Something like this would have been fun back in the 14.4k modem days. But I'm not sure how well this would work out in 2012. People expect way too much from their internet. Do they have a number they can call at 2 AM when it's not working? Running an ISP, even a small local one isn't a 1-3 person job at this point in time. If a switch dies do you have one on hand to replace it immediately, or does everyone go without internet for a day or two while you order a new one? Having n+1 redundancy is pretty big overhead if your n is a low number. If you have 1000 switches it's not a big difference in cost to have 1 or even 10 extra switches lying around for when stuff breaks. But when you have 2 switches, you now have to have 50% of your switch capacity sitting in a closet not being used. People aren't going to go digging ditches unless you can provide some pretty big advantages over their local ISP. That includes better uptime, better bandwidth, and most importantly, much cheaper prices. Unless it's a really geeky community, you aren't going to find a lot of people interested in digging cable ditches if they still have to spend the same amount of money every month on their bill, that is even assuming you could get the level of service up to where your other ISP has it.
Actually, votes are counted so fast in Canada, that we had to create a law that says results from the east coast couldn't be broadcast until the polls in the west coast were closed.
Most of the people going to the $25 barber (that seems to be the minimum price now, but I'll use your pricing) seem to go there just so they can tell people they go to an expensive barber. This is especially true for men, as cutting men's hair is pretty simple. I know people who go to expensive barbers to get a buzz cut they could have got at home for free. I don't think your comparison of haircuts to tablets really makes a good point, because spending lots mo money on haircuts is exactly kind of think people do that makes no sense.
Millions aren't often saved by virtualizing your hardware. Almost all numbers I've seen show that the cost of running on virtual hardware is actually more costly than running on your own servers after you amortize the price of the servers over their lifespan. Often buying your own hardware pays for itself within a year. Hosting in the cloud makes sense in a small number of instances where you have wildly varying amounts of traffic and need to be able to scale up and scale down very quickly to big load changes. It also allows you to get some nice servers on day one without much capital investment. But that's not being very business smart. If the servers can pay for themselves in the first year, you should really be buying the servers. It can also be very cheap if you are utilizing almost no resources, but that is something I would consider more of a home project, and not something that is really something that business would be looking at.
Water meters in my area only have the actual numerical reading on the inside of the house. The person reading the meters comes around with a specialized reader and hooks it up to a port at the front of your house. I guess it makes it a little harder for people to read the meters with specialized equipment. They recently switched to an IR system for reading the meters so that they can read them just driving down the street. I wonder if they are encrypted. I would guess not. Crooks will always find a way though. Most of the smart ones will case out the houses to ensure they have a better chance of the owners not being home.
Apparently not paranoid enough. 6 months ago, I would have said paranoid too. But with news like this, I would have to ask why I would ever want a video camera hooked up to a black box with an internet connection in my living room. They bring out some fun games to get you comfortable with the idea of having a camera in the room all the time, and then find things like this they can use it for once they have the camera in there. Same goes for things like ethernet connections on blu-ray players. If it was just to keep tabs on you and keep the keys updated people would revolt against it. But most people just think it's for downloading additional online content that comes with their movie.
Exactly as the other guy said. Too complicated. You vote for members of government so that you don't have to make hundreds of inane decisions about trivial matters. In Canada, we don't do multiple elections at the same time, and there are exactly 3 different things you can vote for in most jurisdictions. In Federal elections you vote for your member of parliament, and that is it. In Provincial elections you vote for your member of provincial parliament. Local is actually the most confusing, because you have to select a mayor, city concillors, and a school board trustee. But that's it. Once in a while they'll tack on some big refferendum where it applies like when they wanted to see if we should change the Ontario voting system to use mixed member proportional rather than first past the post. But that's a rare occurance. We expect that the people we vote for at each level will be able to make the appropriate decisions to get the job done. Don't even get me started on voting for judges. Judges are supposed to do the right thing, not the popular thing.
You forget that there's also a cost associated with using cash. You have to worry about employees and customers taking that money. You have to find a safe way of transporting the money to the bank. For businesses, banks will also charge you service fees for the privilege of depositing money into your account. You also have to go through the trouble of ensuring that you always have proper change for customers who use cash. Sure there are many expenses when dealing with credit cards and other non cash payment systems, but it's not as if dealing in cash is all fun and games.
This is what we do in Canada. Voting booths are cardboard and are set up on tables. Votes are cast by marking paper with a pen. The ballots are then placed in a cardboard box. Can't get much cheaper or fool proof than that. I never understood the American fascination with making things so complicated. I know that the Canadian system works because anybody can understand exactly what's going on at every step of the process. Once you introduce computers, that all flies out the window.
Depends what's running in the datacenter. Banks, grocery stores, public utilities, repair contractors all need datacenters to get their jobs done. Also, many people work in data centers, or have jobs which rely on the datacenters being up. For them, the datacenter does feed their family
I would like the ability to send fake data to apps. I should be able to configure apps so that when they ask for my contact data, they get a fake list. The apps think they are working, but they aren't. Same goes with access to the SD Card. They think they are getting direct access to the SD card, but really they would just get their own little dedicated subfolder. Everything that they have access to should be able to be swapped out with a fake version. This combined with a network firewall (possibly allowing and disallowing different protocols, hosts, and ports from specific apps) would make it quite a bit easier to control what applications have access to.
As somebody else already said, human power. There's also the option of tapping into the generator. I don't know the specifics, but if it takes less than a gallon of fuel to lift a gallon of fuel up the side of the building, you could just tap into the generator you're trying to refuel. The other option is to have a second smaller generator on the ground that powers just the lift/winch. This could be easily refueled. Seems like bucket brigade was the first thing that came to mind, and once they had that going, people stopped thinking of better ideas.
Or your know, just buy two devices. These things are getting pretty cheap now. Get a Nexus 7 tablet for $200, use it for all your media consumption and facebooking. Get a $400 laptop, or a $600 desktop with gobs of memory and ample processing power, and use it for tinkering and programming whatever else. It's nice that we can tinker with computers without spending a fortune. I like tinkering as much as the next guy, but I also have a computer that I don't tinker with because I like to have it working and free of clutter when I actually want to get stuff done. At $400-$500, tablets are way too expensive for me. But at $200, it's more like buying an MP3 player, or a dvd/blueray player. Nobody cares that they can't hack their dvd player. They just want it to work and play movies
I've often wondered about this sort of thing. I imagine that a dog could probably identify the house from the road. If you live in an apartment and the landlord lets the cops into the halls with the dog. Identify the apartments with pot, and get a warrant for search of that apartment. I, as a person with a not so keen sense of smell, can tell you which apartments have pot in them if you walk by at the right time of day.
I have small hands, and 4.7 inches is definitely not a phone. I have a 4.0 inch screen, and it's about as much as I can handle. People I'm talking to constantly complain about wind noise because it's too big to hold and be able to block the wind using a single hand. I think next time around I'll get the smallest and cheapest phone I can that supports tethering, which will probably end up being great as an actual phone, and then get a nice tablet for consumption. Phones are pretty terrible for consumption no matter what the size, so I might as well just let my phone be a phone, and get a tablet for doing all the stuff they try to cram into a phone.
Actually, if we're talking 10 mile radius vs 50 mile radius, then it' actually a lot less than 1/5 the size. A 10 mile radius is an area 314 square miles, whereas a 50 mile radius is 7850 square miles. So a 10 mile radius is really only 4%, or 1/25th the size of the 50 mile zone.
This reminds me of this episode of This American Life which mentioned that kids that undergo a lot of stress at home are basically constantly in a "fight or flight" mode and therefore have a lot of trouble actually sitting down and absorbing information.
I think the problem is that a Linux gaming machine can be good, but if you just throw Linux on the average PC out there, the results will be less than stellar. I tried installing 6 different distros on my laptop because I really wanted to give Linux a fair try and seriously use it for a year. I quit after all these distros and only 1 month of usage because getting the drivers set up along with getting things like WiFi enabled was just too much of a pain. I was hopeful because from my experience it works well enough on VM, but as soon as I went to run it on real hardware the experience was just completely different, in a bad way. You could develop a gaming platform based on Linux, with a very small list of approved hardware, and a specific distro to work with that hardware, but that kind of takes away half the reason for PC gaming in the first place.
I would have to say that a MacBook Air (if you don't really care about touch, or a Dell XPS Touch Ultrabook with the flip around screen if you insist on a touch interface, would come pretty close to this. The MBA and ultrabooks are basically small enough that they take up about the same amount of space as a tablet, yet they contain a real OS and a real keyboard that let you get real work done. The problem is that for the price of them, you could pick up both a laptop and a tablet, and have the best of both worlds. For days when you need a laptop, bring the laptop (and tablet too if you want) for days when you know you probably won't need a laptop, just bring the tablet. Both the iPad and the Surface RT suffer from the problem of running different operating systems than your standard desktop or laptop which means there's a lot of business applications that just won't run.
This is the way I feel about most unions now. Long gone are the days when people were risking their lives, working in the mines doing 16 hour shifts. Most union positions end up having ridiculous numbers of sick days, outrageous pensions unheard of in non-union positions, and inability to get fired even for extreme incompetence. These are the only things they have to ask for anymore because most of the old health, safety, and working hours problem have been dealt with through actual laws that keep everyone safe, even without a union. My local transit authority went on strike a few years back and one of they things they fought for was allowing the drivers to drive ungodly numbers of hours. That's right, the union was actually trying to make things less safe by allowing drivers to drive 70+ hours a week so the employees could make tons of money on overtime.
Especially disappointing coming from Canada where plug our gas powered cars in during the winter anyway. Is it seriously that hard to plug in your car? Why not just build in some sort of robotics and sensing system so that the charging station can maneuver the plug into the car if you are really that lazy.
Exactly, they have the entire design backwards and are stuck in their old ways. They are trying to stuff all the electronics into this tiny little thing you put inside your ear. Instead, you could put just a small bluetooth speaker inside your ear, which would be really cheap, and have all the smarts located in some other device similar to a phone (or possibly even a phone) that you carry around in your pocket. Sure in the US you could get a large percentage of the hearing impaired to pay thousands of dollars for these devices. But what about China, India, and other less well off countries. Most people there probably go without because there is no way they could afford thousands of dollars for these devices. There are huge untapped markets because the current manufacturers are going about things all wrong.
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Something like this would have been fun back in the 14.4k modem days. But I'm not sure how well this would work out in 2012. People expect way too much from their internet. Do they have a number they can call at 2 AM when it's not working? Running an ISP, even a small local one isn't a 1-3 person job at this point in time. If a switch dies do you have one on hand to replace it immediately, or does everyone go without internet for a day or two while you order a new one? Having n+1 redundancy is pretty big overhead if your n is a low number. If you have 1000 switches it's not a big difference in cost to have 1 or even 10 extra switches lying around for when stuff breaks. But when you have 2 switches, you now have to have 50% of your switch capacity sitting in a closet not being used. People aren't going to go digging ditches unless you can provide some pretty big advantages over their local ISP. That includes better uptime, better bandwidth, and most importantly, much cheaper prices. Unless it's a really geeky community, you aren't going to find a lot of people interested in digging cable ditches if they still have to spend the same amount of money every month on their bill, that is even assuming you could get the level of service up to where your other ISP has it.
Actually, votes are counted so fast in Canada, that we had to create a law that says results from the east coast couldn't be broadcast until the polls in the west coast were closed.
Most of the people going to the $25 barber (that seems to be the minimum price now, but I'll use your pricing) seem to go there just so they can tell people they go to an expensive barber. This is especially true for men, as cutting men's hair is pretty simple. I know people who go to expensive barbers to get a buzz cut they could have got at home for free. I don't think your comparison of haircuts to tablets really makes a good point, because spending lots mo money on haircuts is exactly kind of think people do that makes no sense.
Millions aren't often saved by virtualizing your hardware. Almost all numbers I've seen show that the cost of running on virtual hardware is actually more costly than running on your own servers after you amortize the price of the servers over their lifespan. Often buying your own hardware pays for itself within a year. Hosting in the cloud makes sense in a small number of instances where you have wildly varying amounts of traffic and need to be able to scale up and scale down very quickly to big load changes. It also allows you to get some nice servers on day one without much capital investment. But that's not being very business smart. If the servers can pay for themselves in the first year, you should really be buying the servers. It can also be very cheap if you are utilizing almost no resources, but that is something I would consider more of a home project, and not something that is really something that business would be looking at.
Water meters in my area only have the actual numerical reading on the inside of the house. The person reading the meters comes around with a specialized reader and hooks it up to a port at the front of your house. I guess it makes it a little harder for people to read the meters with specialized equipment. They recently switched to an IR system for reading the meters so that they can read them just driving down the street. I wonder if they are encrypted. I would guess not. Crooks will always find a way though. Most of the smart ones will case out the houses to ensure they have a better chance of the owners not being home.
Apparently not paranoid enough. 6 months ago, I would have said paranoid too. But with news like this, I would have to ask why I would ever want a video camera hooked up to a black box with an internet connection in my living room. They bring out some fun games to get you comfortable with the idea of having a camera in the room all the time, and then find things like this they can use it for once they have the camera in there. Same goes for things like ethernet connections on blu-ray players. If it was just to keep tabs on you and keep the keys updated people would revolt against it. But most people just think it's for downloading additional online content that comes with their movie.
Exactly as the other guy said. Too complicated. You vote for members of government so that you don't have to make hundreds of inane decisions about trivial matters. In Canada, we don't do multiple elections at the same time, and there are exactly 3 different things you can vote for in most jurisdictions. In Federal elections you vote for your member of parliament, and that is it. In Provincial elections you vote for your member of provincial parliament. Local is actually the most confusing, because you have to select a mayor, city concillors, and a school board trustee. But that's it. Once in a while they'll tack on some big refferendum where it applies like when they wanted to see if we should change the Ontario voting system to use mixed member proportional rather than first past the post. But that's a rare occurance. We expect that the people we vote for at each level will be able to make the appropriate decisions to get the job done. Don't even get me started on voting for judges. Judges are supposed to do the right thing, not the popular thing.
You forget that there's also a cost associated with using cash. You have to worry about employees and customers taking that money. You have to find a safe way of transporting the money to the bank. For businesses, banks will also charge you service fees for the privilege of depositing money into your account. You also have to go through the trouble of ensuring that you always have proper change for customers who use cash. Sure there are many expenses when dealing with credit cards and other non cash payment systems, but it's not as if dealing in cash is all fun and games.
This is what we do in Canada. Voting booths are cardboard and are set up on tables. Votes are cast by marking paper with a pen. The ballots are then placed in a cardboard box. Can't get much cheaper or fool proof than that. I never understood the American fascination with making things so complicated. I know that the Canadian system works because anybody can understand exactly what's going on at every step of the process. Once you introduce computers, that all flies out the window.
Depends what's running in the datacenter. Banks, grocery stores, public utilities, repair contractors all need datacenters to get their jobs done. Also, many people work in data centers, or have jobs which rely on the datacenters being up. For them, the datacenter does feed their family
I would like the ability to send fake data to apps. I should be able to configure apps so that when they ask for my contact data, they get a fake list. The apps think they are working, but they aren't. Same goes with access to the SD Card. They think they are getting direct access to the SD card, but really they would just get their own little dedicated subfolder. Everything that they have access to should be able to be swapped out with a fake version. This combined with a network firewall (possibly allowing and disallowing different protocols, hosts, and ports from specific apps) would make it quite a bit easier to control what applications have access to.
Residents of New York Still Without Power
Residents of New York Still Without Power Gloves
See how I didn't change the meaning at all by chopping off the end of that headline.
As somebody else already said, human power. There's also the option of tapping into the generator. I don't know the specifics, but if it takes less than a gallon of fuel to lift a gallon of fuel up the side of the building, you could just tap into the generator you're trying to refuel. The other option is to have a second smaller generator on the ground that powers just the lift/winch. This could be easily refueled. Seems like bucket brigade was the first thing that came to mind, and once they had that going, people stopped thinking of better ideas.
There is fuel running up to them. The problem is that the pumps to the fuel are in the basement, which is flooded. So the pumps aren't working.
I was wondering why they don't carry it up the side of a the building using a winch or window washing lift.
Or your know, just buy two devices. These things are getting pretty cheap now. Get a Nexus 7 tablet for $200, use it for all your media consumption and facebooking. Get a $400 laptop, or a $600 desktop with gobs of memory and ample processing power, and use it for tinkering and programming whatever else. It's nice that we can tinker with computers without spending a fortune. I like tinkering as much as the next guy, but I also have a computer that I don't tinker with because I like to have it working and free of clutter when I actually want to get stuff done. At $400-$500, tablets are way too expensive for me. But at $200, it's more like buying an MP3 player, or a dvd/blueray player. Nobody cares that they can't hack their dvd player. They just want it to work and play movies
I've often wondered about this sort of thing. I imagine that a dog could probably identify the house from the road. If you live in an apartment and the landlord lets the cops into the halls with the dog. Identify the apartments with pot, and get a warrant for search of that apartment. I, as a person with a not so keen sense of smell, can tell you which apartments have pot in them if you walk by at the right time of day.
I have small hands, and 4.7 inches is definitely not a phone. I have a 4.0 inch screen, and it's about as much as I can handle. People I'm talking to constantly complain about wind noise because it's too big to hold and be able to block the wind using a single hand. I think next time around I'll get the smallest and cheapest phone I can that supports tethering, which will probably end up being great as an actual phone, and then get a nice tablet for consumption. Phones are pretty terrible for consumption no matter what the size, so I might as well just let my phone be a phone, and get a tablet for doing all the stuff they try to cram into a phone.
Actually, if we're talking 10 mile radius vs 50 mile radius, then it' actually a lot less than 1/5 the size. A 10 mile radius is an area 314 square miles, whereas a 50 mile radius is 7850 square miles. So a 10 mile radius is really only 4%, or 1/25th the size of the 50 mile zone.
This reminds me of this episode of This American Life which mentioned that kids that undergo a lot of stress at home are basically constantly in a "fight or flight" mode and therefore have a lot of trouble actually sitting down and absorbing information.
I think the problem is that a Linux gaming machine can be good, but if you just throw Linux on the average PC out there, the results will be less than stellar. I tried installing 6 different distros on my laptop because I really wanted to give Linux a fair try and seriously use it for a year. I quit after all these distros and only 1 month of usage because getting the drivers set up along with getting things like WiFi enabled was just too much of a pain. I was hopeful because from my experience it works well enough on VM, but as soon as I went to run it on real hardware the experience was just completely different, in a bad way. You could develop a gaming platform based on Linux, with a very small list of approved hardware, and a specific distro to work with that hardware, but that kind of takes away half the reason for PC gaming in the first place.
I would have to say that a MacBook Air (if you don't really care about touch, or a Dell XPS Touch Ultrabook with the flip around screen if you insist on a touch interface, would come pretty close to this. The MBA and ultrabooks are basically small enough that they take up about the same amount of space as a tablet, yet they contain a real OS and a real keyboard that let you get real work done. The problem is that for the price of them, you could pick up both a laptop and a tablet, and have the best of both worlds. For days when you need a laptop, bring the laptop (and tablet too if you want) for days when you know you probably won't need a laptop, just bring the tablet. Both the iPad and the Surface RT suffer from the problem of running different operating systems than your standard desktop or laptop which means there's a lot of business applications that just won't run.
This is the way I feel about most unions now. Long gone are the days when people were risking their lives, working in the mines doing 16 hour shifts. Most union positions end up having ridiculous numbers of sick days, outrageous pensions unheard of in non-union positions, and inability to get fired even for extreme incompetence. These are the only things they have to ask for anymore because most of the old health, safety, and working hours problem have been dealt with through actual laws that keep everyone safe, even without a union. My local transit authority went on strike a few years back and one of they things they fought for was allowing the drivers to drive ungodly numbers of hours. That's right, the union was actually trying to make things less safe by allowing drivers to drive 70+ hours a week so the employees could make tons of money on overtime.
Especially disappointing coming from Canada where plug our gas powered cars in during the winter anyway. Is it seriously that hard to plug in your car? Why not just build in some sort of robotics and sensing system so that the charging station can maneuver the plug into the car if you are really that lazy.
Exactly, they have the entire design backwards and are stuck in their old ways. They are trying to stuff all the electronics into this tiny little thing you put inside your ear. Instead, you could put just a small bluetooth speaker inside your ear, which would be really cheap, and have all the smarts located in some other device similar to a phone (or possibly even a phone) that you carry around in your pocket. Sure in the US you could get a large percentage of the hearing impaired to pay thousands of dollars for these devices. But what about China, India, and other less well off countries. Most people there probably go without because there is no way they could afford thousands of dollars for these devices. There are huge untapped markets because the current manufacturers are going about things all wrong.