I guess it all depends on the market. How many people in the future will want general purpose computers? I think the market will always be big enough, and that parts in systems (general purpose or appliance) are similar enough that the price of general purpose computers won't be unattainable for the common man. Granted, appliance type computers may still be cheaper, but I don't think they'll ever be an order of magnitude cheaper. Perhaps only around 1/2 the price.
Which version of Windows? I know previous versions of Windows have had this problem, I think all the way up to the initial releases of XP. But I'm pretty sure that it's been fixed in Windows Vista and 7.
Well, I guess it all depends on whether or not we want to be running general purpose computers or not. You don't see many people complaining about viruses on the XBox or other game consoles. You don't see people getting viruses on the iPhone/iPad. But then, you can't run whichever program you want on these platforms. You can only run MS (or Apple, or whoever) approved software, unless you take some huge steps to go around the protections. The computer can either be designed to run whatever program the user tells it to run, or it can be made secure so that it only runs signed software. You can't have it both ways. Sadly, I think for this reason, that the majority of the population will go to appliance type computers in the next decade, where the downside is that they can only run signed software from specific markets, but with the upside that they will never get a virus. Those of us who know what we are doing can run general purpose computers, possibly without even having virus scanners, because we are smart enough to not even run the virus in the first place. I have MS Security Essentials, and if it wasn't so lean, I wouldn't run it, because it hasn't detected a single thing in the 2 years I've been using it. Because I know not to download and run crap off the internet.
Everyone agrees that hiring a hitman is illegal. Or that the guy driving the get-away car for a bank robbery is also doing something illegal. So we at least have some legal precedent that not actually doing an illegal act, but enabling it is an illegal act is itself a crime. If they actually made some honest effort to remove torrents pointed to copyrighted content then I might have some sympathy for them. But they don't. They know they are enabling people to break copyright laws. What if they took the original movie files, reversed them, added a header to make them look like giant BMPs with randomly colored pixles, and then served them up like that. Sorry, we only host big random image files here, it's just a coincidence that you can use that data to easily derive the latest blockbuster movie.
I very much agree. So what if they have a blog. The whole point of the site is to help people gain access to copyrighted material which they most likely do not have license to use. If hosting a blog on your site means it can't be taken down for free speech rules, then they might as well be able to host the actual pirated files themselves. Sorry, can't take the site down, we have a blog. The primary function site of the site is aiding copyright infringement. If the site was an advertised meet-up place for people wanting to hire hitmen, or for people wanting to trade illegal porn, then everyone here would probably think it a good thing to take the site down.
However, can you learn to program well from a single programming course? Students take years of English classes and are immersed in the language, and still many students/people can't write a coherent thoughts longer than a single sentence. There's going to have to be quite a bit of instuction in programming to get people up to a level where they can actually use it to benefit their lives, or to make their job easier. Most people working in some kind of office would be extremely more efficient if they had enough skills to program basic stuff in Excel and learn how to use Access properly. But the amount of time it would take to train these people in this stuff is a lot more than most people seem to realize.
Yes, but they couldn't nuke DPRK out of existence, without causing some serious problems in parts of South Korea, China, Japan, and a few other countries. Even Russia shares a small border with DPRK, and I don't think they'd be very fond of a few towns, no matter how small, being turned into radioactive wastelands.
Just do what us Canadians do. Find somewhere just over the border and open up a PO box. Have things shipped there. Pick it up to avoid sales tax. Should be even easier since you don't have to go through customs when crossing the border. If they don't deliver to PO boxes, then there's other ways around it. There are businesses where you can set up an account, and will sign for your delivery. Things are shipped to a regular, not PO Box address, and you can pick up your items PO Box style. Walmart site to store works nicely too. Plan a trip to the US. Order something to the Walmart just over the border. Pick it up when you are there. Even with duty fees, you can still save quite a bit.
Problems I see. They are all based on detecting water that is already on the floor. Which means that there is a lot of room for error if the device isn't installed in the right spot. You have to account for the slope of the floor and if it isn't in the right spot, a lot of damage could happen. Also, they are quite expensive. For $100+ I would expect something with much more than a 1 year warranty. My idea is something more like measuring the actual water flow in the pipe, and if too much water is flowing, or flows continuously for too long, the valve closes. Also there doesn't need to be 10 different devices. One device with a simple switch for amount of water flow to allow for would suffice.
Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but one does have to wonder. The original copyright laws with their 17 year term (I think) were written in a time when there was no digital copy of anything. If you had a book, and you wanted to copy it out for someone else, you could copy it out by hand or set up a printing press and do a run of books. These processes would be a huge undertaking. And you wouldn't end up with something that was exactly the same product as the first. If the current copyright term was only 15 years, Think about how much content would be freely available in digitally perfect copies for everyone to use. All the music through to the late 90's, along with all the movies, books, and other copyrightable materials. There would be so much freely available content that there would be very little room for people to make money off new stuff. There's so much content available for free on my eBook reader due to all the old public domain stuff, that I find it really hard to justify paying for new material until I've become bored with the old stuff, or until something new that is truly remarkable comes along. I don't think I'd seriously consider paying for anything if copyright was only 15 years. Because there would be so much free content otherwise, that I really couldn't justify it, unless the cost of the copyrighted content was just pennies.
I mentioned those types of devices. All they do is sound an alarm when the floor is wet. They can't actually shut off the water. So if you're lucky, the neighbour will hear the alarm and if you had enough foresite, and a trustworthy neighbour, he would have a key to open the door so that he could shut the water off. Assuming he's close enough to hear the alarm in the first place. Remember, you're on vacation. Also, it doesn't even take that long to cause a problem. The guy was only gone 5 hours before somebody noticed a problem, and that's because water was flowing out of the house. You could leave for work, and come back to a house full of water.
Meh, I'd rather just everybody program applications for Wii/XBox360/PS3. Netflix is so popular simply because they make it easy for people to use. You don't have to buy a new box. You don't have to hook a computer up to your TV (which until computers started having HDMI cables a couple years back was was quite cumbersome). You just turn on your game console, which already has a wireless remote, and browse content and watch it. I don't know why more of these online systems don't just support devices that people already have hooked up to their TV. Google TV should be software you install on your console. As should Apple TV, Hulu, and all the other content providers. Nobody needs another box under their TV, and nobody need a tv with a computer built into it when we all have a perfectly fine computer sitting under our TVs anyway. The Wii is only $100. And if you simple must have HD the XBox is only $200. These devices should be the only box you need hooked up to your TV.
Nobody said that pizza itself it a vegetable. What I believe you are referring to is that the USDA guidelines state that Pizza counts as a serving of vegetables, because of the fact that pizza contains vegetables. What's funny is that even if it only contains vegetables in the "tomato" sauce, that it still counts as a serving. Of course, it's not surprising given their track record which counts ketchup as a vegetable, or french fries for that matter.
My neighbors toilet tank cracked while he was on vacation. Result, tons of damage to the house and months of renovations. Luckily, he was insured. Another neighbour had tenants move out and hook up the old washer incorrectly and experienced similar flooding. Anyway. I really had to wonder. A $5 (retail price most likely produced en masse) could easily have detected that water flow was excessive for that particular unit, and shut off the water within minutes, causing minimum damage. For around $50, you could probably outfit an entire house with sensor on the toilets, washing machine, dishwasher, hot water tank and one at the main inlet to detect abnormal water flow. I've looked around and haven't found anything great. Most things are purely mechanical, and prone to not working correctly, or are based on just sounding alarms when the floor is wet. Water damage due to burst pipes or faulty is a proplem that could be easily solved, yet it seems like nobody is bothering to create a device to do it.
My first digital camera was a FujiFilm. Still works to this day, which is more than I can say for a lot of digital cameras I've owned, (mostly kodaks funnily enough). The Fuji takes great pictures. I'm still amazed by the quality of photos it takes next to the other point and shoot cameras I have. The resolution is only 2MP, but that's enough for viewing on any screen I own, or printing 5x7s. I really should take it back out of the garage again. The only problem I have with that is that it is about 1.5 inches thick. But other than that, great piece of hardware.
I'm not sure how one figuires the cost of a razor is $8. It's a stamped piece of metal and plastic. Probably costs about $0.25 to make. Blades require much more precision than the actual handle. Granted, you are probably still getting ripped off, but I don't think you are getting any less ripped off on the handle than on the blades. Also, which blades only cost $0.25? Mach 3 blades are at least $2.50 a piece, while the cheapest "doesn't tear my face apart" razor I could find was $1.37 each. Actually I found those are quite good value for the money, and actually last quite a while. Gillette Fusion blades cost about $3.70 each.
Every Windows computer comes with VBScript. You may not like it, but it's a powerful language, and you can probably do a lot more with it than most people think. As far as IDE goes, there isn't one. But once you're adept at programming enough to require an IDE, there's plenty of free IDEs available for other languages. Also, you can just create javascript + html webpages and store them in.html files and do all your programming that way. Open them up right in internet explorer. With HTML 5 features, you could probably code up a pretty good app, without downloading any special software.
Also, don't forget that the cost of a house has way more to do with the location than with the actual cost of building it. The same style house, depending on location can cost anywhere from $50,000 all the way up to $500,000 depending on where it is located.
You could just buy TVs cheaper than that. Hook them up to a computer to control the displays, and you have the exact same thing, without any specialized hardware. Power usage would probably be quite a bit higher, but as price of TVs come down, the price of replacing the panels would get quite a bit cheaper. Mind you, at only $60,000, that's less than the cost of hiring one worker. If you get a measurable productvity increase out this, it might actually be cheaper to do this than to hire 1 new person.
I agree, in some cases using a table is quite a bit easier. Most desktop UI toolkits have "grid layout", which is basically the same as using tables in HTML to control your layout. Granted, I've seen people go way overboard and use tons of nested tables for everything. But there is a happy medium.
If only Outlook 2007/2010 didn't exist. MS finally gets a good browser, and then swaps the rendering engine in their email client to the MS Word email client. As bad as IE6 is, Trying to send HTML Emails to people with Outlook 2007/2010 is just absolutely painful. And while text emails are fine for most things, there are some legitimate business use cases for sending HTML email.
What a lot of people seem to forget is that you don't have to use SQL Server with ASP.Net. You can use.Net with MySQL, and in many cases, it's actually quite a good compromise for price and functionality. A copy of Windows Server "Web" edition, is only $400. Pair that with running free database software like MySQL, and you have pretty cheap solution. Visual Studio Express is free, but even if you want the professional version, that's only $500 or so. Sounds kind of expensive, but if you're making a serious business venture, spending $1000 on software to start up isn't that bad at all. You will surely spend much more on many other aspects of your business.
I'm a.Net developer, and I find a lot of what you say is true about.Net especially with respect to the standard controls. However, there's nothing stopping you from writing PHP style code in.Net. That exact line (if statement) you wrote out in PHP could easily have been done exactly the same in C#. Personally, after using.Net for 10 years, I have never actually used the standard controls, but rather just went about using the language to generate HTML because that's what seemed to cause the least friction. You end up generating your own libraries for the standard interface elements your applications uses. I've found this true of just about every programming language I've ever used. The standard stuff is sufficient for getting a prototype out the door quickly, but if you have a big project, you end up having to write a lot of custom code, because the included stuff never dose what it's needed to. The PHP style code ends up being the best starting point, because you don't waste a lot of time trying to bend the included stuff to do things it was never meant to do.
I would say that for the most part, while just about every hosting company out there supports PHP, they don't all support the same PHP. Firstly, there's a question of which version they are running, and then, there are tons of components available, some host support a lot, others support only a few. The API (if you can call it that) is pretty much all encompassing, but is so inconsistent that it makes my head hurt. Half is Object Oriented, half isn't. 3 different choices of APIs for connecting to databases. Documentation is lacking, and is only sufficient with the user comments, many times I don't want to have to read through pages of user comments to find something that should have been in the docs in the first place. Also, it's interpreted at runtime, which means that it's about 10x slower than other options like.Net and Java. This doesn't matter for small sites. But for large sites, it ends up becoming a huge problem. Twitter had to switch to a new platform (Java I think). Facebook compiles all their PHP to C to get the needed performance out of it. In the end, it doesn't really matter, as you can create a good project in any modern language. However, If I had a choice, I wouldn't use it.
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I guess it all depends on the market. How many people in the future will want general purpose computers? I think the market will always be big enough, and that parts in systems (general purpose or appliance) are similar enough that the price of general purpose computers won't be unattainable for the common man. Granted, appliance type computers may still be cheaper, but I don't think they'll ever be an order of magnitude cheaper. Perhaps only around 1/2 the price.
Great movie. I was going to mention that.
Which version of Windows? I know previous versions of Windows have had this problem, I think all the way up to the initial releases of XP. But I'm pretty sure that it's been fixed in Windows Vista and 7.
Well, I guess it all depends on whether or not we want to be running general purpose computers or not. You don't see many people complaining about viruses on the XBox or other game consoles. You don't see people getting viruses on the iPhone/iPad. But then, you can't run whichever program you want on these platforms. You can only run MS (or Apple, or whoever) approved software, unless you take some huge steps to go around the protections. The computer can either be designed to run whatever program the user tells it to run, or it can be made secure so that it only runs signed software. You can't have it both ways. Sadly, I think for this reason, that the majority of the population will go to appliance type computers in the next decade, where the downside is that they can only run signed software from specific markets, but with the upside that they will never get a virus. Those of us who know what we are doing can run general purpose computers, possibly without even having virus scanners, because we are smart enough to not even run the virus in the first place. I have MS Security Essentials, and if it wasn't so lean, I wouldn't run it, because it hasn't detected a single thing in the 2 years I've been using it. Because I know not to download and run crap off the internet.
Everyone agrees that hiring a hitman is illegal. Or that the guy driving the get-away car for a bank robbery is also doing something illegal. So we at least have some legal precedent that not actually doing an illegal act, but enabling it is an illegal act is itself a crime. If they actually made some honest effort to remove torrents pointed to copyrighted content then I might have some sympathy for them. But they don't. They know they are enabling people to break copyright laws. What if they took the original movie files, reversed them, added a header to make them look like giant BMPs with randomly colored pixles, and then served them up like that. Sorry, we only host big random image files here, it's just a coincidence that you can use that data to easily derive the latest blockbuster movie.
I very much agree. So what if they have a blog. The whole point of the site is to help people gain access to copyrighted material which they most likely do not have license to use. If hosting a blog on your site means it can't be taken down for free speech rules, then they might as well be able to host the actual pirated files themselves. Sorry, can't take the site down, we have a blog. The primary function site of the site is aiding copyright infringement. If the site was an advertised meet-up place for people wanting to hire hitmen, or for people wanting to trade illegal porn, then everyone here would probably think it a good thing to take the site down.
However, can you learn to program well from a single programming course? Students take years of English classes and are immersed in the language, and still many students/people can't write a coherent thoughts longer than a single sentence. There's going to have to be quite a bit of instuction in programming to get people up to a level where they can actually use it to benefit their lives, or to make their job easier. Most people working in some kind of office would be extremely more efficient if they had enough skills to program basic stuff in Excel and learn how to use Access properly. But the amount of time it would take to train these people in this stuff is a lot more than most people seem to realize.
Yes, but they couldn't nuke DPRK out of existence, without causing some serious problems in parts of South Korea, China, Japan, and a few other countries. Even Russia shares a small border with DPRK, and I don't think they'd be very fond of a few towns, no matter how small, being turned into radioactive wastelands.
Just do what us Canadians do. Find somewhere just over the border and open up a PO box. Have things shipped there. Pick it up to avoid sales tax. Should be even easier since you don't have to go through customs when crossing the border. If they don't deliver to PO boxes, then there's other ways around it. There are businesses where you can set up an account, and will sign for your delivery. Things are shipped to a regular, not PO Box address, and you can pick up your items PO Box style. Walmart site to store works nicely too. Plan a trip to the US. Order something to the Walmart just over the border. Pick it up when you are there. Even with duty fees, you can still save quite a bit.
Problems I see. They are all based on detecting water that is already on the floor. Which means that there is a lot of room for error if the device isn't installed in the right spot. You have to account for the slope of the floor and if it isn't in the right spot, a lot of damage could happen. Also, they are quite expensive. For $100+ I would expect something with much more than a 1 year warranty. My idea is something more like measuring the actual water flow in the pipe, and if too much water is flowing, or flows continuously for too long, the valve closes. Also there doesn't need to be 10 different devices. One device with a simple switch for amount of water flow to allow for would suffice.
Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but one does have to wonder. The original copyright laws with their 17 year term (I think) were written in a time when there was no digital copy of anything. If you had a book, and you wanted to copy it out for someone else, you could copy it out by hand or set up a printing press and do a run of books. These processes would be a huge undertaking. And you wouldn't end up with something that was exactly the same product as the first. If the current copyright term was only 15 years, Think about how much content would be freely available in digitally perfect copies for everyone to use. All the music through to the late 90's, along with all the movies, books, and other copyrightable materials. There would be so much freely available content that there would be very little room for people to make money off new stuff. There's so much content available for free on my eBook reader due to all the old public domain stuff, that I find it really hard to justify paying for new material until I've become bored with the old stuff, or until something new that is truly remarkable comes along. I don't think I'd seriously consider paying for anything if copyright was only 15 years. Because there would be so much free content otherwise, that I really couldn't justify it, unless the cost of the copyrighted content was just pennies.
I mentioned those types of devices. All they do is sound an alarm when the floor is wet. They can't actually shut off the water. So if you're lucky, the neighbour will hear the alarm and if you had enough foresite, and a trustworthy neighbour, he would have a key to open the door so that he could shut the water off. Assuming he's close enough to hear the alarm in the first place. Remember, you're on vacation. Also, it doesn't even take that long to cause a problem. The guy was only gone 5 hours before somebody noticed a problem, and that's because water was flowing out of the house. You could leave for work, and come back to a house full of water.
Meh, I'd rather just everybody program applications for Wii/XBox360/PS3. Netflix is so popular simply because they make it easy for people to use. You don't have to buy a new box. You don't have to hook a computer up to your TV (which until computers started having HDMI cables a couple years back was was quite cumbersome). You just turn on your game console, which already has a wireless remote, and browse content and watch it. I don't know why more of these online systems don't just support devices that people already have hooked up to their TV. Google TV should be software you install on your console. As should Apple TV, Hulu, and all the other content providers. Nobody needs another box under their TV, and nobody need a tv with a computer built into it when we all have a perfectly fine computer sitting under our TVs anyway. The Wii is only $100. And if you simple must have HD the XBox is only $200. These devices should be the only box you need hooked up to your TV.
Nobody said that pizza itself it a vegetable. What I believe you are referring to is that the USDA guidelines state that Pizza counts as a serving of vegetables, because of the fact that pizza contains vegetables. What's funny is that even if it only contains vegetables in the "tomato" sauce, that it still counts as a serving. Of course, it's not surprising given their track record which counts ketchup as a vegetable, or french fries for that matter.
My neighbors toilet tank cracked while he was on vacation. Result, tons of damage to the house and months of renovations. Luckily, he was insured. Another neighbour had tenants move out and hook up the old washer incorrectly and experienced similar flooding. Anyway. I really had to wonder. A $5 (retail price most likely produced en masse) could easily have detected that water flow was excessive for that particular unit, and shut off the water within minutes, causing minimum damage. For around $50, you could probably outfit an entire house with sensor on the toilets, washing machine, dishwasher, hot water tank and one at the main inlet to detect abnormal water flow. I've looked around and haven't found anything great. Most things are purely mechanical, and prone to not working correctly, or are based on just sounding alarms when the floor is wet. Water damage due to burst pipes or faulty is a proplem that could be easily solved, yet it seems like nobody is bothering to create a device to do it.
My first digital camera was a FujiFilm. Still works to this day, which is more than I can say for a lot of digital cameras I've owned, (mostly kodaks funnily enough). The Fuji takes great pictures. I'm still amazed by the quality of photos it takes next to the other point and shoot cameras I have. The resolution is only 2MP, but that's enough for viewing on any screen I own, or printing 5x7s. I really should take it back out of the garage again. The only problem I have with that is that it is about 1.5 inches thick. But other than that, great piece of hardware.
I'm not sure how one figuires the cost of a razor is $8. It's a stamped piece of metal and plastic. Probably costs about $0.25 to make. Blades require much more precision than the actual handle. Granted, you are probably still getting ripped off, but I don't think you are getting any less ripped off on the handle than on the blades. Also, which blades only cost $0.25? Mach 3 blades are at least $2.50 a piece, while the cheapest "doesn't tear my face apart" razor I could find was $1.37 each. Actually I found those are quite good value for the money, and actually last quite a while. Gillette Fusion blades cost about $3.70 each.
Every Windows computer comes with VBScript. You may not like it, but it's a powerful language, and you can probably do a lot more with it than most people think. As far as IDE goes, there isn't one. But once you're adept at programming enough to require an IDE, there's plenty of free IDEs available for other languages. Also, you can just create javascript + html webpages and store them in .html files and do all your programming that way. Open them up right in internet explorer. With HTML 5 features, you could probably code up a pretty good app, without downloading any special software.
Also, don't forget that the cost of a house has way more to do with the location than with the actual cost of building it. The same style house, depending on location can cost anywhere from $50,000 all the way up to $500,000 depending on where it is located.
You could just buy TVs cheaper than that. Hook them up to a computer to control the displays, and you have the exact same thing, without any specialized hardware. Power usage would probably be quite a bit higher, but as price of TVs come down, the price of replacing the panels would get quite a bit cheaper. Mind you, at only $60,000, that's less than the cost of hiring one worker. If you get a measurable productvity increase out this, it might actually be cheaper to do this than to hire 1 new person.
I agree, in some cases using a table is quite a bit easier. Most desktop UI toolkits have "grid layout", which is basically the same as using tables in HTML to control your layout. Granted, I've seen people go way overboard and use tons of nested tables for everything. But there is a happy medium.
If only Outlook 2007/2010 didn't exist. MS finally gets a good browser, and then swaps the rendering engine in their email client to the MS Word email client. As bad as IE6 is, Trying to send HTML Emails to people with Outlook 2007/2010 is just absolutely painful. And while text emails are fine for most things, there are some legitimate business use cases for sending HTML email.
What a lot of people seem to forget is that you don't have to use SQL Server with ASP.Net. You can use .Net with MySQL, and in many cases, it's actually quite a good compromise for price and functionality. A copy of Windows Server "Web" edition, is only $400. Pair that with running free database software like MySQL, and you have pretty cheap solution. Visual Studio Express is free, but even if you want the professional version, that's only $500 or so. Sounds kind of expensive, but if you're making a serious business venture, spending $1000 on software to start up isn't that bad at all. You will surely spend much more on many other aspects of your business.
I'm a .Net developer, and I find a lot of what you say is true about .Net especially with respect to the standard controls. However, there's nothing stopping you from writing PHP style code in .Net. That exact line (if statement) you wrote out in PHP could easily have been done exactly the same in C#. Personally, after using .Net for 10 years, I have never actually used the standard controls, but rather just went about using the language to generate HTML because that's what seemed to cause the least friction. You end up generating your own libraries for the standard interface elements your applications uses. I've found this true of just about every programming language I've ever used. The standard stuff is sufficient for getting a prototype out the door quickly, but if you have a big project, you end up having to write a lot of custom code, because the included stuff never dose what it's needed to. The PHP style code ends up being the best starting point, because you don't waste a lot of time trying to bend the included stuff to do things it was never meant to do.
I would say that for the most part, while just about every hosting company out there supports PHP, they don't all support the same PHP. Firstly, there's a question of which version they are running, and then, there are tons of components available, some host support a lot, others support only a few. The API (if you can call it that) is pretty much all encompassing, but is so inconsistent that it makes my head hurt. Half is Object Oriented, half isn't. 3 different choices of APIs for connecting to databases. Documentation is lacking, and is only sufficient with the user comments, many times I don't want to have to read through pages of user comments to find something that should have been in the docs in the first place. Also, it's interpreted at runtime, which means that it's about 10x slower than other options like .Net and Java. This doesn't matter for small sites. But for large sites, it ends up becoming a huge problem. Twitter had to switch to a new platform (Java I think). Facebook compiles all their PHP to C to get the needed performance out of it. In the end, it doesn't really matter, as you can create a good project in any modern language. However, If I had a choice, I wouldn't use it.