will act as a desktop computer and plug directly into a standard television."
A big expense for cheap computers is the monitor. So instead they're going to make it work with a standard TV like the original Apples did.
Keyboards in bulk should be easy to get cheaply. You can get a keyboard for $4 on NewEgg. No doubt they cost NewEgg half that or less. Since these computers are using such old tech they could probably fit the entire computer into a standard size keyboard.
I thought that McDonald's case was resolved years ago.
Running MMOs can take a lot of resources depending on what kind of functionality you want to provide. While in theory "anyone" could run their own server, logistically it won't happen.
And that's of course on top of the whole community issue. There needs to be enough flexibility so that my server has something different to offer than their server.
I had an old linksys router that didn't seem to work properly all of a sudden. After looking into it a bit I realized that I had mixed up a couple power supplies so it wasn't getting enough voltage. After plugging in the correct power supply it worked great again. Not so oddly enough.
I've been using a Linksys NR041 (costs about $30) for years and have never had a problem with it. It's a pretty basic router that does what I need it to (block and forward ports). Maybe the issue with more expensive consumer routers is that they're half assed versions of expensive routers. I'd rather have a basic router that does just enough but works than a half assed router that wants to pretend it can do things.
I do have a Conext UPS that everything is plugged into so that takes care of any power fluxuation issues.
The price point needs to be there as well. Companies need to pick a format and stick with it and get the price point low enough that people can afford the new media.
With the cartridge you could order as much storage as you needed for that particular game. Now companies are trying to find a one size fits all solution which will never exist. ###GB will never be enough for everyone.
My guess is that eventually solid state drives will replace the current one size fits all approach. You don't have to upgrade your computer every time a larger flash drive comes out.
Exactly. The reason I have broadband is for school work and because I run web-sites out of house. My cable company is nice enough to not block port 80. Web-sites + AdSense equals a lot more income than the cost of the connection. If the internet wasn't paying for itself we might very well go with something cheaper. Although it is only $30 a month plus it unlockes expanded basic cable for free. We have to pay for basic through the HOA. The cable guy told us that would happen and that they didn't care. A lot of cable companies put a filter on the line to prevent that sort of thing.
Note to others, purchase high speed internet before you purchase expanded basic if you're in an HOA that requires you pay for some sort of cable service. You might just unlock it for free.
A lot of people simply don't need to spend the $30-$50 for an internet connection they barely use. The same goes for cellphones. I used to have a cell phone. So did my wife. That was costing us about $80 a month. As soon as the contract expired we went with a trac fone which costs as much as we want it to with a minimum of about $7 a month to keep it active.
People spend a lot of money for a lot of different things and then are shocked to find out that others don't actually need them and put their money to good use elsewhere.
$80 a month put on your mortgage instead would save you a year or so paying it off (depending on your principle of course) and thousands of dollars over the life of the loan. So really, all that extra money you're spending is not just costing the amount you spend but the amount of interest you now have to pay because you didn't use the money to pay off debts.
Although my primary goal as a kid was to be a game programmer, by the time I was old enough to actually pursue the career I realized what a crappy job it is with long hours. So I do web development instead and was careful when choosing jobs to ensure I'd only be working mon-fri from about 9-5. That gives me plenty of free time to spend time with the family and work on my own personal game/web projects. I also make enough that my wife doesn't have to work and we can still have nice things.
As long as the pay is good and it doesn't ruin your life then it's a good job. An "exciting" job that ruins your homelife isn't worth having either. And unfortunatly, most high paying jobs either demand long hours or they're "boring" tech jobs.
The other thing people tend to forget is that all jobs are pretty boring. It's the people you work with that make them enjoyable.
http://cubia.dawnofthegeeks.com/ is a mirror of wikipedia that takes takes the mediawiki database and converts it into a static easy to manage database. To find an article in the DB the title is lc'd and MD5'd and the first two characters are the table and then the entire MD5 is the key for the entry in the table.
Throw in a MediaWiki parser and you have your own lightweight mirror. Every page has a link back to the original Wikipedia entry.
Not so surprisingly a 933Mhz system can't handle Wikipedia. But it can handle my version.
This setup also works on GoDaddy.
BTW, step 2 is "Ads"
Step 1: find a pile of free information on the net and host it
Step 2: put ads on it
Step 3: profit!
Script kiddies like to skip step 1 because they're too lazy to find a way to make the pile of information easily managable with limited resources.