Very much this. You can get a very bright and functional light for very cheap these days. Everybody who is riding in the night or even during other times of reduced visibility should have a light. Personally, I leave mine on all the time, like daytime running lights on a car. Increased visibility is great for improving safety.
Personally, I'm OK with software being patentable provided a couple of changes to the way they are currently awarded. First, a software patent must be truly novel to be patented. Taking something we already did without computers, and making a program that automates it should not be grounds for copyright. Also, taking something that programmers have been doing for decades and all of a sudden deciding to patent it shouldn't be awarded a patent. Perhaps the patent office should hire some actual people versed in software and computer systems development to help determine of some new patent application is actually something we haven't all been doing for the last 20 years.
Secondly, a fully working codebase should be submitted with the patent application such that, when the patent is expired, we actually have a record as to how the patented software was actually implemented. You shouldn't just be able to describe what the software does to be awarded a patent. A fully working code base must be presented so that the patent office can determine that you've actually done something novel and that you've actually made software that does what you say it does.
Thirdly, software patents should be shortened to make up for the fact that software evolves at such a fast pace. 5 years should probably do it.
Personally, I think all patents should be shortened. The world moves at a much faster pace than it did 100 years ago. It's completely possible to come up with a new invention and have worldwide adoption within 2 years, and the product even often becomes obsolete within 5 years. Maybe something like apply for patent, you have 5 years to bring it to market. If you don't have a significant marketable product, then patent expires. If you have a product, you get another 5 years to sell it. Maximum patent length is 10 years.
When I switch from POTS service to a VOIP service, My bill when from $50 a month down to $25 a month. And the VOIP service included things like unlimited long distance, voicemail, and a few other features that weren't included in my POTS service, because they would have made the bill even more expensive. Are Verizon dropping the rates for any customer affected by changing over to a VOIP system? Because if they are continuing to charge people as if they are using a POTS system, then the customers are truly being fleeced.
A lot of people stay with POTS because they assume that land lines are more reliable and better quality. If they are no longer getting an actual copper connection, they shouldn't be paying the same amount, because then they could go with any other VOIP provider and save a lot of money.
I don't know who's paying $600+ for their phones, but it seems that there's a lot of people doing it. Because manufacturers keep producing phones at this price. The most I've ever spent on a phone was $300, and my last one was $200. For $200 I think I'm getting a pretty good experience from my phone. Certainly things couldn't really be 3 times better with a $600 phone. I only see myself spending less and less in the future as low end phones become more powerful. I paid $600 for my last desktop computer, and it sure does a lot more than my phone. No only that, but it's easily repairable, so I'll probably have the majority of the components for a decade. I'm currently replacing cell phones about every 2 years. At that rate, who can afford $600 phones. Even if it lasts 3 years it still isn't worth it to me.
Seems to me you would just be better off running Linux in a virtual machine. I've tried this Linux on Windows stuff, and there was quite a bit of basic stuff that didn't work. It's definitely not production ready yet. Even if it was production ready, what would this provide that running a virtual machine would not provide?
What they really need is the equivalent of buying a DVD for digital content. You can currently buy the DVD, and that gives you the right to rent it out, simply because you own it. The movie studios have no control whether or not you rent something else that you paid your own money for. There definitely needs to be a way for Netflix to purchase a license for any movie that exists and just stream it as much as they want, provided they only use a license for a single stream at a time. Owning a DVD should probably allow you to store it on a hard disk and rent it out digitally, but the current laws don't allow that I'm pretty sure. But this really does need to be the case. Otherwise, the movie studios will always have a stranglehold on the people distributing and you won't ever get a streaming service that has absolutely every movie available.
The auto company doesn't have to do anything to make networked cars more secure except hire people already knowledgeable in the field computer systems design and security. And actually listen to what they are telling you to do. Putting a computer on a car is no different than putting a computer in any other situation that we've been doing for years. We already know how to make computers secure.
It's fine to have a bluetooth radio. But the radio should not be in any way hooked up to the core systems of the car that control the engine and brakes. You can have remote door locks, but it should be much more robust, using some kind of challenge-response type encryption based technology instead of just sending the same signal over the air every time you want to unlock the car.
I live in Canada, and although we have single payer healthcare, that doesn't mean that everything is covered. Most notable among things that aren't covered are prescription drugs. EpiPens are priced a bit more affordably here, but many other drugs are not very affordable, most notably things like cancer drugs. Although socalized/single payer health care would go a long way to helping the health care situation in the United States, it would definitely not solve all problems, especially depending on exactly what is covered and how it is implemented. That being said, they need to change something, and a real single payer healthcare system would make things a lot better than they currently are.
If I want family pictures printed, I can have them done much better for much cheaper at Costco or Walmart. Even the more expensive dedicated photo stores are cheaper than printing at home, and all provide much better results. Sure, if you have to have the picture "right now", nothing beats a home inkjet, but only a couple times in my life would I have found that useful. Certainly not worth the cost of owning an inkjet printer. I even go so far as to just use a black and white laser printer. For $100, which is less than the cost of owning a color printer, I could print off 1000 color pages, which is easily more color pages than I'll print in 10 years.
Best bet is to get a laser printer. Inkjets are basically designed to have high consumable costs. If you don't print often enough, the ink will dry out. If you print a lot, the ink costs will be high. I got a cheap laser printer about 5 years back and it has served me well. I've only had to get 1 toner cartridge after the original that came with it. It's a Samsung. Of course, their printer division is getting bought out by HP. At work we use Brother printers and they seem to be very reliable. The cartridges are reasonably priced for the number of pages they print. You can use third party toner, but we don't because the price difference isn't that much.
Yeah, I got a lot of flack for commenting on the article about the Pokemon Go related malware, but I think this really doesn't get enough emphasis. Stop installing so much junk on your phone. I am very selective about the apps that I install. Doesn't matter if they are on Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, Windows App Store, Steam, or whatever other place you get you software from for your phone or computer. Every thing you install is a possible vector for attack or snooping at your data. I get by pretty well with my cell phone with just email, browser, a few games, and a couple other basic utilities. After the first month, I might install one new app a month, but they mostly get removed pretty quickly after I realize that I actually don't need that many apps. How many people go installing new software one their PC 5 times a week? Why would you treat your phone any different, especially with such limited resources.
This just goes to show what happens when you put an operating system in the hands of millions/billions of every day users. It can be Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS, Android, it doesn't matter. People are idiots and they will install anything. I didn't really think it was possible to root a phone simply by installing an app. That definitely is a failing in the security. But there isn't really anything you can do to completely stop all attacks if people are going to install random software.
I'm pretty sure there was an entire win 32 subsystem in there based on the applications available. They have notepad, calculator, remote desktop, character map, ms paint, and a bunch of other system tools like regedit and event viewer that I can't really see them bothering to port unless they could just recompile them. Also, I seem to remember somebody jail breaking an early version and getting a few basic open source programs like putty and scummvm running. I think they really missed the boad by now allowing people to run recompiled desktop applications.
You're trying to be funny but this illustrates the point quite well. We are approaching a point which has never been seen before. A point where all jobs that don't require a high level of intelligence will be done by robots. The only jobs that are left will be those that require a high level of intelligence. Even a large number of people I know could easily be replaced by computers or just have the jobs not exist entirely. Many companies are still using 1970s business practices that require people to just sit around copying information from one system to another. Businesses are only beginning catch on to how much computers and automation can save them.
I don't understand the need for any of this stuff. Just put a 64 GB card in your phone and load it up with whatever music you want. No ads, no monthly payments, and you only hear the music you want to hear.
I don't use it anymore, but I looked it up a few months ago, and it actually seems to be a pretty good solution. It has clients for just about every device and operating system. Which seems a lot better than any of the other instant messaging systems that seem to want to limit themselves to certain devices. Services like iMessage or Snapchat come to mind. I didn't actually download and try it, so I can't speak to the quality of how well it works, but it does look like it at least tries to be supported on just about every platform.
I think the point is that the internet is becoming less distributed. Everybody putting their web sites up on virtual machines in "the cloud" means that there are 2 or 3 entities who are responsible for a very large number of websites. Even if they use multiple datacenters, they are all interconnected in the case where if 1 fails, other datacenters can take over, but sometimes this has even more disasterous effects where a chain reaction takes down an even bigger part of the network.
Some people are taking this to an extreme and just doing things that don't make a lot of sense. Using Google's version of certain javascript libraries comes to mind. Sure, Google isn't very likely to go down, but it's kind of a bad idea to rely on some third party for something that you could easily host yourself all in the name of shaving a few milliseconds off the page load time.
I didn't really want to get into a phone OS war, so I didn't mention it before, but I have a Windows phone, and I have to say, the experience is so much better than what I've seen from iOS and Android. The battery just lasts so much longer. Before anybody chimes in about the phone not running any apps, I would have to say I disagree. This phone runs all the stuff in the background I used to run on my Android phone, including email fetching, reddit client, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and can do anything that I did with my Android phone. I don't have many games, but I never really did enjoy gaming on a touch screen anyway.
I'm not saying that everybody should get a Windows phone, it's definitely not for most people, but I think that my experience has mad me realize that Android and iOS are doing a terrible job in terms of making their phones efficient. Just about everybody I know complains that their phone doesn't last through the day, and many Android users have lots of problem with instability and crashes.
They need to do only a couple things to fix this. Firstly, they need to just design the phone so that it never charges above 80%. It would be easy to just report the battery as full when it's really not. As someone else suggested, you could have an overcharge mode warning the user of the problems.
The second thing is to make sure that the battery doesn't go below 20%. A lot of this has to do with operating system design, as well as the total battery capacity. A lot of phones, even new ones seem to be designed to not last more than the period between morning and night (7AM - 11PM) without absolutely needing to be charged. If the battery had sufficient capacity and the operating system and applications were power efficient enough, then there would be little chance of the battery dropping below that 20% mark. My current phone is very good, and can go a couple days without being changed. This means I'm in the 20%-80% zone very often. I've experienced very little battery degradation, even after 18 months using the phone. The battery is almost as good as the day I got it.
It works, but it makes your code kludgy. Without operator overloading, you have to do fun things like a = b.add(c) just to numbers together. Just hope you never have to do a complex mathematical operation. It's much harder to see what's going on when you can't use things like BigDecimal. Even a simple comparison just gets ugly.
if ( bigDecimal1.compareTo(bigDecimal2) < 0){ ... }
How do this work when calculating tax rates? Taxes can be at a fraction of a percent. Quebec for instance has 9.975 % sales tax. If you store your amounts as integers in total cents, what value do you multiply by to get the tax? If you have a proper decimal data type, you can store store the exact values..Net has no problem storing 9.975, 0.09975 or any number up to 28 significant digits without worrying about weird floating point anomalies.
Have they added support for decimal numbers yet?.Net has had support for decimal numbers for quite a few years now (At least since 2003). It comes in really handy for doing applications dealing with money, which quite a lot of applications deal with. Floats and doubles don't work well with currency values as they can't hold exact decimal values for many commonly encountered numbers. There are work arounds like using integers to store the number of cents, and using classes like BigDecimal, but both of those have quite a few drawbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Very much this. You can get a very bright and functional light for very cheap these days. Everybody who is riding in the night or even during other times of reduced visibility should have a light. Personally, I leave mine on all the time, like daytime running lights on a car. Increased visibility is great for improving safety.
Personally, I'm OK with software being patentable provided a couple of changes to the way they are currently awarded. First, a software patent must be truly novel to be patented. Taking something we already did without computers, and making a program that automates it should not be grounds for copyright. Also, taking something that programmers have been doing for decades and all of a sudden deciding to patent it shouldn't be awarded a patent. Perhaps the patent office should hire some actual people versed in software and computer systems development to help determine of some new patent application is actually something we haven't all been doing for the last 20 years.
Secondly, a fully working codebase should be submitted with the patent application such that, when the patent is expired, we actually have a record as to how the patented software was actually implemented. You shouldn't just be able to describe what the software does to be awarded a patent. A fully working code base must be presented so that the patent office can determine that you've actually done something novel and that you've actually made software that does what you say it does.
Thirdly, software patents should be shortened to make up for the fact that software evolves at such a fast pace. 5 years should probably do it.
Personally, I think all patents should be shortened. The world moves at a much faster pace than it did 100 years ago. It's completely possible to come up with a new invention and have worldwide adoption within 2 years, and the product even often becomes obsolete within 5 years. Maybe something like apply for patent, you have 5 years to bring it to market. If you don't have a significant marketable product, then patent expires. If you have a product, you get another 5 years to sell it. Maximum patent length is 10 years.
When I switch from POTS service to a VOIP service, My bill when from $50 a month down to $25 a month. And the VOIP service included things like unlimited long distance, voicemail, and a few other features that weren't included in my POTS service, because they would have made the bill even more expensive. Are Verizon dropping the rates for any customer affected by changing over to a VOIP system? Because if they are continuing to charge people as if they are using a POTS system, then the customers are truly being fleeced.
A lot of people stay with POTS because they assume that land lines are more reliable and better quality. If they are no longer getting an actual copper connection, they shouldn't be paying the same amount, because then they could go with any other VOIP provider and save a lot of money.
I don't know who's paying $600+ for their phones, but it seems that there's a lot of people doing it. Because manufacturers keep producing phones at this price. The most I've ever spent on a phone was $300, and my last one was $200. For $200 I think I'm getting a pretty good experience from my phone. Certainly things couldn't really be 3 times better with a $600 phone. I only see myself spending less and less in the future as low end phones become more powerful. I paid $600 for my last desktop computer, and it sure does a lot more than my phone. No only that, but it's easily repairable, so I'll probably have the majority of the components for a decade. I'm currently replacing cell phones about every 2 years. At that rate, who can afford $600 phones. Even if it lasts 3 years it still isn't worth it to me.
Seems to me you would just be better off running Linux in a virtual machine. I've tried this Linux on Windows stuff, and there was quite a bit of basic stuff that didn't work. It's definitely not production ready yet. Even if it was production ready, what would this provide that running a virtual machine would not provide?
What they really need is the equivalent of buying a DVD for digital content. You can currently buy the DVD, and that gives you the right to rent it out, simply because you own it. The movie studios have no control whether or not you rent something else that you paid your own money for. There definitely needs to be a way for Netflix to purchase a license for any movie that exists and just stream it as much as they want, provided they only use a license for a single stream at a time. Owning a DVD should probably allow you to store it on a hard disk and rent it out digitally, but the current laws don't allow that I'm pretty sure. But this really does need to be the case. Otherwise, the movie studios will always have a stranglehold on the people distributing and you won't ever get a streaming service that has absolutely every movie available.
The auto company doesn't have to do anything to make networked cars more secure except hire people already knowledgeable in the field computer systems design and security. And actually listen to what they are telling you to do. Putting a computer on a car is no different than putting a computer in any other situation that we've been doing for years. We already know how to make computers secure.
It's fine to have a bluetooth radio. But the radio should not be in any way hooked up to the core systems of the car that control the engine and brakes. You can have remote door locks, but it should be much more robust, using some kind of challenge-response type encryption based technology instead of just sending the same signal over the air every time you want to unlock the car.
I live in Canada, and although we have single payer healthcare, that doesn't mean that everything is covered. Most notable among things that aren't covered are prescription drugs. EpiPens are priced a bit more affordably here, but many other drugs are not very affordable, most notably things like cancer drugs. Although socalized/single payer health care would go a long way to helping the health care situation in the United States, it would definitely not solve all problems, especially depending on exactly what is covered and how it is implemented. That being said, they need to change something, and a real single payer healthcare system would make things a lot better than they currently are.
If I want family pictures printed, I can have them done much better for much cheaper at Costco or Walmart. Even the more expensive dedicated photo stores are cheaper than printing at home, and all provide much better results. Sure, if you have to have the picture "right now", nothing beats a home inkjet, but only a couple times in my life would I have found that useful. Certainly not worth the cost of owning an inkjet printer. I even go so far as to just use a black and white laser printer. For $100, which is less than the cost of owning a color printer, I could print off 1000 color pages, which is easily more color pages than I'll print in 10 years.
Best bet is to get a laser printer. Inkjets are basically designed to have high consumable costs. If you don't print often enough, the ink will dry out. If you print a lot, the ink costs will be high. I got a cheap laser printer about 5 years back and it has served me well. I've only had to get 1 toner cartridge after the original that came with it. It's a Samsung. Of course, their printer division is getting bought out by HP. At work we use Brother printers and they seem to be very reliable. The cartridges are reasonably priced for the number of pages they print. You can use third party toner, but we don't because the price difference isn't that much.
Yeah, I got a lot of flack for commenting on the article about the Pokemon Go related malware, but I think this really doesn't get enough emphasis. Stop installing so much junk on your phone. I am very selective about the apps that I install. Doesn't matter if they are on Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, Windows App Store, Steam, or whatever other place you get you software from for your phone or computer. Every thing you install is a possible vector for attack or snooping at your data. I get by pretty well with my cell phone with just email, browser, a few games, and a couple other basic utilities. After the first month, I might install one new app a month, but they mostly get removed pretty quickly after I realize that I actually don't need that many apps. How many people go installing new software one their PC 5 times a week? Why would you treat your phone any different, especially with such limited resources.
This just goes to show what happens when you put an operating system in the hands of millions/billions of every day users. It can be Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS, Android, it doesn't matter. People are idiots and they will install anything. I didn't really think it was possible to root a phone simply by installing an app. That definitely is a failing in the security. But there isn't really anything you can do to completely stop all attacks if people are going to install random software.
I'm pretty sure there was an entire win 32 subsystem in there based on the applications available. They have notepad, calculator, remote desktop, character map, ms paint, and a bunch of other system tools like regedit and event viewer that I can't really see them bothering to port unless they could just recompile them. Also, I seem to remember somebody jail breaking an early version and getting a few basic open source programs like putty and scummvm running. I think they really missed the boad by now allowing people to run recompiled desktop applications.
You're trying to be funny but this illustrates the point quite well. We are approaching a point which has never been seen before. A point where all jobs that don't require a high level of intelligence will be done by robots. The only jobs that are left will be those that require a high level of intelligence. Even a large number of people I know could easily be replaced by computers or just have the jobs not exist entirely. Many companies are still using 1970s business practices that require people to just sit around copying information from one system to another. Businesses are only beginning catch on to how much computers and automation can save them.
I don't understand the need for any of this stuff. Just put a 64 GB card in your phone and load it up with whatever music you want. No ads, no monthly payments, and you only hear the music you want to hear.
I don't use it anymore, but I looked it up a few months ago, and it actually seems to be a pretty good solution. It has clients for just about every device and operating system. Which seems a lot better than any of the other instant messaging systems that seem to want to limit themselves to certain devices. Services like iMessage or Snapchat come to mind. I didn't actually download and try it, so I can't speak to the quality of how well it works, but it does look like it at least tries to be supported on just about every platform.
I think the point is that the internet is becoming less distributed. Everybody putting their web sites up on virtual machines in "the cloud" means that there are 2 or 3 entities who are responsible for a very large number of websites. Even if they use multiple datacenters, they are all interconnected in the case where if 1 fails, other datacenters can take over, but sometimes this has even more disasterous effects where a chain reaction takes down an even bigger part of the network.
Some people are taking this to an extreme and just doing things that don't make a lot of sense. Using Google's version of certain javascript libraries comes to mind. Sure, Google isn't very likely to go down, but it's kind of a bad idea to rely on some third party for something that you could easily host yourself all in the name of shaving a few milliseconds off the page load time.
There are Dozens of us!!!!!
My old android phone would go down to 50% by the end of the day just sitting there on my desk. It's definitely not anything to do with games.
I didn't really want to get into a phone OS war, so I didn't mention it before, but I have a Windows phone, and I have to say, the experience is so much better than what I've seen from iOS and Android. The battery just lasts so much longer. Before anybody chimes in about the phone not running any apps, I would have to say I disagree. This phone runs all the stuff in the background I used to run on my Android phone, including email fetching, reddit client, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and can do anything that I did with my Android phone. I don't have many games, but I never really did enjoy gaming on a touch screen anyway.
I'm not saying that everybody should get a Windows phone, it's definitely not for most people, but I think that my experience has mad me realize that Android and iOS are doing a terrible job in terms of making their phones efficient. Just about everybody I know complains that their phone doesn't last through the day, and many Android users have lots of problem with instability and crashes.
They need to do only a couple things to fix this. Firstly, they need to just design the phone so that it never charges above 80%. It would be easy to just report the battery as full when it's really not. As someone else suggested, you could have an overcharge mode warning the user of the problems.
The second thing is to make sure that the battery doesn't go below 20%. A lot of this has to do with operating system design, as well as the total battery capacity. A lot of phones, even new ones seem to be designed to not last more than the period between morning and night (7AM - 11PM) without absolutely needing to be charged. If the battery had sufficient capacity and the operating system and applications were power efficient enough, then there would be little chance of the battery dropping below that 20% mark. My current phone is very good, and can go a couple days without being changed. This means I'm in the 20%-80% zone very often. I've experienced very little battery degradation, even after 18 months using the phone. The battery is almost as good as the day I got it.
And hope you aren't running with 32 bit integers and encounter an overflow because you just multiplied 1 million by 9975
How do this work when calculating tax rates? Taxes can be at a fraction of a percent. Quebec for instance has 9.975 % sales tax. If you store your amounts as integers in total cents, what value do you multiply by to get the tax? If you have a proper decimal data type, you can store store the exact values. .Net has no problem storing 9.975, 0.09975 or any number up to 28 significant digits without worrying about weird floating point anomalies.
Have they added support for decimal numbers yet? .Net has had support for decimal numbers for quite a few years now (At least since 2003). It comes in really handy for doing applications dealing with money, which quite a lot of applications deal with. Floats and doubles don't work well with currency values as they can't hold exact decimal values for many commonly encountered numbers. There are work arounds like using integers to store the number of cents, and using classes like BigDecimal, but both of those have quite a few drawbacks.