I greatly agree with this. I've check out rates for colleges and universities in the US, because people complain how expensive it is (I live in Canada, so I was curious). Turns out, if you go to an in-state school, you pay about the same as we pay up here in Canada. And I know plenty of people who got through school with no help from parents and no, or small (under $10,000) in loans.
However, I think there is one major problem. Loans should be given based on the likelihood of the student being able to pay them back. That means no loans to people who want an art history degree from a fancy private or out of state school. If there is no job market in or demand for whatever degree you choose to take, then you shouldn't get a loan. Most of the people who I saw fall deep into student debt were people who took worthless degrees, and went to schools that cost way too much.
Even with a laptop, I mostly use hibernate. Amount of time to come out of hibernate, even on Windows 7 is only about 20 seconds after BIOS. And that gives you fully usable system, with all the programs you had open previously. Reboot time is absolutely worthless, because I almost never reboot anymore. Once every couple of weeks for updates.
Scott Hanselman. Ok, I dont know if you meant personally or not, but I also know quite a few people personally who went to mediocre schools and got great jobs. There are tons of people in the industry who don't even hold degrees, so I don't see why a degree from a "lesser school" would make much of a difference. Unless you go to MIT or similar, a college degree is mostly about proving you can get things done. Most schools will give you an equivalent education. I didn't go to a top notch school, but I think I've done pretty well. As did most of the people that I've graduated with.
That's a nice anecdote you got there, but it isn't hard data. What more people need to realize is that they don't need to go to Harvard. Go to a school in your state, and your tution will only be about $5000 a semester. Now if you go to an out of state school, be prepared to pay. However, a school in your state is very affordable. I paid about the same in Tuition 10 years ago in Canada. If you work in the summers, or the school has a co-op program, you should be able to make a fair amount of money while going to school such that you don't need $100,000 in student loans. I know people who paid similar tuition, had no help from their parents and worked part time jobs during school. Combined with co-op education, they were able to graduate debt free.
Yeah, after reading more closely, these boards mostly support the 8GB modules as well, giving you the ability to use 32 GB of RAM. However, the prices on the 8 GB modules is still way too expensive. At least $200 each, compared to about $25 a piece fro the 4GB modules. if the price of the 8GB comes down enough, and you get 8 slots on a board, giving you 64 GB, that gives you some serious power. Or if you have 8 slots, and you can get 32 GB of RAM for $200, it is also really interesting.
The only thing hold back desktop boards right now is more RAM slots. I would really like to see motherboards with 8 or event 16 RAM slots become standard. Most of these motherboards support 16 GB maximum memory, which is nice, but once you start running VMs or databases on your machine, 16 GB can get eaten up pretty quickly. I would think that having a machine with a possible 64 GB of RAM would entice a lot of people. Right now the only way to get serious amounts of RAM is to go with XEON or Opteron. And those chips are pretty expensive without offering a whole lot of extra, or event less computing power (assuming single socket).
I think failure mode is very important here. I'm a cyclist so I like to use a cycling analogy. Take a carbon frame on a bike. Now, the odds of these things failing are very low. They are well built, and under almost all riding conditions they probably won't break. But, the failure mode of carbon is to snap. So if you're riding along and your front fork snaps in half, it's probably going to be a pretty bad fall. Compare that with steel or aluminum, which are more likely to bend. I would think that just having part of the framed bend would be a much better failure mode.
Now think about how this applies cars. If you're driving down the street, you aren't going to slam on the brakes for no reason, and you aren't going to swerve across into the oncoming lane. Not that this stuff is very likely, but it is a possiblity. A possibility that could have bad consequences.
How are self driving cars supposed to account for all possibilities. What about those two way cycling lanes in Montreal where you have to turn left over the cycling lane, and cyclists are coming from in front and behind you? While automated cars might be safer in general, there's something to be said about the human driver being able to handle the unexpected. As a cyclist lots of drivers wave me by, even when I don't have the right of way. Now the cyclists and pedestrians are going to have to guess how the car might react. I say we just push for harder driving tests, they are way too easy, and make more people lose their license for bad driving.
I agree. Unless I can actually run around in the 3-D environment, there isn't much point in having things projected out of the screen. Sure it's interesting from a technology point of view, but it doesn't really help my gaming or movie watching experience.
All good and fine when it's facebook, a multi billion dollar company facing the charges. They will probably get off. But I don't think people would have the same attitude if it was a much smaller entity getting charged, without so much means to defend itself.
The difference is that that's from the infancy of computers. Sure we can't read things from 30 years ago. But I can easily read most media from the last 20 years. At that point 3.5 floppies were mostly used, and since then, the only advances have been optical media. In my current computer I can probably use just about any hard drive, or external storage used in the last 20 years. As much as things change, they also stay very much the same. If you have something important, you'll transfer it to whatever the new medium is every 5 or so years, so as not to fall behind. It's not that difficult. And since it's digital, the copy is perfect every time.
They should just have reset everybody's password to some really long (20 character?) random string (different string for each user) and not recorded the result. Any user who wanted to log in would have to use the "lost password" feature.
My 4GB Ipod Nano does just fine for music. You don't need to take 100 GB of music with you. Sure it's nice to be able to, but hardly necessary. It used to be nice to have a CD walkman, and maybe bring a long a couple extra CDs. With this you can easily bring along 20 albums without carrying anything extra.
I agree. The only one who knows how much Amazon pays for each individual part is Amazon. These analysts have no idea what kind of deals Amazon has made with their suppliers. When you are dealing in the millions of units, there is quite a bit of negotiating room. Maybe the people who produce the parts are the ones taking a loss (initially) because they figure they can make more as production ramps up, and they would rather not lose the contract entirely. Analysts can make all the guesses they want as to the cost of these things. But something tells me they have no idea what they are talking about. How come the HP Tablet cost $300+ to make, but you can get a netbook with similar bill of materials for $179 retail?
Exactly. The cost of using paper votes and counting by hand is vastly cheaper than using machines. Even if you have to pay the people who count. Not to mention all the other problems with using machines such as machines breaking down, or not having enough machines to handle all the voters because of their high cost. In Canada, we use cardboard resting on a table as our voting booth. Elections are usually held at schools, so the tables are there and available anyway. Counting is done at each polling station, usually within a few hours after closing. Votes are counted so fast they had to create a law against reporting results in the east before the polls were closed in the west.
Exactly. My Nokia C5 doesn't support HTML 5, but it does support flash. So all they've really done is abandon one set of affordable phones and added support for a different set of very expensive phones. Why not have some sort of hybrid implementation where they detect the capabilities of your browser and use whatever features are available and then fall back on that. It's a site for sharing powerpoint presentations. I'm pretty sure you could support 99% of powerpoint presentations with HTML 4, no javascript necessary.
But with just the iPad, you can't back the thing up. Considering last time I checked iTunes didn't let you redownload music you had already paid for, and I presume the same is true for apps, you stand to lose a lot of something happens to your precious tablet.
Looked it up on Wikipedia because I was curious. The Demonym for a person from Nigeria is Nigerian, and the Demonym for a person from Niger is Nigerien. That's got to create quite a bit of confusion.
What's the legality associated with renting out movies that you own physical copies for? Netflix might find a better deal buying a copy for each movie they plan to stream online at the same time. It would work the same as their mail order service, except that they could deliver the DVD instantly (or the data contained there-in) and you could return the movie instantly. I'm not sure how well this could work out in real life, but I has to be cheaper than spending 30 million per title. Think of how many physical copies they could have for that price. Anyway, it's probably not legal, but at that price, there must be some workaround you can use, such as having a robot physically move disks between machines for each user who is streaming the movie.
I mean, if you can run Quake III on Raspberry Pi, I see no reason why you can't solve most people's computing needs with an 1 GHz or less ARM processor. Now, you can't do video editing, but that's not what most people do with their computers. They type email, visit facebook, type up a document, look at some pictures, or watch a movie. These computers are perfect for those uses.
Well, google earth is still plenty usable, even though I don't have a locally installed copy of all the maps. Their database is probably huge, but I'm reallly only looking at a very small portion of it at any one time. That isn't to say that this will be the end of installable games, where all the content is just downloaded on the fly. But I also see a possibility where someone just downloads the game engine, and possibly textures and then the "map" is downloaded as you travel over it.
How did 2DBoy get World Of Goo released on the WiiWare store then. Sure, it was already popular on the PC before getting to WiiWare, but it's still their first and only game. If they can do it, I'm sure others can. There's tons of games on WiiWare that I don't recognize the name of the "studio" that made the game. Mind you, it's not the free-for-all that XBox360 has (funny you just forgot to mention them), but I Think Nintendo wants to maintain a more "curated" shop, so that the good games don't get drowned out by unpolished demos and people putting up a "game" just to say they did it. Which I find perfectly acceptable.
Exactly. Think about it this way. If you sell 100,000 copies at $10 each, that's 1 million dollars. If steam takes 30% (I can't get any hard numbers, but from quick googling that seems to close), you still have $700,000 left over. If it takes 5 people, 2 years to develop, that's 10 man years, giving $70,000 per person, per year. Now, that's not rockstar money (no pun intended), but that's nothing to laugh about either.
I could see this getting popular. Provider a system for people to share their edited war videos, and it could probably gain quite a following. I don't really understand the draw of something like MineCraft, or Dwarf Fortress, but they are quite popular games.
Slashdot Mirror
I greatly agree with this. I've check out rates for colleges and universities in the US, because people complain how expensive it is (I live in Canada, so I was curious). Turns out, if you go to an in-state school, you pay about the same as we pay up here in Canada. And I know plenty of people who got through school with no help from parents and no, or small (under $10,000) in loans.
However, I think there is one major problem. Loans should be given based on the likelihood of the student being able to pay them back. That means no loans to people who want an art history degree from a fancy private or out of state school. If there is no job market in or demand for whatever degree you choose to take, then you shouldn't get a loan. Most of the people who I saw fall deep into student debt were people who took worthless degrees, and went to schools that cost way too much.
Even with a laptop, I mostly use hibernate. Amount of time to come out of hibernate, even on Windows 7 is only about 20 seconds after BIOS. And that gives you fully usable system, with all the programs you had open previously. Reboot time is absolutely worthless, because I almost never reboot anymore. Once every couple of weeks for updates.
Scott Hanselman. Ok, I dont know if you meant personally or not, but I also know quite a few people personally who went to mediocre schools and got great jobs. There are tons of people in the industry who don't even hold degrees, so I don't see why a degree from a "lesser school" would make much of a difference. Unless you go to MIT or similar, a college degree is mostly about proving you can get things done. Most schools will give you an equivalent education. I didn't go to a top notch school, but I think I've done pretty well. As did most of the people that I've graduated with.
That's a nice anecdote you got there, but it isn't hard data. What more people need to realize is that they don't need to go to Harvard. Go to a school in your state, and your tution will only be about $5000 a semester. Now if you go to an out of state school, be prepared to pay. However, a school in your state is very affordable. I paid about the same in Tuition 10 years ago in Canada. If you work in the summers, or the school has a co-op program, you should be able to make a fair amount of money while going to school such that you don't need $100,000 in student loans. I know people who paid similar tuition, had no help from their parents and worked part time jobs during school. Combined with co-op education, they were able to graduate debt free.
Yeah, after reading more closely, these boards mostly support the 8GB modules as well, giving you the ability to use 32 GB of RAM. However, the prices on the 8 GB modules is still way too expensive. At least $200 each, compared to about $25 a piece fro the 4GB modules. if the price of the 8GB comes down enough, and you get 8 slots on a board, giving you 64 GB, that gives you some serious power. Or if you have 8 slots, and you can get 32 GB of RAM for $200, it is also really interesting.
The only thing hold back desktop boards right now is more RAM slots. I would really like to see motherboards with 8 or event 16 RAM slots become standard. Most of these motherboards support 16 GB maximum memory, which is nice, but once you start running VMs or databases on your machine, 16 GB can get eaten up pretty quickly. I would think that having a machine with a possible 64 GB of RAM would entice a lot of people. Right now the only way to get serious amounts of RAM is to go with XEON or Opteron. And those chips are pretty expensive without offering a whole lot of extra, or event less computing power (assuming single socket).
Now think about how this applies cars. If you're driving down the street, you aren't going to slam on the brakes for no reason, and you aren't going to swerve across into the oncoming lane. Not that this stuff is very likely, but it is a possiblity. A possibility that could have bad consequences.
How are self driving cars supposed to account for all possibilities. What about those two way cycling lanes in Montreal where you have to turn left over the cycling lane, and cyclists are coming from in front and behind you? While automated cars might be safer in general, there's something to be said about the human driver being able to handle the unexpected. As a cyclist lots of drivers wave me by, even when I don't have the right of way. Now the cyclists and pedestrians are going to have to guess how the car might react. I say we just push for harder driving tests, they are way too easy, and make more people lose their license for bad driving.
I agree. Unless I can actually run around in the 3-D environment, there isn't much point in having things projected out of the screen. Sure it's interesting from a technology point of view, but it doesn't really help my gaming or movie watching experience.
All good and fine when it's facebook, a multi billion dollar company facing the charges. They will probably get off. But I don't think people would have the same attitude if it was a much smaller entity getting charged, without so much means to defend itself.
The difference is that that's from the infancy of computers. Sure we can't read things from 30 years ago. But I can easily read most media from the last 20 years. At that point 3.5 floppies were mostly used, and since then, the only advances have been optical media. In my current computer I can probably use just about any hard drive, or external storage used in the last 20 years. As much as things change, they also stay very much the same. If you have something important, you'll transfer it to whatever the new medium is every 5 or so years, so as not to fall behind. It's not that difficult. And since it's digital, the copy is perfect every time.
They should just have reset everybody's password to some really long (20 character?) random string (different string for each user) and not recorded the result. Any user who wanted to log in would have to use the "lost password" feature.
Scare Tactics?
My 4GB Ipod Nano does just fine for music. You don't need to take 100 GB of music with you. Sure it's nice to be able to, but hardly necessary. It used to be nice to have a CD walkman, and maybe bring a long a couple extra CDs. With this you can easily bring along 20 albums without carrying anything extra.
I agree. The only one who knows how much Amazon pays for each individual part is Amazon. These analysts have no idea what kind of deals Amazon has made with their suppliers. When you are dealing in the millions of units, there is quite a bit of negotiating room. Maybe the people who produce the parts are the ones taking a loss (initially) because they figure they can make more as production ramps up, and they would rather not lose the contract entirely. Analysts can make all the guesses they want as to the cost of these things. But something tells me they have no idea what they are talking about. How come the HP Tablet cost $300+ to make, but you can get a netbook with similar bill of materials for $179 retail?
Exactly. The cost of using paper votes and counting by hand is vastly cheaper than using machines. Even if you have to pay the people who count. Not to mention all the other problems with using machines such as machines breaking down, or not having enough machines to handle all the voters because of their high cost. In Canada, we use cardboard resting on a table as our voting booth. Elections are usually held at schools, so the tables are there and available anyway. Counting is done at each polling station, usually within a few hours after closing. Votes are counted so fast they had to create a law against reporting results in the east before the polls were closed in the west.
Exactly. My Nokia C5 doesn't support HTML 5, but it does support flash. So all they've really done is abandon one set of affordable phones and added support for a different set of very expensive phones. Why not have some sort of hybrid implementation where they detect the capabilities of your browser and use whatever features are available and then fall back on that. It's a site for sharing powerpoint presentations. I'm pretty sure you could support 99% of powerpoint presentations with HTML 4, no javascript necessary.
But with just the iPad, you can't back the thing up. Considering last time I checked iTunes didn't let you redownload music you had already paid for, and I presume the same is true for apps, you stand to lose a lot of something happens to your precious tablet.
Looked it up on Wikipedia because I was curious. The Demonym for a person from Nigeria is Nigerian, and the Demonym for a person from Niger is Nigerien. That's got to create quite a bit of confusion.
What's the legality associated with renting out movies that you own physical copies for? Netflix might find a better deal buying a copy for each movie they plan to stream online at the same time. It would work the same as their mail order service, except that they could deliver the DVD instantly (or the data contained there-in) and you could return the movie instantly. I'm not sure how well this could work out in real life, but I has to be cheaper than spending 30 million per title. Think of how many physical copies they could have for that price. Anyway, it's probably not legal, but at that price, there must be some workaround you can use, such as having a robot physically move disks between machines for each user who is streaming the movie.
The daycares I see usually use something like this rope with rings. Similar concept, but, not quite as bad.
I mean, if you can run Quake III on Raspberry Pi, I see no reason why you can't solve most people's computing needs with an 1 GHz or less ARM processor. Now, you can't do video editing, but that's not what most people do with their computers. They type email, visit facebook, type up a document, look at some pictures, or watch a movie. These computers are perfect for those uses.
Well, google earth is still plenty usable, even though I don't have a locally installed copy of all the maps. Their database is probably huge, but I'm reallly only looking at a very small portion of it at any one time. That isn't to say that this will be the end of installable games, where all the content is just downloaded on the fly. But I also see a possibility where someone just downloads the game engine, and possibly textures and then the "map" is downloaded as you travel over it.
How did 2DBoy get World Of Goo released on the WiiWare store then. Sure, it was already popular on the PC before getting to WiiWare, but it's still their first and only game. If they can do it, I'm sure others can. There's tons of games on WiiWare that I don't recognize the name of the "studio" that made the game. Mind you, it's not the free-for-all that XBox360 has (funny you just forgot to mention them), but I Think Nintendo wants to maintain a more "curated" shop, so that the good games don't get drowned out by unpolished demos and people putting up a "game" just to say they did it. Which I find perfectly acceptable.
Exactly. Think about it this way. If you sell 100,000 copies at $10 each, that's 1 million dollars. If steam takes 30% (I can't get any hard numbers, but from quick googling that seems to close), you still have $700,000 left over. If it takes 5 people, 2 years to develop, that's 10 man years, giving $70,000 per person, per year. Now, that's not rockstar money (no pun intended), but that's nothing to laugh about either.
I could see this getting popular. Provider a system for people to share their edited war videos, and it could probably gain quite a following. I don't really understand the draw of something like MineCraft, or Dwarf Fortress, but they are quite popular games.