I think with the OP is really asking for is an easy to use development environment although of course he suggested BASIC. While BASIC is really a pretty crappy language it was easy to use on Windows to produce decent applications. Corona SDK isn't quite that easy (yet), but it is vastly easier than Java for sure and also allows you to produce apps which run on Android or iOS. At $199/year for a single target or $349 to make apps for either iOS or Andriod it is very reasonably priced and of course you get free upgrades any time they release them (so long as you keep paying the yearly license). Free to try as well, great product in my opinion (I am not affiliated in any way with Ansca Mobile).
I recommend Crobots. It is a fairly simple game where you create a program that operates a robot on a battlefield vs another robot that someone else has written. Limited C syntax but it has the basic programming structures. Way back in the late 80s I spent all summer building robots with Crobots.
I call BS anyway. There are only 50, is it too much to have some schmoe simply look the damned tax up on a sheet of paper? WTF?
If only it were so simple. The US sales tax system is a byzantine mess. You have state taxes, city taxes, transit authority taxes, public improvement fees, etc which apply based on where the sale occurred. That is the easy piece though. The difficult part is that the tax rates themselves can be different based off the products. Some products are taxable in one state but not in others. A simple example is plain bottled water which is pretty much untaxed everywhere, and flavored bottled water which is taxable in most states. Then you have tax free holidays where a certain class of products are tax free for 3 days (typically back to school), but it is a different set of days for different areas of the country of course.
To top all that off, cities, states, etc are constantly changing the rules as to which products are taxable and which are not. It is a real pain in the a** to deal with, but all of the national retail chains have to deal with it, so why can't Amazon and the other online retail companies? The best case would be to just have a national sales tax that is the same everywhere instead of the current stupid system. Instead of forcing companies to devote millions of person hours to figuring out what taxes to pay, people could actually be doing something productive.
It is unrealistic for every company to figure out what sales tax applies in every state, that is why there is a company that does it for you: Vertex. I recently worked on a project to implement this software for a large retailer. Amazon has far more technical knowledge than the average bricks and mortar retailer, this is no reasonable excuse as to why they cannot pay local sales tax. It is long past time for the online retailers to start paying sales tax just like every other business.
Not having to pay sales tax is one of my primary reasons that I often buy products online. Online retailers already have a lot of advantages for many types of products, there is no reason that they should be subsidized over local retailers.
Does offering to strike a deal with one of your competitors (Yahoo) to prevent them from joining with another competitor (Microsoft) not count? I remember a time not that many years ago when Microsoft could do no wrong. Just as opinion on Microsoft eventually soured when they began to abuse their position in the market, so will people's opinions of Google and Apple.
Companies are not 'evil', they are just trying to maximize their profits. Sooner or later this always results in a powerful company having to crush some smaller upstart by using their power in the market to reduce competition. Any company presented with the option of 1) "abuse my position in the market" or 2) "accept lower profits" is almost always going to take option #1.
What good is a real time quote without the ability to click on the quote and make a trade? Anyone that cares about real time stock quotes already has a brokerage account that gives this to them free anyway. Most brokerages do charge for level II quotes though.
Now when Google gives me free stock trades and free real time quotes they will have my business! Not sure how they will make money off of it though.
Pepsi is launching a promotion during the super bowl where you will be able to win free mp3 downloads from amazon's mp3 download service from bottle caps, lids, containers, etc. Too bad I don't drink any Pepsi products.
Right now there's some zombie network sending around a stock market scam, of which I am getting roughly 300 copies per hour, even though spamassassin correctly classifies virtually all other unwanted mail.
Do you happen to use Ameritrade? I started receiving these emails this Sunday myself (July 30). Since I always use disposable email addresses I immediatly noticed that the email was being sent to the disposable address I had created for Ameritrade. I sent them an email complaining about it and accusing them of either giving away my email address to some third party who was spamming me or that someone had stolen customer account information from them. I have yet to hear any response back from them.
I love my tivo, but how can any of you condone this stupid patent? The technology is obvious and should not be patentable. In reality tivo is little more than an advanced VCR, using a disk drive instead of a tape and with a few fancy bells and whistles thrown in. This is just another sign that our patent system is broken. The ones who suffer are the consumers. Now we must pay higher prices and we will suffer from less innovation due to tivo being able to stifle competition in the PVR market.
The Nomad's design is an atrocity. It's so damn hard to navigate when you have 40 GB of MP3s on there....
The ipod isn't all that great either. It is a serious pain to navigate with 8000 mp3s from 500+ artists. Really ought to be an option to add another menu level that groups artists and songs by the first letter or first couple letters.
In reality the only effective method is to build playlists using itunes. Trying to pick individual songs out of a large collection on an ipod is difficult at best.
It has only a little to do with the OS or user base.
A much better comparison would be to compare the number of disease a small isolated group of people get vs. the number of disease a group of people living in a large city that is at the center of a large trading empire.
If 90%+ of all computers were Macs we would have less virus issues than Windows users currently do, but we would still have a lot of issues.
There is very little anyone can do to prevent an average user from clicking 'Ok' on a web page and downloading some spyware or virus onto their machine. Same goes for opening up attachments in emails that contain virus/spyware programs. Most people are just not well educated on how to keep unwanted programs off their systems.
Anyone who downloads all the patches from Microsoft and doesn't execute unknown programs will have extremly few (if any) issues with viruses infecting their systems.
Seriously, this isn't a troll. Why are such trivial features of google search such a big deal that they make the front page of slashdot? The poster even points out that Yahoo! already has this feature.
It generally helps a fast growing company to switch from private to public ownership. There are more regulatory hoops to jump through, but the business process opens up. Since Google was already keenly in the public eye, this move did indeed help the company seem more transparent.
And don't forget that the owners made a ridiculous amount of money.
Do you really want Microsoft software/hardware/formats/DRM as the technology interface between you and content providers?
As opposed to the totally open source products Sony produces right? Competition is good for us as consumers. I would much rather have the option to buy Xbox 2 or PS3 than to be stuck using proprietary products like Sony's betamax, minidisc, and memory sticks.
Sony has continuously tried to lock users into their products and has often succeeded. The PS and PS2 are great examples of that. Just because they have not been as successful at it as Microsoft is no reason to demonize MS in favor of Sony. Both companies will screw you if they have the chance.
It is all well and good to talk about how we are all used to using google today. I certainly am. The truth still is that even google's search results are very often quite bad and there is vast room for imporvement.
Google has a great product but the barrier to entry in the search engine market is not very high. Twenty years from now I very seriously doubt google will be so dominant. The web will change so much over in the future that it will hardly be recoginizable as even being the same thing as it is today.
The vast majority of spyware is installed when users click 'Yes' to the question (or a variant to the question) 'Should you always trust software from Gator Corporation'. Not being a Microsoft defender, just pointing out the facts.
Microsoft/Internet Explorer has a lot of issues, but you can never prevent people from installing software off the internet that includes spyware, thus programs to clean up spyware will always be required regardless of how many security measures are created to prevent unauthorized access to the computer.
Who provides that software is up to the market to decide. Considering that most people who use Windows as their operating system will need defense vs. spyware, and that if Windows always comes with spyware protection it will make the life of those who produce it more difficult since it will always be installed on every new machine, I am 100% for Microsoft including spyware protection as part of the base operating system that people get with every machine.
If the software market can provide a solution that is superior to what Microsoft provides then they can charge money for it and those who need/want the additional protection can buy it. If Microsoft's solution is adequete and there is no room for a competitor, who cares? The problem is fixed and we all live happily ever after.
The Slashdot community always seems to put Microsoft into a lose/lose situation. If they create a new program and add it to the operating system they are destroying competition. If they don't then everyone claims their software sucks
While I don't think lighting up my entire house with LEDs seems very desirable, the ForeverBright LED Christmas Lights look interesting (from the NY Times article concerning the Vos Pad).
Also add in the marketing (which is probably the biggest single cost) and the profit margin isn't as high as you think.
Marketing being the highest cost is without a doubt the truth. One of the big things to consider however is that the cost / value of marketing is directly proportional to the amount being spent by others who are competing with you for the same audience.
Marketing is rather like the prisoners dilemma. If your competitors spend $1000000, you have to spend $1000000 just to stay in the game. Most of the cost of marketing in the music business is caused by competition between the music companies. Thus if file sharing of music takes money away from the music industry, forcing them all to cut marketing expenses, the net effect will not be so bad as the music industry complains. While their marketing will not be as 'good' as it was before, in comparison to the other music companies it will be the same as it was before.
A nice additional benefit is that it will make independant labels more competitive because lowering the marketing done by the major music lables will lower the barrier to entry for the independants. This should over time lead to higher quality music compared to much of the music available now that is just decent but very well marketed.
Forcing musicians and record labels to compete on quality instead of marketing is a good thing as far as I and the rest of the music listening public is concerned.
The queries required to find how person A is linked to person B via C, D and E are quite processor-intensive, if there are hundreds of people involved. That'll be where they're spending the money on new hardware. If course, they may be using a custom DB and not an RDBMS, in which case you'd be right.
The queries would be fairly slow if you actually had to hit the DB for every one. Far more likely they would store the relationships in a DB and have an trivial application that loads the data into memory for searching.
Say each user is identified by a 4 byte key and every user has 100 friends. To store that in memory takes 400 bytes or so per user at least, more likely 1000 bytes or so depending on the data structure. Anyway say it takes 1K per user, storing all that data in memory still only amounts to nothing excessive for say 10 million users (10G). Using a caching system would reduce the memory requirements substantially.
So then you get a list of say 20,000 users that are within 4 levels of a person. You then check the status/relationship types by accessing the database (again with a cache in between).
Of course that was more of a worst case scenario as I doubt most people would have 100 links and most relationships tend to be heavily cross linked so you wouldn't get 20K hits normally.
Anyway it isn't so complicated as you make it out to be. This is very similar (but less complex) to some associative analyis data mining that I've done in the past. The main thing you need is a lot of memory to keep from hitting disks or querying from the DB. CPU shouldn't really be much of an issue here.
Symantec issued an alert about Slammer to DeepSight Threat Management System subscribers "at approximately 9 p.m. PST on Friday, Jan. 24." Most of the rest of the Internet didn't spot Slammer until shortly after midnight EST on Saturday, Jan. 25th.
For those of you who don't know the difference, EST is 3 hours ahead of PST. Thus DeepSight identified Slammer at about the same time as the 'rest of the Internet'
I realized after posting that I had the incorrect dates for when the games were released. Modem wars was released in 1988, Command HQ in 1990, and Global Conquest in 1992. All three before Dune II which was described in the article as the first PC RTS.
The true RTS pioneer was Dan Bunten. I was absoultly astounded after reading the article on gamespot that Dan Bunten's games Modem Wars (1986), Command HQ (1988), and Global Conquest (1990) were not even mentioned. Dan Bunten was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Internation Game Developers Association in 1998.
Tragically Dan Bunten abandoned the field and changed his pronoun to her (and his name from Dan to Danielle) in 1991. Dani Bunten passed away in 1998 of metastatic lung cancer at the young age of 49.
A good history of Dani Bunten's accomplishments is available from The Underdogs. Also here in Google cache
Geron (GERN) owns 5 of them according to a statement by them today. Actually they were very surprised to hear that 60 stem cell lines exist which qualify for the NIH guidelines for their research. My guess would be that the 60 number is incorrect and in reality is closer to 20.
There is another (private) company in Australia which owns several as well. I cannot recall the name off the top of my head.
On the same note, Geron owns most (maybe all) of the patents associated with embryonic stem cells (not adult stem cells). Their web site is http://www.geron.com Geron is generally considered to be the dominant company as far as embryonic stem cells are concerned.
As far as the money issue goes, Geron nor any other private company will see much benefit from it. The primary benefit to companies in the field will be that federal funding will increase the number of people doing research in the field, which will give the companies access to a larger group of talent going foward.
Slashdot Mirror
I think with the OP is really asking for is an easy to use development environment although of course he suggested BASIC. While BASIC is really a pretty crappy language it was easy to use on Windows to produce decent applications. Corona SDK isn't quite that easy (yet), but it is vastly easier than Java for sure and also allows you to produce apps which run on Android or iOS. At $199/year for a single target or $349 to make apps for either iOS or Andriod it is very reasonably priced and of course you get free upgrades any time they release them (so long as you keep paying the yearly license). Free to try as well, great product in my opinion (I am not affiliated in any way with Ansca Mobile).
I recommend Crobots. It is a fairly simple game where you create a program that operates a robot on a battlefield vs another robot that someone else has written. Limited C syntax but it has the basic programming structures. Way back in the late 80s I spent all summer building robots with Crobots.
I call BS anyway. There are only 50, is it too much to have some schmoe simply look the damned tax up on a sheet of paper? WTF?
If only it were so simple. The US sales tax system is a byzantine mess. You have state taxes, city taxes, transit authority taxes, public improvement fees, etc which apply based on where the sale occurred. That is the easy piece though. The difficult part is that the tax rates themselves can be different based off the products. Some products are taxable in one state but not in others. A simple example is plain bottled water which is pretty much untaxed everywhere, and flavored bottled water which is taxable in most states. Then you have tax free holidays where a certain class of products are tax free for 3 days (typically back to school), but it is a different set of days for different areas of the country of course.
To top all that off, cities, states, etc are constantly changing the rules as to which products are taxable and which are not. It is a real pain in the a** to deal with, but all of the national retail chains have to deal with it, so why can't Amazon and the other online retail companies? The best case would be to just have a national sales tax that is the same everywhere instead of the current stupid system. Instead of forcing companies to devote millions of person hours to figuring out what taxes to pay, people could actually be doing something productive.
It is unrealistic for every company to figure out what sales tax applies in every state, that is why there is a company that does it for you: Vertex. I recently worked on a project to implement this software for a large retailer. Amazon has far more technical knowledge than the average bricks and mortar retailer, this is no reasonable excuse as to why they cannot pay local sales tax. It is long past time for the online retailers to start paying sales tax just like every other business.
Not having to pay sales tax is one of my primary reasons that I often buy products online. Online retailers already have a lot of advantages for many types of products, there is no reason that they should be subsidized over local retailers.
So sending out funny emails to large groups of people all the time is going to get me a promotion? Sweet!
Does offering to strike a deal with one of your competitors (Yahoo) to prevent them from joining with another competitor (Microsoft) not count? I remember a time not that many years ago when Microsoft could do no wrong. Just as opinion on Microsoft eventually soured when they began to abuse their position in the market, so will people's opinions of Google and Apple.
Companies are not 'evil', they are just trying to maximize their profits. Sooner or later this always results in a powerful company having to crush some smaller upstart by using their power in the market to reduce competition. Any company presented with the option of 1) "abuse my position in the market" or 2) "accept lower profits" is almost always going to take option #1.
What good is a real time quote without the ability to click on the quote and make a trade? Anyone that cares about real time stock quotes already has a brokerage account that gives this to them free anyway. Most brokerages do charge for level II quotes though.
Now when Google gives me free stock trades and free real time quotes they will have my business! Not sure how they will make money off of it though.
Pepsi is launching a promotion during the super bowl where you will be able to win free mp3 downloads from amazon's mp3 download service from bottle caps, lids, containers, etc. Too bad I don't drink any Pepsi products.
Pepsi To Launch Massive Giveaway of MP3s and Other Prizes
Pepsi Stuff web site
AmazonMP3.com
Right now there's some zombie network sending around a stock market scam, of which I am getting roughly 300 copies per hour, even though spamassassin correctly classifies virtually all other unwanted mail.
Do you happen to use Ameritrade? I started receiving these emails this Sunday myself (July 30). Since I always use disposable email addresses I immediatly noticed that the email was being sent to the disposable address I had created for Ameritrade. I sent them an email complaining about it and accusing them of either giving away my email address to some third party who was spamming me or that someone had stolen customer account information from them. I have yet to hear any response back from them.
I love my tivo, but how can any of you condone this stupid patent? The technology is obvious and should not be patentable. In reality tivo is little more than an advanced VCR, using a disk drive instead of a tape and with a few fancy bells and whistles thrown in. This is just another sign that our patent system is broken. The ones who suffer are the consumers. Now we must pay higher prices and we will suffer from less innovation due to tivo being able to stifle competition in the PVR market.
The ipod isn't all that great either. It is a serious pain to navigate with 8000 mp3s from 500+ artists. Really ought to be an option to add another menu level that groups artists and songs by the first letter or first couple letters.
In reality the only effective method is to build playlists using itunes. Trying to pick individual songs out of a large collection on an ipod is difficult at best.
It has only a little to do with the OS or user base. A much better comparison would be to compare the number of disease a small isolated group of people get vs. the number of disease a group of people living in a large city that is at the center of a large trading empire. If 90%+ of all computers were Macs we would have less virus issues than Windows users currently do, but we would still have a lot of issues. There is very little anyone can do to prevent an average user from clicking 'Ok' on a web page and downloading some spyware or virus onto their machine. Same goes for opening up attachments in emails that contain virus/spyware programs. Most people are just not well educated on how to keep unwanted programs off their systems. Anyone who downloads all the patches from Microsoft and doesn't execute unknown programs will have extremly few (if any) issues with viruses infecting their systems.
Seriously, this isn't a troll. Why are such trivial features of google search such a big deal that they make the front page of slashdot? The poster even points out that Yahoo! already has this feature.
It generally helps a fast growing company to switch from private to public ownership. There are more regulatory hoops to jump through, but the business process opens up. Since Google was already keenly in the public eye, this move did indeed help the company seem more transparent. And don't forget that the owners made a ridiculous amount of money.
As opposed to the totally open source products Sony produces right? Competition is good for us as consumers. I would much rather have the option to buy Xbox 2 or PS3 than to be stuck using proprietary products like Sony's betamax, minidisc, and memory sticks.
Sony has continuously tried to lock users into their products and has often succeeded. The PS and PS2 are great examples of that. Just because they have not been as successful at it as Microsoft is no reason to demonize MS in favor of Sony. Both companies will screw you if they have the chance.
It is all well and good to talk about how we are all used to using google today. I certainly am. The truth still is that even google's search results are very often quite bad and there is vast room for imporvement. Google has a great product but the barrier to entry in the search engine market is not very high. Twenty years from now I very seriously doubt google will be so dominant. The web will change so much over in the future that it will hardly be recoginizable as even being the same thing as it is today.
The vast majority of spyware is installed when users click 'Yes' to the question (or a variant to the question) 'Should you always trust software from Gator Corporation'. Not being a Microsoft defender, just pointing out the facts.
Microsoft/Internet Explorer has a lot of issues, but you can never prevent people from installing software off the internet that includes spyware, thus programs to clean up spyware will always be required regardless of how many security measures are created to prevent unauthorized access to the computer.
Who provides that software is up to the market to decide. Considering that most people who use Windows as their operating system will need defense vs. spyware, and that if Windows always comes with spyware protection it will make the life of those who produce it more difficult since it will always be installed on every new machine, I am 100% for Microsoft including spyware protection as part of the base operating system that people get with every machine.
If the software market can provide a solution that is superior to what Microsoft provides then they can charge money for it and those who need/want the additional protection can buy it. If Microsoft's solution is adequete and there is no room for a competitor, who cares? The problem is fixed and we all live happily ever after.
The Slashdot community always seems to put Microsoft into a lose/lose situation. If they create a new program and add it to the operating system they are destroying competition. If they don't then everyone claims their software sucks
While I don't think lighting up my entire house with LEDs seems very desirable, the ForeverBright LED Christmas Lights look interesting (from the NY Times article concerning the Vos Pad).
Also add in the marketing (which is probably the biggest single cost) and the profit margin isn't as high as you think.
Marketing being the highest cost is without a doubt the truth. One of the big things to consider however is that the cost / value of marketing is directly proportional to the amount being spent by others who are competing with you for the same audience.
Marketing is rather like the prisoners dilemma. If your competitors spend $1000000, you have to spend $1000000 just to stay in the game. Most of the cost of marketing in the music business is caused by competition between the music companies. Thus if file sharing of music takes money away from the music industry, forcing them all to cut marketing expenses, the net effect will not be so bad as the music industry complains. While their marketing will not be as 'good' as it was before, in comparison to the other music companies it will be the same as it was before.
A nice additional benefit is that it will make independant labels more competitive because lowering the marketing done by the major music lables will lower the barrier to entry for the independants. This should over time lead to higher quality music compared to much of the music available now that is just decent but very well marketed.
Forcing musicians and record labels to compete on quality instead of marketing is a good thing as far as I and the rest of the music listening public is concerned.
The queries would be fairly slow if you actually had to hit the DB for every one. Far more likely they would store the relationships in a DB and have an trivial application that loads the data into memory for searching.
Say each user is identified by a 4 byte key and every user has 100 friends. To store that in memory takes 400 bytes or so per user at least, more likely 1000 bytes or so depending on the data structure. Anyway say it takes 1K per user, storing all that data in memory still only amounts to nothing excessive for say 10 million users (10G). Using a caching system would reduce the memory requirements substantially.
So then you get a list of say 20,000 users that are within 4 levels of a person. You then check the status/relationship types by accessing the database (again with a cache in between).
Of course that was more of a worst case scenario as I doubt most people would have 100 links and most relationships tend to be heavily cross linked so you wouldn't get 20K hits normally.
Anyway it isn't so complicated as you make it out to be. This is very similar (but less complex) to some associative analyis data mining that I've done in the past. The main thing you need is a lot of memory to keep from hitting disks or querying from the DB. CPU shouldn't really be much of an issue here.
how on earth do you "educate" a spammer?
Haven't you ever seen Clockwork Orange?Symantec issued an alert about Slammer to DeepSight Threat Management System subscribers "at approximately 9 p.m. PST on Friday, Jan. 24." Most of the rest of the Internet didn't spot Slammer until shortly after midnight EST on Saturday, Jan. 25th.
For those of you who don't know the difference, EST is 3 hours ahead of PST. Thus DeepSight identified Slammer at about the same time as the 'rest of the Internet'I realized after posting that I had the incorrect dates for when the games were released. Modem wars was released in 1988, Command HQ in 1990, and Global Conquest in 1992. All three before Dune II which was described in the article as the first PC RTS.
The true RTS pioneer was Dan Bunten. I was absoultly astounded after reading the article on gamespot that Dan Bunten's games Modem Wars (1986), Command HQ (1988), and Global Conquest (1990) were not even mentioned. Dan Bunten was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Internation Game Developers Association in 1998.
Tragically Dan Bunten abandoned the field and changed his pronoun to her (and his name from Dan to Danielle) in 1991. Dani Bunten passed away in 1998 of metastatic lung cancer at the young age of 49.
A good history of Dani Bunten's accomplishments is available from The Underdogs. Also here in Google cache
Geron (GERN) owns 5 of them according to a statement by them today. Actually they were very surprised to hear that 60 stem cell lines exist which qualify for the NIH guidelines for their research. My guess would be that the 60 number is incorrect and in reality is closer to 20.
There is another (private) company in Australia which owns several as well. I cannot recall the name off the top of my head.
On the same note, Geron owns most (maybe all) of the patents associated with embryonic stem cells (not adult stem cells). Their web site is http://www.geron.com Geron is generally considered to be the dominant company as far as embryonic stem cells are concerned.
As far as the money issue goes, Geron nor any other private company will see much benefit from it. The primary benefit to companies in the field will be that federal funding will increase the number of people doing research in the field, which will give the companies access to a larger group of talent going foward.
I own stock in Geron.