Yes, and now you have hundreds of tons of batteries in landfills. Not to mention, it takes a hell of a lot more energy (as well as raw materials) to make a battery. Great idea. Maybe you should like, use your brain, next time.
The belkin adapter works fine with the Ralink drivers, although the driver is sort of buggy and doesn't recognize it if it's plugged into a 2.0 port. It works fine in 1.1 ports.
Given that, WLAN support in Linux is still pretty abysmal. Gotta thank the vendors for that one.
What exactly do you mean by "calculus"? A bucket is an example of an integrator; applied calculus is rather trivial stuff. Catching a frisbee is an example of a very interesting feedback system, but i don't see any calculus there. Your brain doesn't calculate the precise trajectory of the frisbee; it simply assesses its position, velocity, and environmental factor and produces an appropriate response. Apart from the requisite vision and locomotion systems, it's not really that complicated. The fascinating part is how a brain can dynamically create and improve its control systems and equations. This is something that has not been replicated yet.
Last I checked, I can buy printer cartridges from about a million different sources. If I want the OEM cartidges, I can buy them. There are also lots of remanufactured/refilled cartridges available. If a company starts pulling shit like putting in chips that prevent refilling, I start to avoid them. Right now, my printer is a Samsung laser that has $50 cartridges that put out 3000 pages and can be refilled about 4-5 times for next to nothing. It was cheap, and the quality and reliability beats the crap out of any of the garbage HP puts out these days.
You hit the law of diminishing returns very quickly. As in, getting that last 10% of the customers would make 90% of your development budget. It's not generally worth it. That's why we have to have laws like the ADA -- the expense of adding a wheelchair ramp far outweighs any additional business it will bring.
I would say, do all the easy stuff first. Supporting the last couple of browser versions is easy enough if you stick to standards. Stop when it gets too difficult/expensive.
If used-game sales indeed reduce the amount of money to be made in the industry, innovation will increase. A lot. If first-person shooters sell well and make bundles of money, everyone makes first person shooters and there is zero innovation. Why fix something that is not broken? This is pretty much what is happening right now -- in the last couple of years, there were only a handful of innovative games and a metric shit-ton of mediocre crap.
If, on the other hand, making a successful game was difficult and risky, there would be a lot more innovation and probably higher overall quality. A game company's goal should be to make great games, not simply to maximize shareholder value.
First, I'm not sure what you are talking about with the razor analogy. Gillette has patents on their razors and nobody else can make compatible blades. This is still a poor analogy, since an operating system is licensed and not sold. Unlike a razor handle, you can't own Windows or OS X, you can only obtain a license to use it. As such, you have to follow any license requirements, since it is a binding contract. Similarly, if you lease a car or rent an apartment, there are all kinds of requirements you have to follow.
Exactly. It is easy to make money selling hardware. It is next to impossible to make money by selling operating systems, unless you monopolize the market. Not to mention, actually having proper support for the x86 platform would be rather difficult for Apple to do. Even Linux still has trouble with hardware support, after 15 years of development. Selling OS X alone would kill the hardware business and fail as a software venture.
There are a few prototypes. Search for OTEC on google. The problem is, there isn't enough of a temperature difference to efficiently extract any useful energy. You basically have to pump HUGE quantities of water (like a 10m diameter pipe) to the surface and have enormous heat exchangers and stuff that extract the energy. You use a lot of energy to pump the water and it requires enormous capital investment for very small amounts of energy.
This is a horrible idea, because it makes your vote public. This means you could buy votes -- ask people to show them the receipt with the unique ID and verify which way they voted. We have a secret ballot system for a very good reason.
I could see your point -- if the artists actually made money by selling CDs. In reality, the artist has to pay for the recording and mastering costs and then try to recover the investment from the royalties (which are something like 5% of sales). If we estimate that 20% of the cost of a CD goes to the store, and 10% for manufacturing and distribution, the publisher gets about 65% of the retail price for doing next to nothing, and the artist does not generally make money at all.
Free software in general does not come with support. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. If you want professional support, buy a commercial Linux distribution from a vendor. It's the vendor's job to fix problems and support the product.
Windows doesn't have virus protection, and commercial antivirus programs don't have this issue. It's most likely your BIOS. Turn it off, it's pretty much useless anyway.
Refrigerators are fairly efficient, actually. They have a high power draw, but unless you open it every 5 minutes, it will very rarely cycle on. Heating and air conditioning are by far the worst offenders. Even gas heaters use a lot of power to run the fan.
Well, the difference is that none of those things run _continuously_ like a computer does. The fridge only runs about 10-30% of the time. The hairdryer, microwave oven, and so on run for a few minutes / day. A really power-hungry computer can jack up your electric bill pretty fast. If you use up 1kW on average, that's a $100/month electric bill.
Actually, I was using Ubuntu. The drivers were a major bitch. It turned out they would not see the network card if it was plugged into a USB 2.0 port, but worked OK with USB 1.1. Weirdest thing I ever saw. And then it took another 2 hours to figure out how to interface wpa_supplicant to the campus network.
Bullshit. I have a few old boxes sitting in the basement with UPS labels on them. Some are 10 years old. The thermal labels on them are just as readable as the day they were printed.
Inkjet will fade and smear horribly if it meets a single drop of water (rain, for instance). It won't last a week in the mail.
Thermal really is the way to go. Inkjet labels will get smudged easily; they are very sensitive to moisture. Laser is OK, but it has a tendency to chip off with handling. Thermal labels are very hard to destroy. If the package heats up to the point where the label is impossible to read, it will catch fire. Besides, laser toner doesn't like heat, either -- it will melt and smudge. Just about everyone uses thermal printers. There is a good reason for that.
The motor in the xbox spins normally, just like it does for any other CD or DVD (xbox discs are ordinary DVDs). Soldering the wires in a different order is necessary because the firmware is designed for a different drive and the motor connections are in the wrong order on the replacement's PCB.
Not to mention, if the disk is not signed or encrypted, it would be trivial to make the xbox run arbitrary code. It is then possible to do just about anything. Of course, it is most likely that Microsoft will fix this exploit with a software update/hardware revision.
I don't think Microsoft needs to worry. They basically won the browser wars, which means they control the web. GMail could not exist if MSIE didn't support its javascript magic. Microsoft can guarantee that web applications will never compete with their Windows-based ones simply by choosing what to support in MSIE.
When Linux becomes an actual viable alternative to Windows, I can see that happening. Right now, it's not even close. I don't mean to troll, but any OS which requires 5 hours to configure a wireless card (if you're lucky) is not exactly a Windows alternative.
Some people work harder than others and should reasonably expect to be compensated to a greater degree.
Let's look at a CEO of a large company who is doing an extremely poor job (let's say the GM guy). He makes about 500 times the salary of an average employee. If he is fired or quits, he will get a huge golden parachute (something like $5 million). Are you saying he works 500x harder than an average GM employee? How would that even be possible?
I think in a perfect society everyone would work as hard as they were able and everyone would receive equally.
Since most people never work as hard as they are able to, this system would be inherently unfair. In any fair system, people are compensated by job performance and job difficulty. A good system should additionally guarantee that everyone will receive the very basic human necessities (housing, food, healthcare), if they are unable to work.
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Yes, and now you have hundreds of tons of batteries in landfills. Not to mention, it takes a hell of a lot more energy (as well as raw materials) to make a battery. Great idea. Maybe you should like, use your brain, next time.
Ummm, because Apples use the same chip, and it might not be a software problem (if it was, they would have fixed it by now).
The belkin adapter works fine with the Ralink drivers, although the driver is sort of buggy and doesn't recognize it if it's plugged into a 2.0 port. It works fine in 1.1 ports.
Given that, WLAN support in Linux is still pretty abysmal. Gotta thank the vendors for that one.
What exactly do you mean by "calculus"? A bucket is an example of an integrator; applied calculus is rather trivial stuff. Catching a frisbee is an example of a very interesting feedback system, but i don't see any calculus there. Your brain doesn't calculate the precise trajectory of the frisbee; it simply assesses its position, velocity, and environmental factor and produces an appropriate response. Apart from the requisite vision and locomotion systems, it's not really that complicated. The fascinating part is how a brain can dynamically create and improve its control systems and equations. This is something that has not been replicated yet.
Last I checked, I can buy printer cartridges from about a million different sources. If I want the OEM cartidges, I can buy them. There are also lots of remanufactured/refilled cartridges available. If a company starts pulling shit like putting in chips that prevent refilling, I start to avoid them. Right now, my printer is a Samsung laser that has $50 cartridges that put out 3000 pages and can be refilled about 4-5 times for next to nothing. It was cheap, and the quality and reliability beats the crap out of any of the garbage HP puts out these days.
You hit the law of diminishing returns very quickly. As in, getting that last 10% of the customers would make 90% of your development budget. It's not generally worth it. That's why we have to have laws like the ADA -- the expense of adding a wheelchair ramp far outweighs any additional business it will bring.
I would say, do all the easy stuff first. Supporting the last couple of browser versions is easy enough if you stick to standards. Stop when it gets too difficult/expensive.
If used-game sales indeed reduce the amount of money to be made in the industry, innovation will increase. A lot. If first-person shooters sell well and make bundles of money, everyone makes first person shooters and there is zero innovation. Why fix something that is not broken? This is pretty much what is happening right now -- in the last couple of years, there were only a handful of innovative games and a metric shit-ton of mediocre crap.
If, on the other hand, making a successful game was difficult and risky, there would be a lot more innovation and probably higher overall quality. A game company's goal should be to make great games, not simply to maximize shareholder value.
First, I'm not sure what you are talking about with the razor analogy. Gillette has patents on their razors and nobody else can make compatible blades. This is still a poor analogy, since an operating system is licensed and not sold. Unlike a razor handle, you can't own Windows or OS X, you can only obtain a license to use it. As such, you have to follow any license requirements, since it is a binding contract. Similarly, if you lease a car or rent an apartment, there are all kinds of requirements you have to follow.
I honestly don't see what makes Microsoft a monopoly
It wouldn't be the 90% marketshare, would it?
Exactly. It is easy to make money selling hardware. It is next to impossible to make money by selling operating systems, unless you monopolize the market. Not to mention, actually having proper support for the x86 platform would be rather difficult for Apple to do. Even Linux still has trouble with hardware support, after 15 years of development. Selling OS X alone would kill the hardware business and fail as a software venture.
There are a few prototypes. Search for OTEC on google. The problem is, there isn't enough of a temperature difference to efficiently extract any useful energy. You basically have to pump HUGE quantities of water (like a 10m diameter pipe) to the surface and have enormous heat exchangers and stuff that extract the energy. You use a lot of energy to pump the water and it requires enormous capital investment for very small amounts of energy.
This is a horrible idea, because it makes your vote public. This means you could buy votes -- ask people to show them the receipt with the unique ID and verify which way they voted. We have a secret ballot system for a very good reason.
I could see your point -- if the artists actually made money by selling CDs. In reality, the artist has to pay for the recording and mastering costs and then try to recover the investment from the royalties (which are something like 5% of sales). If we estimate that 20% of the cost of a CD goes to the store, and 10% for manufacturing and distribution, the publisher gets about 65% of the retail price for doing next to nothing, and the artist does not generally make money at all.
Free software in general does not come with support. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. If you want professional support, buy a commercial Linux distribution from a vendor. It's the vendor's job to fix problems and support the product.
Windows doesn't have virus protection, and commercial antivirus programs don't have this issue. It's most likely your BIOS. Turn it off, it's pretty much useless anyway.
Refrigerators are fairly efficient, actually. They have a high power draw, but unless you open it every 5 minutes, it will very rarely cycle on. Heating and air conditioning are by far the worst offenders. Even gas heaters use a lot of power to run the fan.
Well, the difference is that none of those things run _continuously_ like a computer does. The fridge only runs about 10-30% of the time. The hairdryer, microwave oven, and so on run for a few minutes / day. A really power-hungry computer can jack up your electric bill pretty fast. If you use up 1kW on average, that's a $100/month electric bill.
Actually, I was using Ubuntu. The drivers were a major bitch. It turned out they would not see the network card if it was plugged into a USB 2.0 port, but worked OK with USB 1.1. Weirdest thing I ever saw. And then it took another 2 hours to figure out how to interface wpa_supplicant to the campus network.
Bullshit. I have a few old boxes sitting in the basement with UPS labels on them. Some are 10 years old. The thermal labels on them are just as readable as the day they were printed.
Inkjet will fade and smear horribly if it meets a single drop of water (rain, for instance). It won't last a week in the mail.
Thermal really is the way to go. Inkjet labels will get smudged easily; they are very sensitive to moisture. Laser is OK, but it has a tendency to chip off with handling. Thermal labels are very hard to destroy. If the package heats up to the point where the label is impossible to read, it will catch fire. Besides, laser toner doesn't like heat, either -- it will melt and smudge. Just about everyone uses thermal printers. There is a good reason for that.
The motor in the xbox spins normally, just like it does for any other CD or DVD (xbox discs are ordinary DVDs). Soldering the wires in a different order is necessary because the firmware is designed for a different drive and the motor connections are in the wrong order on the replacement's PCB.
Not to mention, if the disk is not signed or encrypted, it would be trivial to make the xbox run arbitrary code. It is then possible to do just about anything. Of course, it is most likely that Microsoft will fix this exploit with a software update/hardware revision.
I don't think Microsoft needs to worry. They basically won the browser wars, which means they control the web. GMail could not exist if MSIE didn't support its javascript magic. Microsoft can guarantee that web applications will never compete with their Windows-based ones simply by choosing what to support in MSIE.
When Linux becomes an actual viable alternative to Windows, I can see that happening. Right now, it's not even close. I don't mean to troll, but any OS which requires 5 hours to configure a wireless card (if you're lucky) is not exactly a Windows alternative.
Some people work harder than others and should reasonably expect to be compensated to a greater degree.
Let's look at a CEO of a large company who is doing an extremely poor job (let's say the GM guy). He makes about 500 times the salary of an average employee. If he is fired or quits, he will get a huge golden parachute (something like $5 million). Are you saying he works 500x harder than an average GM employee? How would that even be possible?
I think in a perfect society everyone would work as hard as they were able and everyone would receive equally.
Since most people never work as hard as they are able to, this system would be inherently unfair. In any fair system, people are compensated by job performance and job difficulty. A good system should additionally guarantee that everyone will receive the very basic human necessities (housing, food, healthcare), if they are unable to work.