That's kind of my whole point. Bearocracy and legal requirements have gotten in the way of letting technology help out a large number of people. These devices aren't expensive for any other reason than the fact that they have to be certified by someone who wants all these devices to cost more than they should. These devices aren't really that complicated and could be sold a lot cheaper than they are. I'm surprised you don't see more unapproved devices being shipped over from China or elsewhere.
Cell phones are getting cheaper if you live in they city. I'm using Wind Mobile and I save quite a bit over the other guys. $30 a month for unlimited text, data (slow down at 5GB) and local calling. The big three can't even come close to that price. Most people I know are paying double that. Sure those rates only apply when I'm in the city limits, but that's where I am most of the time anyway. I'd have to be doing quite a bit of traveling to make up for the price difference. Assuming (conservatively) I save $20 a month, Over a year that $240. Which is enough to pay for 2400 minutes of talk time outside the city. Or I could not talk so much when I leave the city and use the money to buy a new phone.
Sure it does. The audiologist just follows a script anyway. Play a bunch of sounds. Record whether or not the user can hear the sounds, Adjust accordingly. I'm pretty sure that you could create a computer program that would automatically adjust a hearing aid to fit a person's specific hearing profile. You could probably rerun the calibration every month, in order to fine tune the device, and account for any changes in the patients hearing. It would probably work better than an audiologist because going to see one is time consuming and expensive and many people probably avoid it even though it might help their hearing.
Except that there's plenty of deaf people who cannot use a hearing aid and yet still manage to have a job. Not being able to hear does not mean you can't work. It means some jobs are harder or just impossible (phone support, although I'm sure there's phone support tty operators). There are many jobs where you just don't need to hear to perform the job just fine. Also, if an employer doesn't hire you because of the disability, that is discrimination.
Didn't say it wasn't good enough, I said it wasn't a drop in replacement. If you're running a business off Windows today, you can't just install Linux on all your machines tomorrow and it's business as usual. There are certain programs that do not run in Linux. Sure you can usually find a replacement program, but it's not the same program, and there will be a learning curve, and for many applications, especially in business, there may not even be a product for Linux that does what you need it to.
That''s hilarious. Never has our society been so litigious. It seems to me like people with a law degree who are unemployed just aren't being creative enough. If you can practice law, you can open your own business, taking whatever jobs you can get. There's always people out there looking for attorneys. If you can undercut the other guys, you can probably build quite a business.
The difference with cars is that cars are expensive, so it's worth your time or money to fix it. However, with computers, things are so cheap that it isn't worth your money to get someone else to fix it for you. Mechanics cost about $80 an hour, so if your car was only worth $300, you wouldn't bother paying the mechanic when your car broke, you would just buy a new one. With computers, the repair guys also charge similar rates. Maybe a bit less. If you only paid $200 (tablet) to $500 (laptop) for your computer, you're probably not going to pay some guy $100 + parts to fix it. Except for desktop machines where any semi-competent person can swap out parts, there is very little need for repair of computers.
I agree with you here. But I think that Android has reached a better balance between walled garden, and letting the user run whatever they want. I like that I can easily go and buy apps for my phone from a reliable source. But I also like that I have the option to install third party software, or develop my own software. I realize that for most people, you can't have it both ways. Give them an inch, and they will take a mile. Give them the ability to install software from unknown sources, and they will install all kinds of crap software which will wreak havoc on their system. The only thing to really stop most users from doing this is to outright refuse to run software from unknown sources.
What hurts the people more? Not being able to choose a browser, or not being able to buy Windows at all? As much as we like to think that Linux is a good OS, it's not a drop in replacement for Windows. You can't just tell MS that they can no longer do business at all in your country/continent. That would annoy a fair number of your citizens and cripple many businesses. While I think that giving small fines to Microsoft isn't really that effective, telling them they couldn't sell their product at all would probably hurt the EU more than it would hurt MS. Personally, I think this whole thing is a little stupid. You've always been able to install whatever browser you wanted to on your Windows machine with absolutely no trouble. They shouldn't need to present you with a nice little screen asking which one you want to install.
I'm not so sure. The Windows phone never took off like they wanted it to. Plus the surface is $519 minimum. If I'm going to spend $519 on a device it's going to be a laptop. Sure the surface can have "touch cover" - not a real keyboard, for $619. The real keyboard "type cover" costs more. With this price, you can get a low end ultra book, that will still outperform the surface tablet. I think they might sell a few to people who don't realize it's not real Windows and won't run all their old Windows programs, but I don't see a lot of advantage to buying this over a real Windows laptop.
Sadly, most people who are plumbers are probably better qualified then most people who call themselves programmers. I think that all degrees/diplomas should require some kind of apprenticeship/co-operative education/internship program to get you real on the job experience. There's only so much that can be learned in the classroom. Being on the job, doing actual work allows you to learn a lot of stuff that just would not come up in a classroom.
The problem is that the hardware can't tell the difference between unsigned homebrew software and unsigned pirated games. So they lock down the hardware so that it only loads signed code. If you allow the console to easily run unsigned code, you are also allowing people to play pirated games. You could possibly encrypt the entire game disk, and therefore take make it more difficult to copy them, but you only need 1 person smart enough to copy the game, and then distribute it all over the internet. But if your hardware won't play unsigned games at all, or requires complicated modifications to play unsigned games, then you'll discourage a lot of users from using pirated games.
This is really the kind of stuff that interests me too. I love the fact that it's possible to load games from a hard drive plugged into the USB port of my Wii. I love the fact that I never have to put another disc in the Wii. I could download games and get games for free, but personally, I only have time to play 1 or 2 new games per year, so the cost of the games isn't killing me. Being able to use my Wii to play emulated games, play video files from my windows share, and play Wii games from a USB hard drive makes it so much better.
My best advice is that if you live in the city, go with Wind or Mobilicity. I'm with Wind, and I have a $30 unlimited local calling, texting, data plan (slows down after 5 GB). For $40 you get unlimited long distance. Only disadvantage is that they charge you roaming when you go outside their "zone", which is basically outside the city. Even with the extra roaming fees for the few times I leave the city each year, I still come out way under what I'd be paying with Rogers/Telus/Bell. Also worth noting is that if you travel to another city, you're covered there too. I live in Ottawa, went to Toronto this summer. Only time I wasn't in a coverage zone was when I was actually between cities. Once I got to my destination, I was back in the coverage zone. It kind of sucks if you live in a rural location, but most of the population of Canada lives in cities, so I thought I'd put this out there.
You're talking like hosting your own servers on premises or being in the cloud are your only choices. You could also rent space in a high quality data center and replicate you data out to another high quality datacenter where you also rent space in a different geographic location. Then, when your primary data center goes down, you switch over to the other one. Or run off both at the same time if your architecture allows you do do that. That basically covers you in most instances. If both your rented datacenters go out at the same time, and they are in different locations, there's probably much bigger things to worry about. Or you didn't pick very good datacenters in the first place.
My biggest beef with the blackberry playbook is that it has a huge frame around the screen. So basically you end up carrying a 9 inch device but only get 7 inches of useable space.
I don't generally wear cargo pants, and I don't really want my device dictating which pants I'm going to wear for the day. I don't know about you, but pixels don't actually define the size for me. Pixels define the clarity of what I see. I'm perfectly happy using a 17 inch 1280x1024 monitor to do my work. But I would not be able to get my word done on a 7 inch screen with the same or higher resolution. The "click target" can only be made so small (physically) before I can't reliably hit it.
I've never really understood it either. 7 inches is too large to fit in your pocket, yet too small for a lot of tasks. Once you need to carry a backpack/purse/messenger bag to carry the device about, you might as well at least have a 9-10 inch screen. I've been waiting for the Google Nexus 10 which is rumoured to be coming out. If they give it a reasonable price, like they did with the Nexus 7, then I'll be buying one for sure. I have an eBook reader that only has 6 inch screen, which is fine because I only use it for fiction novels. But for something that's supposed to be used to browse the web, I don't think that anything in the 7 inch range would be big enough. Ideally, I'd like to have a 14 inch tablet, but I know that would be cost prohibitive.
Look what they did to hockey? The Europeans are the one's who screwed that one up. NHL hockey (in the playoffs) used to be over time until somebody scored. The Europeans and Olympic hockey use to go into a shootout after a period of overtime. The big problem came once shootouts were introduced into NHL hockey.
Sure, if you want to watch "specific film" then you may need to pirate because it's not available in your area or at all. But that's not my point. My point is that you can fill up all your free time with free entertainment. You don't have to spend a single cent. Even if you insist on paying for stuff, you still won't spend that much money. Unless you spend 16 hours a day consuming media you probably don't have enough free time to bankrupt yourself unless you purposely try to spend as much money on movies and other entertainment as possible.
My only reply to this is that there's more free content out there than time allows. Sure there's a lot of entertainment out there, and if you choose to watch all the latest blockbusters, you will (possibly) run out of money quite quickly, but there there's also more free stuff than you could ever watch, assuming you hold down a job and actually sleep. Most people I know who pirate a lot don't even end up watching half the stuff they download because they just don't have the time. Renting 3 or 4 movies a week off iTunes a week isn't going to bankrupt most people. And if you need more media than that, find something else to do. People will spend $5 on a coffee from starbucks, which will last 20 minutes, but they won't spend $5 to rent a 2 hour movie from the internet which they can watch with a friend. People are seriously cheap, and only pirate because they get away with it so easily.
My brother started working when he was 15 too. Worked about 20 hours a week. He was still able to maintain pretty good grades too. There's no reason somebody shouldn't be able to work at 14 or 15. And that's for a "real job". Most kids started working even younger than that delivering news papers. I remember working as a paper delivery boy when I was young, probably around 8 or 10. I remember getting very little money for delivering the paper when I was a kid. But then again, I was just a kid and had nothing better to spend the money on than candy and comic books. It only took a few hours a week, and gave me a little bit of money.
Speaking of spamming, why not just build something into the phone system for users to flag phone calls as robocalls. Whenever you get one, hang up, and dial *54 or some other code. That sends a message to the phone company that whoever called is a robocaller. After enough negative feedback against a particular source, that source is blocked. Sure systems can route their calls through other sources to make it look like they are coming from somewhere else, but that just puts some onus on whoever is providing these services to block robocalls on their own end. Provide them with the time and location of the call, and they should be able to track where it came from. Most robocalls probably come directly from the entity making the calls, or a contracted out to some other company who does the robocalls for them. Start blocking the calls, and they will stop doing it.
I'm very disappointed with the price that MS chose. Early on I heard rumours that MS was going to sell it for $200. Maybe that was just wishful thinking by most people, but I think that's the right price point for these things. Google has their Nexus 7 priced at $199 and I heard a rumour that they are going to start selling them for $99. If I could get a nexus 10, which isn't out yet, for $250 or less then I would definitely be interested in getting a tablet. A tablet should not cost more than a notebook, and should ideally cost less than a netbook. I've thought about just picking up a Chinese tablet, but really would really want something I can easily return if something breaks.
To create a file in Windows, I used python to create a file with the proper name. The following code worked
fname='SexyL' + unichr(8238) + 'gpj.exe' f = open(fname,'w') f.close()
It created a file in my python directory. It shows up as you describe. I was unaware that you could change the text direction in the middle of a line. This kind of thing could probably be used all over the place. If placed on a web server Internet Explorer will actually download the file "properly" with the correct unicode file name. Depending where you look at the file name, and whether it supports unicode in that specific interface it will either show up right or wrong. The IE download window shows the name with.exe on the end. But explorer shows it with.jpg at the end. Firefox just replaces the unicode character with an underscore, and Chrome replaces it a hyphen. IEs behavior, while correct, could cause a lot of security problems.
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That's kind of my whole point. Bearocracy and legal requirements have gotten in the way of letting technology help out a large number of people. These devices aren't expensive for any other reason than the fact that they have to be certified by someone who wants all these devices to cost more than they should. These devices aren't really that complicated and could be sold a lot cheaper than they are. I'm surprised you don't see more unapproved devices being shipped over from China or elsewhere.
Cell phones are getting cheaper if you live in they city. I'm using Wind Mobile and I save quite a bit over the other guys. $30 a month for unlimited text, data (slow down at 5GB) and local calling. The big three can't even come close to that price. Most people I know are paying double that. Sure those rates only apply when I'm in the city limits, but that's where I am most of the time anyway. I'd have to be doing quite a bit of traveling to make up for the price difference. Assuming (conservatively) I save $20 a month, Over a year that $240. Which is enough to pay for 2400 minutes of talk time outside the city. Or I could not talk so much when I leave the city and use the money to buy a new phone.
Sure it does. The audiologist just follows a script anyway. Play a bunch of sounds. Record whether or not the user can hear the sounds, Adjust accordingly. I'm pretty sure that you could create a computer program that would automatically adjust a hearing aid to fit a person's specific hearing profile. You could probably rerun the calibration every month, in order to fine tune the device, and account for any changes in the patients hearing. It would probably work better than an audiologist because going to see one is time consuming and expensive and many people probably avoid it even though it might help their hearing.
Except that there's plenty of deaf people who cannot use a hearing aid and yet still manage to have a job. Not being able to hear does not mean you can't work. It means some jobs are harder or just impossible (phone support, although I'm sure there's phone support tty operators). There are many jobs where you just don't need to hear to perform the job just fine. Also, if an employer doesn't hire you because of the disability, that is discrimination.
Didn't say it wasn't good enough, I said it wasn't a drop in replacement. If you're running a business off Windows today, you can't just install Linux on all your machines tomorrow and it's business as usual. There are certain programs that do not run in Linux. Sure you can usually find a replacement program, but it's not the same program, and there will be a learning curve, and for many applications, especially in business, there may not even be a product for Linux that does what you need it to.
That''s hilarious. Never has our society been so litigious. It seems to me like people with a law degree who are unemployed just aren't being creative enough. If you can practice law, you can open your own business, taking whatever jobs you can get. There's always people out there looking for attorneys. If you can undercut the other guys, you can probably build quite a business.
The difference with cars is that cars are expensive, so it's worth your time or money to fix it. However, with computers, things are so cheap that it isn't worth your money to get someone else to fix it for you. Mechanics cost about $80 an hour, so if your car was only worth $300, you wouldn't bother paying the mechanic when your car broke, you would just buy a new one. With computers, the repair guys also charge similar rates. Maybe a bit less. If you only paid $200 (tablet) to $500 (laptop) for your computer, you're probably not going to pay some guy $100 + parts to fix it. Except for desktop machines where any semi-competent person can swap out parts, there is very little need for repair of computers.
I agree with you here. But I think that Android has reached a better balance between walled garden, and letting the user run whatever they want. I like that I can easily go and buy apps for my phone from a reliable source. But I also like that I have the option to install third party software, or develop my own software. I realize that for most people, you can't have it both ways. Give them an inch, and they will take a mile. Give them the ability to install software from unknown sources, and they will install all kinds of crap software which will wreak havoc on their system. The only thing to really stop most users from doing this is to outright refuse to run software from unknown sources.
What hurts the people more? Not being able to choose a browser, or not being able to buy Windows at all? As much as we like to think that Linux is a good OS, it's not a drop in replacement for Windows. You can't just tell MS that they can no longer do business at all in your country/continent. That would annoy a fair number of your citizens and cripple many businesses. While I think that giving small fines to Microsoft isn't really that effective, telling them they couldn't sell their product at all would probably hurt the EU more than it would hurt MS. Personally, I think this whole thing is a little stupid. You've always been able to install whatever browser you wanted to on your Windows machine with absolutely no trouble. They shouldn't need to present you with a nice little screen asking which one you want to install.
I'm not so sure. The Windows phone never took off like they wanted it to. Plus the surface is $519 minimum. If I'm going to spend $519 on a device it's going to be a laptop. Sure the surface can have "touch cover" - not a real keyboard, for $619. The real keyboard "type cover" costs more. With this price, you can get a low end ultra book, that will still outperform the surface tablet. I think they might sell a few to people who don't realize it's not real Windows and won't run all their old Windows programs, but I don't see a lot of advantage to buying this over a real Windows laptop.
Sadly, most people who are plumbers are probably better qualified then most people who call themselves programmers. I think that all degrees/diplomas should require some kind of apprenticeship/co-operative education/internship program to get you real on the job experience. There's only so much that can be learned in the classroom. Being on the job, doing actual work allows you to learn a lot of stuff that just would not come up in a classroom.
The problem is that the hardware can't tell the difference between unsigned homebrew software and unsigned pirated games. So they lock down the hardware so that it only loads signed code. If you allow the console to easily run unsigned code, you are also allowing people to play pirated games. You could possibly encrypt the entire game disk, and therefore take make it more difficult to copy them, but you only need 1 person smart enough to copy the game, and then distribute it all over the internet. But if your hardware won't play unsigned games at all, or requires complicated modifications to play unsigned games, then you'll discourage a lot of users from using pirated games.
This is really the kind of stuff that interests me too. I love the fact that it's possible to load games from a hard drive plugged into the USB port of my Wii. I love the fact that I never have to put another disc in the Wii. I could download games and get games for free, but personally, I only have time to play 1 or 2 new games per year, so the cost of the games isn't killing me. Being able to use my Wii to play emulated games, play video files from my windows share, and play Wii games from a USB hard drive makes it so much better.
My best advice is that if you live in the city, go with Wind or Mobilicity. I'm with Wind, and I have a $30 unlimited local calling, texting, data plan (slows down after 5 GB). For $40 you get unlimited long distance. Only disadvantage is that they charge you roaming when you go outside their "zone", which is basically outside the city. Even with the extra roaming fees for the few times I leave the city each year, I still come out way under what I'd be paying with Rogers/Telus/Bell. Also worth noting is that if you travel to another city, you're covered there too. I live in Ottawa, went to Toronto this summer. Only time I wasn't in a coverage zone was when I was actually between cities. Once I got to my destination, I was back in the coverage zone. It kind of sucks if you live in a rural location, but most of the population of Canada lives in cities, so I thought I'd put this out there.
You're talking like hosting your own servers on premises or being in the cloud are your only choices. You could also rent space in a high quality data center and replicate you data out to another high quality datacenter where you also rent space in a different geographic location. Then, when your primary data center goes down, you switch over to the other one. Or run off both at the same time if your architecture allows you do do that. That basically covers you in most instances. If both your rented datacenters go out at the same time, and they are in different locations, there's probably much bigger things to worry about. Or you didn't pick very good datacenters in the first place.
My biggest beef with the blackberry playbook is that it has a huge frame around the screen. So basically you end up carrying a 9 inch device but only get 7 inches of useable space.
I don't generally wear cargo pants, and I don't really want my device dictating which pants I'm going to wear for the day. I don't know about you, but pixels don't actually define the size for me. Pixels define the clarity of what I see. I'm perfectly happy using a 17 inch 1280x1024 monitor to do my work. But I would not be able to get my word done on a 7 inch screen with the same or higher resolution. The "click target" can only be made so small (physically) before I can't reliably hit it.
I've never really understood it either. 7 inches is too large to fit in your pocket, yet too small for a lot of tasks. Once you need to carry a backpack/purse/messenger bag to carry the device about, you might as well at least have a 9-10 inch screen. I've been waiting for the Google Nexus 10 which is rumoured to be coming out. If they give it a reasonable price, like they did with the Nexus 7, then I'll be buying one for sure. I have an eBook reader that only has 6 inch screen, which is fine because I only use it for fiction novels. But for something that's supposed to be used to browse the web, I don't think that anything in the 7 inch range would be big enough. Ideally, I'd like to have a 14 inch tablet, but I know that would be cost prohibitive.
Look what they did to hockey? The Europeans are the one's who screwed that one up. NHL hockey (in the playoffs) used to be over time until somebody scored. The Europeans and Olympic hockey use to go into a shootout after a period of overtime. The big problem came once shootouts were introduced into NHL hockey.
Sure, if you want to watch "specific film" then you may need to pirate because it's not available in your area or at all. But that's not my point. My point is that you can fill up all your free time with free entertainment. You don't have to spend a single cent. Even if you insist on paying for stuff, you still won't spend that much money. Unless you spend 16 hours a day consuming media you probably don't have enough free time to bankrupt yourself unless you purposely try to spend as much money on movies and other entertainment as possible.
My only reply to this is that there's more free content out there than time allows. Sure there's a lot of entertainment out there, and if you choose to watch all the latest blockbusters, you will (possibly) run out of money quite quickly, but there there's also more free stuff than you could ever watch, assuming you hold down a job and actually sleep. Most people I know who pirate a lot don't even end up watching half the stuff they download because they just don't have the time. Renting 3 or 4 movies a week off iTunes a week isn't going to bankrupt most people. And if you need more media than that, find something else to do. People will spend $5 on a coffee from starbucks, which will last 20 minutes, but they won't spend $5 to rent a 2 hour movie from the internet which they can watch with a friend. People are seriously cheap, and only pirate because they get away with it so easily.
My brother started working when he was 15 too. Worked about 20 hours a week. He was still able to maintain pretty good grades too. There's no reason somebody shouldn't be able to work at 14 or 15. And that's for a "real job". Most kids started working even younger than that delivering news papers. I remember working as a paper delivery boy when I was young, probably around 8 or 10. I remember getting very little money for delivering the paper when I was a kid. But then again, I was just a kid and had nothing better to spend the money on than candy and comic books. It only took a few hours a week, and gave me a little bit of money.
Speaking of spamming, why not just build something into the phone system for users to flag phone calls as robocalls. Whenever you get one, hang up, and dial *54 or some other code. That sends a message to the phone company that whoever called is a robocaller. After enough negative feedback against a particular source, that source is blocked. Sure systems can route their calls through other sources to make it look like they are coming from somewhere else, but that just puts some onus on whoever is providing these services to block robocalls on their own end. Provide them with the time and location of the call, and they should be able to track where it came from. Most robocalls probably come directly from the entity making the calls, or a contracted out to some other company who does the robocalls for them. Start blocking the calls, and they will stop doing it.
I'm very disappointed with the price that MS chose. Early on I heard rumours that MS was going to sell it for $200. Maybe that was just wishful thinking by most people, but I think that's the right price point for these things. Google has their Nexus 7 priced at $199 and I heard a rumour that they are going to start selling them for $99. If I could get a nexus 10, which isn't out yet, for $250 or less then I would definitely be interested in getting a tablet. A tablet should not cost more than a notebook, and should ideally cost less than a netbook. I've thought about just picking up a Chinese tablet, but really would really want something I can easily return if something breaks.
It created a file in my python directory. It shows up as you describe. I was unaware that you could change the text direction in the middle of a line. This kind of thing could probably be used all over the place. If placed on a web server Internet Explorer will actually download the file "properly" with the correct unicode file name. Depending where you look at the file name, and whether it supports unicode in that specific interface it will either show up right or wrong. The IE download window shows the name with .exe on the end. But explorer shows it with .jpg at the end. Firefox just replaces the unicode character with an underscore, and Chrome replaces it a hyphen. IEs behavior, while correct, could cause a lot of security problems.