Yeah, if you look at all the old programs, you can always tell what they do. Excel, Access, Gimp, Firefox, Quarkxpress. Sure there's some good names out there like Photoshop, Word, Internet Explorer, WordPerfect and CorelDraw!, but I don't think it was ever the case where the function of most programs could be identified by their name. All the obvious names get taken early on, and you're left with having to give your program a meaningless name so that you don't sound like a copycat, and so you can distinguish your program from all the others out there.
Having never actually used a Windows phone, I have to ask, is it that bad? Or is it just that everyone hates it simple because it's from Microsoft, or possibly because Windows Mobile 6 was so bad that people think the new Windows phone couldn't possibly be any good. I mean, on phones the interface itself doesn't matter that much since it's mostly about the apps. Once you launch the app it takes over, so it doesn't really matter what the main interface is like too much.
Not really. You could probably get carbon from coal cheaply enough. Especially with many countries no longer using coal from power plants and such. Carbon is not a rare element by any means. There's probably much cheaper ways to get carbon powder than heating up sugar to 1500 degrees. I really don't know how similar it is to what they are using, but graphite powder is pretty cheap. If you're actually using it produce batteries, the bulk price is even cheaper. Only about 20 cents a pound.
While I agree that a lot has changed since it was only university students, I have to point out that my university has more people attending than there were people in my home town. I don't consider my entire university to be anything equivalent to a close knit community. There are 33,000 students currently at my old Alma mater. That's quite a few people.
THIS. I've never understood the people who think that being overweight is the result of fast food being too cheap. For $10 I can make a healthy dinner for my family and have left overs for lunch the next day. I could probably do it cheaper, but I'm counting a meal with meat in it. Fast food costs about $5 a person, and is getting closer to $10 for the "adult" size meal. Same goes for entertainment. I can take my whole family to the public pool or skating rink for under $10 but it costs $10+ per person to sit and watch a movie. Going on a walk is free. Going to the park is free, Going on a bike ride is free (once you buy a bike). Being overweight is all about making the wrong choices, and has nothing to do with how much money you have. Although there is a big correlation between people who make bad choice and people who have no money, and there for a correlation between no money and poor health.
Bread is pretty simple to make at home. Look for those no-knead bread recipes online. They make great bread, and require almost no work . We've started making quite a bit of our own bread now that even the terrible "Wonderbread" is $3 a loaf.
I agree with everything you say, except the part about laptops being more expensive. Compared to a desktop, complete with a screen, mouse, and keyboard, you would probably pay more for the desktop. You can get a netbook for $200. That's good enough to send a few emails, browse the web, write up a resume and find yourself a better job. Plus you can carry it around, which means that you can go to the public library, coffee shop, or McDonald's and use their internet connection so you don't have to pay for that either.
I wonder how there is even a market for laptop rentals in today's society. First, a laptop can be bought flat out for $400 and that will get you a not too bad laptop. On top of that, most computer stores will offer some kind of financing. I know a guy who worked at Futureshop. He said he was quite amazed how bad the credit ratings were of the people they gave out store credit cards to. You can go to dell right now and get a laptop for $15 a month. I don't see how any rental company could compete with that.
Learn to read. It's 40 MB per square inch. Same as an Audio CD. You could easily fit music on something the size of an audio CD, I'm sure someone has done it before. Although pictures are getting quite big. A single picture from my digital camera comes pretty close to the size of a lot of MP3s I have. So, it might need quite a few of these discs to back up the thousands of pictures I have. Although you could probably keep a collection of important ones.
Exactly. For $200 I could get a netbook. That's a full computer that comes with a small keyboard, screen, and trackpad. I can open the box and use it right away. It comes with much better specs than any of these "educational" or open computers. By the time you buy a screen, keyboard, mouse, and power supply for your raspberry pi, you're probably already close to the cost of the netbook. If you already have all these extra required devices then the Raspberry Pi can be fun to play around with (I have one myself), but if I was poor and wanted to learn computers, and didn't already have some other computer, it would make much more sense to just go with the netbook and get a complete computer.
I think you underestimate how good compilers have become. Also, the "expert assembly language programmer" probably would work at 1/100 the pace of a programmer in something more high level like C++. It would probably be next to impossible to write an entire modern operating system, web browser, or word processor in assembly language. Sure for some very small sections of code you can optimize at the assembly level, but you can't write a whole program in assembly. Also, if a person can recognize some optimization, then that optimization can be added to the compiler, which means that a compiler can probably always at least come within a very close margin of where the human could get, and it could probably do better, because a compiler can remember a lot more optimizations than any human can.
The problem is that you can't do a diff between Word documents. Source control and diffing tools work great on source code because it's all just plain text. But for things like Word documents or Powerpoint presentations things get a little more complicated. Sure with a version control service you won't lose any previous versions, but you don't know what changed between versions either. To me this is the major thing missing for MS Office, and I can't believe they haven't done it yet. Sure they have track changes, but you have to remember to turn that on. There's no reason you should have to track changes. You should be able to take two versions of the document and MS Word should be able to tell you what has changed between the two versions. I think that if OpenOffice developed this feature it would be a killer feature that might get people to actually start using it. Because as you pointed out, when you have 4 different versions of the same document from 4 different people, it's nice to be able to figure out which changes those 4 people actually made without going through all 50 pages of the document.
It seems the less natural meat becomes the more tasteless it becomes. Meat from a wild deer tastes amazing. Meat from a free range elk tastes pretty good too (there's an elk farm near my house, see the elk grazing in the fields on bike rides in the country). Beef from the supermarket that usually originates from corn fed cattle that isn't allowed to graze doesn't even compare to something that has actually had the ability to graze on grass, and wander in the field. It would be quite a feat if they could get laboratory meat that tastes better than hunted animals. However, most attempts I've seen at laboratory meat don't seem to have any fat, which apart from being part of a healthy diet, also adds significantly to the taste. The varied diet of grazing animals is part of what makes it taste so good. Same goes for things like cheese, which tastes much better when made from cows/sheep/goats which eat grass and spend time in the pasture.
I imagine the problem with this is that there will be extortionate amounts they charge just for the service, similar to with propane tanks. However with propane tanks it's not too much of a problem, since I only go through 2-3 tanks a year, so I don't mind paying the extra fee, plus none of the gas stations in my area have filling stations anyway. Not only that, but propane tanks themselves are quite cheap and last a long time. Battery packs on the other hand are very expensive, and with constant use, the amount of power they hold will go down. I wouldn't want to swap out the new batteries I just bought with my car for a set of old batteries that only get 75% of the range.
Actually, the Tesla model S seats 5 Adults + 2 children in rear facing seats. When you consider this, the Tesla looks very attractive. You'll be hard pressed to find a 7 seater car that gets respectable gas mileage. Also, 7 seater vehicles are often more expensive meaning that it makes the tesla even more competitive and appealing to certain market segments.
The problem is that it's way too easy to get contraband tires. Go over to Canada for the day and get a new set of tires. Canadians do it all the time going the other way, not because of taxes on tires, but because tires are so much cheaper in the US. Plus tires only have to be bought once ever 100,000 or more KM. That would have to be a pretty hefty tax to account for all the gas taxes that would have been collected. This would make getting non-taxed foreign tires too good for most people to not do it. They could much more easily just build something into the car, oh, I don't know, like the odometer, which measures how far you travel without recording where you're actually travelling.
Sounds a lot like this Android TV dongle I saw on kickstarter. Looks like it got fully funded, and then some, but people could have just gone out and bought something exactly the same off numerous chinese websites, for cheaper. I think the only thing that was original here was the case.
I really don't know why people complain about the quality of mp3 when most of the music I listened to in my younger days was recorded on cassette tapes using the highspeed dubbing feature. The source tape for most of mine tapes was itself a copy of the original which was copied using the highspeed dubbing feature. MP3 even at 128 kbps is still miles ahead of that stuff.
I think that a nice alternative for this would be for the tablet to come with an SD Card slot, and be able to boot off that. When you're booting off the SD Card slot, the internal memory becomes readonly, or if they don't want you poking around the firmware, make it completely disabled. That way they don't have to worry about custom firmware voiding warranties, and the customer could run whichever software they want on the device without having to worry about voiding the warranty, and they are free to return back to the default firmware whenever they want by just removing the SD Card. For security's sake it would probably be a good idea to have some kind of physical switch to enable booting from the SD Card.
I wonder how much energy one could garner from the water flowing out of the taps. I currently pay about $3 for 1m^3 (1000 litres) of water. Electricity costs about 10 cents / kwh. So if I could generate more than 30 kwh of electricity from 1 m^3 of water coming out of my tap, then I could get electricty for less than the cost supplied to me by the power company. You'd probably need to measure the pressure at the tap, and I assume it wouldn't be possible, but I wonder if anybody has ever ran through all the calcuations.
You think that's bad, I'm a VB.Net developer. People rant endlessly about VB.Net. It's almost got the exact same feature set as C#, minus a few and plus a few features. For a long time, C# was missing simple things like optional parameters. Also, VB.Net has always had a much superior background compiler. A lot of what you hear about VB.Net is based on biases from the old VB, as well as complaints about syntax and verbosity. Neither of which really address it's merits.
I think the main problem here is that the insurance costs way too much. Consider the iPhone which costs about $600. The $100 insurance plan assumes that 1 in 6 people are going to need a total phone replacement for them to break even. Even counting in operating costs, and the fact that they will want to make a profit, let's say 1 in 20 end up needing a complete replacement over the life of the phone. This doesn't even count the fact that after about a year, the cost of the phone has come down considerably. Something like $20 may make a lot more sense for most people. A year of insurance on a house probably costs $1200, which is around 0.4% of the value of my house and possessions. Yet for some reason it costs about 20% of the value of the phone to insure it. I think it all comes down to the fact that it's way too tempting to drop/fry/submerse your phone on purpose in order to get a shiny new one. Whereas one would be crazy to try the same with their phone. Insurance fraud is illegal, but probably impossible to prove with phones.
I guess with the million dollar prize at the end, you could probably get some people motivated enough. But I would think there's a very high percentage of people who really just don't have the "mental capacity necessary to follow logic". You'd probably end up with a lot of people passing, but still not really understanding how to program at the end. I saw a lot of this in university. They'd get a whole bunch of help on the assignments, or just outright copy from other students. In the exam, they'd cram until they could just barely pass, and then proceed to forget everything within minutes after the exam, leaving them no more knowledgable then before the class. It's not that people are stupid, but I knew some pretty "smart" people (they did well enough in highschool to get accepted to engineering), but who utterly failed at anything programming related.
Well, despite the Macbook Air being extemely small. They have dedicated a fair amount of size to the battery. Check out this picture to see just how much space the battery takes up in the Macbook Air. I only wish my HP thickbook used the same percentage of the volume for the batteries. I'd be able to work an entire day without charging. I'd gladly go without the optical drive if they could replace the entire thing with a battery.
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Yeah, if you look at all the old programs, you can always tell what they do. Excel, Access, Gimp, Firefox, Quarkxpress. Sure there's some good names out there like Photoshop, Word, Internet Explorer, WordPerfect and CorelDraw!, but I don't think it was ever the case where the function of most programs could be identified by their name. All the obvious names get taken early on, and you're left with having to give your program a meaningless name so that you don't sound like a copycat, and so you can distinguish your program from all the others out there.
Having never actually used a Windows phone, I have to ask, is it that bad? Or is it just that everyone hates it simple because it's from Microsoft, or possibly because Windows Mobile 6 was so bad that people think the new Windows phone couldn't possibly be any good. I mean, on phones the interface itself doesn't matter that much since it's mostly about the apps. Once you launch the app it takes over, so it doesn't really matter what the main interface is like too much.
Not really. You could probably get carbon from coal cheaply enough. Especially with many countries no longer using coal from power plants and such. Carbon is not a rare element by any means. There's probably much cheaper ways to get carbon powder than heating up sugar to 1500 degrees. I really don't know how similar it is to what they are using, but graphite powder is pretty cheap. If you're actually using it produce batteries, the bulk price is even cheaper. Only about 20 cents a pound.
While I agree that a lot has changed since it was only university students, I have to point out that my university has more people attending than there were people in my home town. I don't consider my entire university to be anything equivalent to a close knit community. There are 33,000 students currently at my old Alma mater. That's quite a few people.
You're right, everyone else should be in a driverless car, except me.
THIS. I've never understood the people who think that being overweight is the result of fast food being too cheap. For $10 I can make a healthy dinner for my family and have left overs for lunch the next day. I could probably do it cheaper, but I'm counting a meal with meat in it. Fast food costs about $5 a person, and is getting closer to $10 for the "adult" size meal. Same goes for entertainment. I can take my whole family to the public pool or skating rink for under $10 but it costs $10+ per person to sit and watch a movie. Going on a walk is free. Going to the park is free, Going on a bike ride is free (once you buy a bike). Being overweight is all about making the wrong choices, and has nothing to do with how much money you have. Although there is a big correlation between people who make bad choice and people who have no money, and there for a correlation between no money and poor health.
Bread is pretty simple to make at home. Look for those no-knead bread recipes online. They make great bread, and require almost no work . We've started making quite a bit of our own bread now that even the terrible "Wonderbread" is $3 a loaf.
I agree with everything you say, except the part about laptops being more expensive. Compared to a desktop, complete with a screen, mouse, and keyboard, you would probably pay more for the desktop. You can get a netbook for $200. That's good enough to send a few emails, browse the web, write up a resume and find yourself a better job. Plus you can carry it around, which means that you can go to the public library, coffee shop, or McDonald's and use their internet connection so you don't have to pay for that either.
I wonder how there is even a market for laptop rentals in today's society. First, a laptop can be bought flat out for $400 and that will get you a not too bad laptop. On top of that, most computer stores will offer some kind of financing. I know a guy who worked at Futureshop. He said he was quite amazed how bad the credit ratings were of the people they gave out store credit cards to. You can go to dell right now and get a laptop for $15 a month. I don't see how any rental company could compete with that.
Learn to read. It's 40 MB per square inch. Same as an Audio CD. You could easily fit music on something the size of an audio CD, I'm sure someone has done it before. Although pictures are getting quite big. A single picture from my digital camera comes pretty close to the size of a lot of MP3s I have. So, it might need quite a few of these discs to back up the thousands of pictures I have. Although you could probably keep a collection of important ones.
Exactly. For $200 I could get a netbook. That's a full computer that comes with a small keyboard, screen, and trackpad. I can open the box and use it right away. It comes with much better specs than any of these "educational" or open computers. By the time you buy a screen, keyboard, mouse, and power supply for your raspberry pi, you're probably already close to the cost of the netbook. If you already have all these extra required devices then the Raspberry Pi can be fun to play around with (I have one myself), but if I was poor and wanted to learn computers, and didn't already have some other computer, it would make much more sense to just go with the netbook and get a complete computer.
I think you underestimate how good compilers have become. Also, the "expert assembly language programmer" probably would work at 1/100 the pace of a programmer in something more high level like C++. It would probably be next to impossible to write an entire modern operating system, web browser, or word processor in assembly language. Sure for some very small sections of code you can optimize at the assembly level, but you can't write a whole program in assembly. Also, if a person can recognize some optimization, then that optimization can be added to the compiler, which means that a compiler can probably always at least come within a very close margin of where the human could get, and it could probably do better, because a compiler can remember a lot more optimizations than any human can.
The problem is that you can't do a diff between Word documents. Source control and diffing tools work great on source code because it's all just plain text. But for things like Word documents or Powerpoint presentations things get a little more complicated. Sure with a version control service you won't lose any previous versions, but you don't know what changed between versions either. To me this is the major thing missing for MS Office, and I can't believe they haven't done it yet. Sure they have track changes, but you have to remember to turn that on. There's no reason you should have to track changes. You should be able to take two versions of the document and MS Word should be able to tell you what has changed between the two versions. I think that if OpenOffice developed this feature it would be a killer feature that might get people to actually start using it. Because as you pointed out, when you have 4 different versions of the same document from 4 different people, it's nice to be able to figure out which changes those 4 people actually made without going through all 50 pages of the document.
It seems the less natural meat becomes the more tasteless it becomes. Meat from a wild deer tastes amazing. Meat from a free range elk tastes pretty good too (there's an elk farm near my house, see the elk grazing in the fields on bike rides in the country). Beef from the supermarket that usually originates from corn fed cattle that isn't allowed to graze doesn't even compare to something that has actually had the ability to graze on grass, and wander in the field. It would be quite a feat if they could get laboratory meat that tastes better than hunted animals. However, most attempts I've seen at laboratory meat don't seem to have any fat, which apart from being part of a healthy diet, also adds significantly to the taste. The varied diet of grazing animals is part of what makes it taste so good. Same goes for things like cheese, which tastes much better when made from cows/sheep/goats which eat grass and spend time in the pasture.
I imagine the problem with this is that there will be extortionate amounts they charge just for the service, similar to with propane tanks. However with propane tanks it's not too much of a problem, since I only go through 2-3 tanks a year, so I don't mind paying the extra fee, plus none of the gas stations in my area have filling stations anyway. Not only that, but propane tanks themselves are quite cheap and last a long time. Battery packs on the other hand are very expensive, and with constant use, the amount of power they hold will go down. I wouldn't want to swap out the new batteries I just bought with my car for a set of old batteries that only get 75% of the range.
Actually, the Tesla model S seats 5 Adults + 2 children in rear facing seats. When you consider this, the Tesla looks very attractive. You'll be hard pressed to find a 7 seater car that gets respectable gas mileage. Also, 7 seater vehicles are often more expensive meaning that it makes the tesla even more competitive and appealing to certain market segments.
The problem is that it's way too easy to get contraband tires. Go over to Canada for the day and get a new set of tires. Canadians do it all the time going the other way, not because of taxes on tires, but because tires are so much cheaper in the US. Plus tires only have to be bought once ever 100,000 or more KM. That would have to be a pretty hefty tax to account for all the gas taxes that would have been collected. This would make getting non-taxed foreign tires too good for most people to not do it. They could much more easily just build something into the car, oh, I don't know, like the odometer, which measures how far you travel without recording where you're actually travelling.
Sounds a lot like this Android TV dongle I saw on kickstarter. Looks like it got fully funded, and then some, but people could have just gone out and bought something exactly the same off numerous chinese websites, for cheaper. I think the only thing that was original here was the case.
I really don't know why people complain about the quality of mp3 when most of the music I listened to in my younger days was recorded on cassette tapes using the highspeed dubbing feature. The source tape for most of mine tapes was itself a copy of the original which was copied using the highspeed dubbing feature. MP3 even at 128 kbps is still miles ahead of that stuff.
I think that a nice alternative for this would be for the tablet to come with an SD Card slot, and be able to boot off that. When you're booting off the SD Card slot, the internal memory becomes readonly, or if they don't want you poking around the firmware, make it completely disabled. That way they don't have to worry about custom firmware voiding warranties, and the customer could run whichever software they want on the device without having to worry about voiding the warranty, and they are free to return back to the default firmware whenever they want by just removing the SD Card. For security's sake it would probably be a good idea to have some kind of physical switch to enable booting from the SD Card.
I wonder how much energy one could garner from the water flowing out of the taps. I currently pay about $3 for 1m^3 (1000 litres) of water. Electricity costs about 10 cents / kwh. So if I could generate more than 30 kwh of electricity from 1 m^3 of water coming out of my tap, then I could get electricty for less than the cost supplied to me by the power company. You'd probably need to measure the pressure at the tap, and I assume it wouldn't be possible, but I wonder if anybody has ever ran through all the calcuations.
You think that's bad, I'm a VB.Net developer. People rant endlessly about VB.Net. It's almost got the exact same feature set as C#, minus a few and plus a few features. For a long time, C# was missing simple things like optional parameters. Also, VB.Net has always had a much superior background compiler. A lot of what you hear about VB.Net is based on biases from the old VB, as well as complaints about syntax and verbosity. Neither of which really address it's merits.
I think the main problem here is that the insurance costs way too much. Consider the iPhone which costs about $600. The $100 insurance plan assumes that 1 in 6 people are going to need a total phone replacement for them to break even. Even counting in operating costs, and the fact that they will want to make a profit, let's say 1 in 20 end up needing a complete replacement over the life of the phone. This doesn't even count the fact that after about a year, the cost of the phone has come down considerably. Something like $20 may make a lot more sense for most people. A year of insurance on a house probably costs $1200, which is around 0.4% of the value of my house and possessions. Yet for some reason it costs about 20% of the value of the phone to insure it. I think it all comes down to the fact that it's way too tempting to drop/fry/submerse your phone on purpose in order to get a shiny new one. Whereas one would be crazy to try the same with their phone. Insurance fraud is illegal, but probably impossible to prove with phones.
I guess with the million dollar prize at the end, you could probably get some people motivated enough. But I would think there's a very high percentage of people who really just don't have the "mental capacity necessary to follow logic". You'd probably end up with a lot of people passing, but still not really understanding how to program at the end. I saw a lot of this in university. They'd get a whole bunch of help on the assignments, or just outright copy from other students. In the exam, they'd cram until they could just barely pass, and then proceed to forget everything within minutes after the exam, leaving them no more knowledgable then before the class. It's not that people are stupid, but I knew some pretty "smart" people (they did well enough in highschool to get accepted to engineering), but who utterly failed at anything programming related.
Well, despite the Macbook Air being extemely small. They have dedicated a fair amount of size to the battery. Check out this picture to see just how much space the battery takes up in the Macbook Air. I only wish my HP thickbook used the same percentage of the volume for the batteries. I'd be able to work an entire day without charging. I'd gladly go without the optical drive if they could replace the entire thing with a battery.