I'm pretty sure the day will come when consoles have their motherboards encased in epoxy, and don't have any external inputs. The only way to load a game would be over the network on their authenticated servers. From my experience with soft-modding the Wii, the problems seems to be all too often that they let you plug in standard peripherals into the machine and copy and load data off the machine. Put a fake save game on an SD card, load it up in some game, and poof, buffer overflow, and the thing is modded. They made it extra nice with USB ports on the thing so you could then hook up a hard drive and run games off that. Maybe not the next generation, but I think eventually somebody will make something that is unmoddable. The big question is, will they be able to convince people to buy it.
I've always wondered, wouldn't it be easier to add an extra attribute to HTML documents so that they can do a request without sending any (or most) of the headers. Most of the time, when you're requesting an image, or a javascript file, or a css file, the web server doesn't care what your user agent is, it probably isn't looking at any cookies you have for the site. The number of headers you would probably have to include is minimal. It would be nice if you could write HTML as follows
Then the browser notices that it's requesting static content, and doesn't send all the headers in the HTTP request. Perhaps you could just put a directive in the page header which says not to send headers with specific file extensions. that would minimize the amount of redesign in the page. And there's no need to implement new protocols.
Very much agree. I've been biking to work for the past 5 years, and I love it. Keeps me fit without having to ever step foot in a gym. First little while it seems like quite a workout, but eventually it becomes just as easy as walking, or even easier. But one correction. I think there's plenty of room for profit margins in bicycles. There's a lot of high end bikes, or bikes aimed at people who like specific styles which cost way more than just the cost of the manufacturing.
Very true indeed. Large companies have lawyers on staff looking for work to do. It's more like the lawyers that they have on staff are just looking to make themselves look relevant. If the lawyers don't have anything to do, you can cut back on the number of lawyers you have on retainer.
I was discussing this with my brother about a year back. We were in the store looking at this warhammer stuff, and I remarked that these dye-cast figures aren't any more complicated (probably less so) than hotwheels. Yet peopel are paying $5 a piece for them, or getting special sets of "rare" pieces for over $50. I was saying that eventually people would just be printing their own models on 3D printers. I guess the future is here. And good for it. I always thought some of these games were a little odd. Things like Magic Cards. Who-ever spends the most on their deck has a huge advantage over everyone else. Sure there's skill involved at some level, in knowing which cards to put in the deck in the first place, but a lot of it is spending money obtaining that deck. I would be like playing chess, where one player had all queens because he had spent a bunch of money.
This is why I can't stand HTML CSS and JS for programming (although I am a web developer). Because the browsers are both forgiving, and inconsistent, tracking down why something doesn't work can be very troublesome. An extra tag thrown in can throw the entire formatting of the document out of whack, but there aren't a lot of tools to help you find that extra tag. CSS and JS have terrible incompatibilities across browsers. It's extremely frustrating to do something correctly, and have it not work because some browser coder messed up their implementation.
Very much agree with this. We shouldn't be teaching programming, but rather "advanced" computer use. Show them how to use a spreadsheet to it's full potential. The number of times pivot tables have helped me is huge, but most people don't even know the feature exists. Most people can't do anything more than a sum or average calculation in excel. Teach them how to use a database like Access. This again will save people tons of time. If they want to move to programming, the tools are right there. Teaching people how to program computers without actually requiring them to use a programming language, such as by using macros would solve a lot more problems for people than actually teaching real programming.
Which is why I think programming probably isn't the right thing to be teaching to everybody. Something like systems administration would be a much better course. Understanding the basics like how a computer goes together, what the different parts are for (many people don't even know the difference between memory (RAM) and storage (hard disk). You can't be proficient in programming until you actually understand how to operate a computer, and many people fail on that to no end. Get people up to the point where they can operate their computer before we talk about how they should be programming them. For a car analogy, let's make sure everyone knows how to drive well, before we start requiring everyone to be a mechanic.
Most every hosting company I've seen will provide a GUI for this type of thing. There are a few who will probably even answer questions you have about how to set this stuff up.
I was going to mention that site. I haven't read it for a while, but there were some truly atrocious things I've seen on there. My favourite was some VBScript that was embedded in a webpage, which would actually open a direct connection to the database, to retrieve data. Kind of like an AJAX call, but just running a query directly from the database.
Yeah, but there's an 8-year/100,000 mile warranty on that battery. After 8 years, it may be time for a whole new car anyway. If you drive a lot, and get 100,000 miles out of it in 3 years, then in 3 years, the batteries will likely be cheaper than they are now, or you'll be able to get a battery that will get you 500 mile range.
Depends what you are buying. You can get a much better calculator for $10.00 now than you cold in 1998. For $10 you could get a 4 GB USB stick. Do you know how many floppy disks you would have to buy to get 4 GB. A lot more than $10 worth. Sure if you're buying food you might get less, but many things have come down in price.
I really wouldn't include Altavista and Digg in this list. The rest of those companies had real physical products. Altavista and Digg just set up websites. Some others you might want to add to the list are DEC, Commodore, Tandy, and 3DFX
Very much agree. As much as I enjoy my eBook reader (kobo) for reading things like novels and biographies, I can't imagine trying to use it to read a text book. And I can't imagine having an iPad would make it a better experience. Text books are not something that can be experienced on a screen.
If the game was only programmed to take input from a gamepad/joystick, how do you propose that the mouse movements be translated? It's a completely different control model. While it's easy to translate key presses to button presses, it's not so easy to translate mouse movements into joystick positions. You can't even do it. If the game isn't programmed to expect mouse inputs, that is, change in X and Y position, as opposed to x and y offset from center as is the case with analog thumbsticks, then, you aren't going to be able to use a mouse with the game.
I really don't understand how it was accomplished, but UltraHLE was capable of running N64 even on my old PII 266 MhZ. The games even looked better in emulation because they ran in higher resolution. There's still emulators out there that can't compete with what was accomplished in UltraHLE.
People aren't going malnourished because a farmer doesn't want to use his field for growing corn to sell for ethanol. It's his land (or which ever corporation the land belongs to). We live in a capitalistic society. If you have land, you can grow whatever you want, and sell it to whoever you want, and after you sell it to them, they can do whatever they want with it. I'm pretty sure that there's publicly traded farming corporations, and they would be doing a disservice to their shareholders if they didn't get the highest price they could for the crops they grow on their land. Whether that be for selling as people food, selling as dog food, or selling as fuel for cars. There are starving people in the world, not because there isn't enough land for the crops, but for many, much more complicated, political reasons. As someone in the first world, I personally, find that food isn't "that" expensive. But you have to be a smart shopper. Buy what's in season. Buy unprocessed foods. Dried beans and rice provide a lot of calories for quite a low price. For the price of a single McDonald's meal, I can make a healthy meal for my entire family of 5. For those in third world countries who are starving, again, it's a lot of politics, and farmers selling corn for ethanol isn't the main problem.
I've been using this method for years. I recommend this to everyone I know. But for most people, it is a bit of a hassle. The biggest problem is that you have to keep the file backed up, and you have to ensure that your backup is current. If you lose the file, you have now lost access to all your online accounts. Some people say they keep their file in a DropBox account, but personally, I wouldn't trust my data there. They had a data breach a little while back. Even if I change all my passwords (arduous process), there's still a file out there contain the list of all my user accounts for all the websites I visit. That's pretty personal information.
They'll probably be safer at people's houses than in the hands of the medical clinic staff. Remember this story about medical records being used as scrap paper at schools? There's countless others just like it. I don't see that this information shouldn't be required to be given to the patient on their request. They do have a legal right to the data, and shouldn't have to put up a big fight to get it.
Anecdote does not equal data. While I'm sure there are plenty intelligent people who are homeless, what I was saying was that the average intelligence of homeless people is probably lower then the average of the entire population.
This is what I'm thinking. ARM isn't owned by any one entity. They can make companies like HP, Acer, and others use specific ARM chips for the items they sell with Windows 8, but they won't be able to make HTC use these special ARM chips for their Android phones. There will still be plenty of ARM chips floating around and being manufactured without this new functionality. It's more like if you want to run Windows 8, you'll have to buy a Win-ARM device, but there will be plenty of plain old ARM devices out there.
In all probability, homeless people will follow the same distribution curve as everyone else
Sorry, but I seriously doubt that. A very large percentage of the homeless population are there because they have mental disorders. I'm pretty sure that there's a much larger proportion of people with an IQ of 80 than those who have an IQ of 120
Not only that, but once upon a time, there was a point where running a GUI would take a considerable percentage of the resources of the machine. Now, not so much. You have a machine with 32 GB (or 512 GB or whatever) of RAM, and you're worried about the small amount taken up by the GUI? Sure, make it so that the GUI can be completely shut down, link in Linux, but don't completely remove the GUI. We're passed the point where not running a GUI gives enough of a performance advantage that it's worth not having it installed.
How is $649 + $396 = 3 * $499? It isn't, It's almost double. Also, there's enough devopers in the world (I've heard around 4 million, numbers vary) that I think there's enough room for general purpose computers at a reasonable price. I suppose eventually computers might be so cheap that they will be given away for free with subscription to some service, they already are if you look at cell phones. With $25 raspberry pi devices, a device to watch movies on your TV could be thrown in for free with a Netflix contract. At that point, sure, a general purpose computer will be infinitely times more expensive than an appliance computer. But that doesn't mean that general purpose computers will ever reach the point of being too expensive. Also, you're talking about the cost of appliances VS the cost developing for the appliances. Which is quite different the cost of appliances VS the cost of a general purpose computer than can run programs written on the same machine.
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I'm pretty sure the day will come when consoles have their motherboards encased in epoxy, and don't have any external inputs. The only way to load a game would be over the network on their authenticated servers. From my experience with soft-modding the Wii, the problems seems to be all too often that they let you plug in standard peripherals into the machine and copy and load data off the machine. Put a fake save game on an SD card, load it up in some game, and poof, buffer overflow, and the thing is modded. They made it extra nice with USB ports on the thing so you could then hook up a hard drive and run games off that. Maybe not the next generation, but I think eventually somebody will make something that is unmoddable. The big question is, will they be able to convince people to buy it.
I've always wondered, wouldn't it be easier to add an extra attribute to HTML documents so that they can do a request without sending any (or most) of the headers. Most of the time, when you're requesting an image, or a javascript file, or a css file, the web server doesn't care what your user agent is, it probably isn't looking at any cookies you have for the site. The number of headers you would probably have to include is minimal. It would be nice if you could write HTML as follows Then the browser notices that it's requesting static content, and doesn't send all the headers in the HTTP request. Perhaps you could just put a directive in the page header which says not to send headers with specific file extensions. that would minimize the amount of redesign in the page. And there's no need to implement new protocols.
Very much agree. I've been biking to work for the past 5 years, and I love it. Keeps me fit without having to ever step foot in a gym. First little while it seems like quite a workout, but eventually it becomes just as easy as walking, or even easier. But one correction. I think there's plenty of room for profit margins in bicycles. There's a lot of high end bikes, or bikes aimed at people who like specific styles which cost way more than just the cost of the manufacturing.
Very true indeed. Large companies have lawyers on staff looking for work to do. It's more like the lawyers that they have on staff are just looking to make themselves look relevant. If the lawyers don't have anything to do, you can cut back on the number of lawyers you have on retainer.
I was discussing this with my brother about a year back. We were in the store looking at this warhammer stuff, and I remarked that these dye-cast figures aren't any more complicated (probably less so) than hotwheels. Yet peopel are paying $5 a piece for them, or getting special sets of "rare" pieces for over $50. I was saying that eventually people would just be printing their own models on 3D printers. I guess the future is here. And good for it. I always thought some of these games were a little odd. Things like Magic Cards. Who-ever spends the most on their deck has a huge advantage over everyone else. Sure there's skill involved at some level, in knowing which cards to put in the deck in the first place, but a lot of it is spending money obtaining that deck. I would be like playing chess, where one player had all queens because he had spent a bunch of money.
This is why I can't stand HTML CSS and JS for programming (although I am a web developer). Because the browsers are both forgiving, and inconsistent, tracking down why something doesn't work can be very troublesome. An extra tag thrown in can throw the entire formatting of the document out of whack, but there aren't a lot of tools to help you find that extra tag. CSS and JS have terrible incompatibilities across browsers. It's extremely frustrating to do something correctly, and have it not work because some browser coder messed up their implementation.
Very much agree with this. We shouldn't be teaching programming, but rather "advanced" computer use. Show them how to use a spreadsheet to it's full potential. The number of times pivot tables have helped me is huge, but most people don't even know the feature exists. Most people can't do anything more than a sum or average calculation in excel. Teach them how to use a database like Access. This again will save people tons of time. If they want to move to programming, the tools are right there. Teaching people how to program computers without actually requiring them to use a programming language, such as by using macros would solve a lot more problems for people than actually teaching real programming.
Which is why I think programming probably isn't the right thing to be teaching to everybody. Something like systems administration would be a much better course. Understanding the basics like how a computer goes together, what the different parts are for (many people don't even know the difference between memory (RAM) and storage (hard disk). You can't be proficient in programming until you actually understand how to operate a computer, and many people fail on that to no end. Get people up to the point where they can operate their computer before we talk about how they should be programming them. For a car analogy, let's make sure everyone knows how to drive well, before we start requiring everyone to be a mechanic.
If your files are completely legitimate, there's no reason why you shouldn't just get a shared hosting account.
Most every hosting company I've seen will provide a GUI for this type of thing. There are a few who will probably even answer questions you have about how to set this stuff up.
I was going to mention that site. I haven't read it for a while, but there were some truly atrocious things I've seen on there. My favourite was some VBScript that was embedded in a webpage, which would actually open a direct connection to the database, to retrieve data. Kind of like an AJAX call, but just running a query directly from the database.
Yeah, but there's an 8-year/100,000 mile warranty on that battery. After 8 years, it may be time for a whole new car anyway. If you drive a lot, and get 100,000 miles out of it in 3 years, then in 3 years, the batteries will likely be cheaper than they are now, or you'll be able to get a battery that will get you 500 mile range.
Depends what you are buying. You can get a much better calculator for $10.00 now than you cold in 1998. For $10 you could get a 4 GB USB stick. Do you know how many floppy disks you would have to buy to get 4 GB. A lot more than $10 worth. Sure if you're buying food you might get less, but many things have come down in price.
I really wouldn't include Altavista and Digg in this list. The rest of those companies had real physical products. Altavista and Digg just set up websites. Some others you might want to add to the list are DEC, Commodore, Tandy, and 3DFX
Very much agree. As much as I enjoy my eBook reader (kobo) for reading things like novels and biographies, I can't imagine trying to use it to read a text book. And I can't imagine having an iPad would make it a better experience. Text books are not something that can be experienced on a screen.
If the game was only programmed to take input from a gamepad/joystick, how do you propose that the mouse movements be translated? It's a completely different control model. While it's easy to translate key presses to button presses, it's not so easy to translate mouse movements into joystick positions. You can't even do it. If the game isn't programmed to expect mouse inputs, that is, change in X and Y position, as opposed to x and y offset from center as is the case with analog thumbsticks, then, you aren't going to be able to use a mouse with the game.
I really don't understand how it was accomplished, but UltraHLE was capable of running N64 even on my old PII 266 MhZ. The games even looked better in emulation because they ran in higher resolution. There's still emulators out there that can't compete with what was accomplished in UltraHLE.
People aren't going malnourished because a farmer doesn't want to use his field for growing corn to sell for ethanol. It's his land (or which ever corporation the land belongs to). We live in a capitalistic society. If you have land, you can grow whatever you want, and sell it to whoever you want, and after you sell it to them, they can do whatever they want with it. I'm pretty sure that there's publicly traded farming corporations, and they would be doing a disservice to their shareholders if they didn't get the highest price they could for the crops they grow on their land. Whether that be for selling as people food, selling as dog food, or selling as fuel for cars. There are starving people in the world, not because there isn't enough land for the crops, but for many, much more complicated, political reasons. As someone in the first world, I personally, find that food isn't "that" expensive. But you have to be a smart shopper. Buy what's in season. Buy unprocessed foods. Dried beans and rice provide a lot of calories for quite a low price. For the price of a single McDonald's meal, I can make a healthy meal for my entire family of 5. For those in third world countries who are starving, again, it's a lot of politics, and farmers selling corn for ethanol isn't the main problem.
I've been using this method for years. I recommend this to everyone I know. But for most people, it is a bit of a hassle. The biggest problem is that you have to keep the file backed up, and you have to ensure that your backup is current. If you lose the file, you have now lost access to all your online accounts. Some people say they keep their file in a DropBox account, but personally, I wouldn't trust my data there. They had a data breach a little while back. Even if I change all my passwords (arduous process), there's still a file out there contain the list of all my user accounts for all the websites I visit. That's pretty personal information.
They'll probably be safer at people's houses than in the hands of the medical clinic staff. Remember this story about medical records being used as scrap paper at schools? There's countless others just like it. I don't see that this information shouldn't be required to be given to the patient on their request. They do have a legal right to the data, and shouldn't have to put up a big fight to get it.
Anecdote does not equal data. While I'm sure there are plenty intelligent people who are homeless, what I was saying was that the average intelligence of homeless people is probably lower then the average of the entire population.
This is what I'm thinking. ARM isn't owned by any one entity. They can make companies like HP, Acer, and others use specific ARM chips for the items they sell with Windows 8, but they won't be able to make HTC use these special ARM chips for their Android phones. There will still be plenty of ARM chips floating around and being manufactured without this new functionality. It's more like if you want to run Windows 8, you'll have to buy a Win-ARM device, but there will be plenty of plain old ARM devices out there.
Sorry, but I seriously doubt that. A very large percentage of the homeless population are there because they have mental disorders. I'm pretty sure that there's a much larger proportion of people with an IQ of 80 than those who have an IQ of 120
Not only that, but once upon a time, there was a point where running a GUI would take a considerable percentage of the resources of the machine. Now, not so much. You have a machine with 32 GB (or 512 GB or whatever) of RAM, and you're worried about the small amount taken up by the GUI? Sure, make it so that the GUI can be completely shut down, link in Linux, but don't completely remove the GUI. We're passed the point where not running a GUI gives enough of a performance advantage that it's worth not having it installed.
How is $649 + $396 = 3 * $499? It isn't, It's almost double. Also, there's enough devopers in the world (I've heard around 4 million, numbers vary) that I think there's enough room for general purpose computers at a reasonable price. I suppose eventually computers might be so cheap that they will be given away for free with subscription to some service, they already are if you look at cell phones. With $25 raspberry pi devices, a device to watch movies on your TV could be thrown in for free with a Netflix contract. At that point, sure, a general purpose computer will be infinitely times more expensive than an appliance computer. But that doesn't mean that general purpose computers will ever reach the point of being too expensive. Also, you're talking about the cost of appliances VS the cost developing for the appliances. Which is quite different the cost of appliances VS the cost of a general purpose computer than can run programs written on the same machine.