I had a professor in university who required students to log into an SSH session to edit the files with VIM. Not only that, but he required that you committed them to a CVS repository. This was a good way of getting rid of cheating. You had to check in any work you did daily. Sure you could pay people to log into your account and do the work from there, but that's more than most people are willing to do. The kind of cheating most people do is wait until the day before the assignment is due, copy the code from another student, change all the variable names and a little bit of the structure, and hand it in. This kind of thing basically put an end to that.
Maybe you don't want this, but many people are perfectly fine running game consoles and tablets, simply because of the walled garden. I don't hear people complaining about how their game console doesn't work, unless there is an actual hardware problem. Contrast that with the complaints I hear all the time about the how people can no longer get their computer to boot because it's filled up with so much malware. The walled garden is a welcome change for most people. With the amount of junk installed on the average person's computer, I would have to say that most people should be in some sort of walled garden.
Yeah, but youtube has a couple of limitations that make it different than a site such as this. First, all the files it hosts are videos. So that changes the type of content they have to deal with. Second, all the files uploaded to Youtube are not encrypted. This makes it possible for Youtube to see if the content is actually infringing. The way these file sharing sites usually work, is that encrypted rars are uploaded with non-descript file names. This way the authorities have no way to discover which files are pirated unless they scour the forums, looking for the passphrase. Thirdly, Youtube's content is completely searchable and discoverable by any user. This site on the other hand, the only way to find any content is to already have the link. Again making it really difficult for copyright holders to track down who is sharing their content. Since these sites have completely different service models, I would have to say that we should wait until it goes to court (if it ever does) before we decide just how legit it is. Just from an outside perspective, it seems like it will be just like any other rapidshare/megaupload/whatever site where 99.9% will be pirated content, and the rest will be homework assignments from people who forget their USB stick.
I agree. If they want to go truly legit, files should be unencrypted and pre-screened by a human prior to the file being made available to the public. If they aren't doing that, then they really can't claim they are going legit. Not that I'm saying anybody wants a service like that, but it's really the only way to make sure things are "legit"
Besides, who uses these services anyway. Anybody I know who wants a little web server just pays the $5 a month and gets a shared hosting package. You get a lot more features this way. Most Home ISP web server packages only let you serve up static files, with no scripting abilities or anything. I personally can't even believe they have the service at all.
I thought the same thing. Why the sudden drop from $400 to $99 for the firesale. Why not lower the price first to $300 and see how many units they could get rid of at that price. Every 2 weeks or month, lower the price a little more enticing even more people to buy them. Sure some people might catch on and wait until price dropped really low, but they would be risking not having anything to buy.
Maybe the charging stations could get a better price on power for the end user since they would be a bigger consumer than a single person, and therefore be able to work out better deals with the power company. Maybe they could have onsite solar and wind operations allowing them to generate some of their own power, further reducing the costs to the end users.
Probably because a used, empty propane tank is probably worth about $5, where as a load of EV grade batteries is probably somewhere in the thousands. There'd probably be too much of a problem with people swapping good batteries for bad ones. Or people would have to have a really good credit rating simply to "fill up" their car.
Possibly, although you have to realize that people really like their cars. I don't own a car, and let me tell you, people think I'm crazy. I do just fine with bikes and the bus system, and I have a wife and 3 kids. It's not because of lack of money either, but not owning a car sure does free up a lot of money. But most people can't imagine not owning a car, and driving it daily. Most people I know drive their car everywhere, even if it's just something that would be a short walk, simply because they have a car.
I agree. This makes me think of stuff like Linq. SQL is a much nicer language for representing this stuff. Now, they could have added support for some kind of inline sql that could work on objects. Instead, they tried to shoehorn the functionality of SQL into C#/VB.Net syntax, creating something that is just more difficult to use. It's not that hard to learn 3 languages to do web development. Most web developers already know at least 3, languages such as SQL, PHP, and Javascript. Most serious web developers probably know SQL, Javascript, and 3 or 4 different server side languages. Languages are easy once you have the concepts down.
Isn't there a truecrypt feature that allows you to have 2 passwords, each one showing a different partition. This allows you plausible deniability. Just hand over the dummy password and they can see the stuff you want them to see.
Assuming you can afford to buy both a notebook and a tablet, you're right, they aren't competitors. But once you have to decide to buy one or the other, for most people the notebook is winner. If tablets can come down to netbook prices (I saw one for $179 today) then maybe the question of affording both will disappear. However, the decent tablets aren't anywhere close to that price yet. Most of them are $400+. For that you could buy a very capable notebook. For the cost of a tablet and a minimal notebook, you could buy a really nice notebook, even something like the MacBook air if you want something ultra-portable like a tablet.
I agree with you on the hockey there. I actually find it more enjoyable to watch amateur and university games as there aren't all the stoppages in play for TV commercials. I didn't pay $60+ a ticket to watch the TimBits play hockey. Olympic hockey used to be good, although I think the last time around they incorporated commercial breaks as well.
This has always been my opinion as well. The tablet is a good third device. Most people don't want to work all day long on a laptop, unless they hook it up to a full monitor/keyboard/mouse. And most people can't do everything they want to do with a tablet that they can do with a laptop. So most people who are happy with their tablets are the kind of people who own all 3. I do know a few people who are happy with just a tablet, but these people aren't heavy computer users, and are really just using it for facebook, and a few games.
I'm not sure where companies come up with these numbers. If you can sell a full netbook for $229, there's no reason that tablets should cost over $400. The only thing they have that's more expensive is the touch screen, but they are missing a lot of parts too. Flash memory is expensive, but it's not like they are using high end solid state drives in these things. And most of them only come with 16-32 GB, which isn't all that much. They should be able to sell these things pretty cheap. If you can get Chinese knock-off tablets for under $100, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get a nice tablet at the $200-$300 price point.
I very much agree with this. Look at the average house of the 50s. No cable TV, No cell phones, No internet. If the average house hold cut off these monthly services, they would probably save at least $200. People don't make as much food from scratch anymore either. You could probably save at least another $200 a month on food if you didn't eat out at the restaurant so much, or eat out of boxes of pre-made food. And that's only counting recurring costs. Once you start to get into items that people buy like dishwashers, computers, cell phones, video game systems, lattes, and everythign else people didn't even thing of buying in the 50s, you can save a whole bunch more money. People think they are so much worse off because they have less money at the end of the month to put away into savings. But if people wanted to just live like people lived in the 50s, they would probably quickly discover how rich they were.
I've known plenty of people who buy cars with cash. They often don't have as nice of cars as others in their same income bracket, but they have pretty respectable cars. Houses are about the only thing I would say that most people cannot buy cash. But I don't see that as so much of a problem, because houses tend to appreciate in value, even if left alone, except in the status of the US housing crash. Even then, the house continues to be usable for decades, assuming you bought a house which was in good condition. Contrast that with cars, which degrade very quickly in value and usability 5-10 years after you purchase them.
I think this has a lot to do with when you started using computers/word processors. If you learned on something like WordPerfect 5, it seems perfectly normal to do almost everything using only the keyboard. Even getting things in the menu can be done easiliy done on the keyboard. Contrast that with someone who learned on Word for windows, or ever later. Many functions weren't available without going through menus. And there wasn't that handy strip of paper above the F keys describing all the different things you could do.
I live in Canada, and the one thing I don't get about the American (United Statesian) system is that so many things are being voted on. When we have a federal or provincial election, there is exactly 1 question on the ballot. The question is, who are you using for your member of (provincial) parliament. That's it. Once in a while there'll be a referendum on something really major like when they wanted to change to MMP from first past the post (didn't happen). This is why we elect officials, so that we don't have to vote on a million little insignificant things.
No, he probably lives in Canada, where realistically you don't have to wait to vote most of the time. This is because we don't use machines. But rather voting booths made out of cardboard resting on a table. This makes it cheap and easy to set up any number of voting booths in any number of public buildings (schools usually, although sometimes they set up in an apartment building if it's big enough, that's right, if you live in a large apartment building, you may not even have to go outside to vote). This ensures that everybody can vote without waiting for hours in line. Online voting would be silly. They'd have to have enough servers provisioned to handle the load of everybody voting in a single day but then the servers would most likely go unused for the next 4 years until the next election, at which point they would probably have to replace the whole lot. And don't even talk about using Amazon EC2 or some server virtualization thing. That's just ripe for spying and vote fixing .
Very similar to something that happened here in Ontario a few years back. We had a referendum to see if we should adopt a Mixed Member Proportional instead of first past the post system. Many voters had no clue what was being asked. The news media (for whatever reason) told people if they don't understand the question, they should just vote no (the status quo). Which is completely the wrong advice. If you don't know what you are voting on, you should either educate yourself, or you should leave the ballot empty so your vote isn't potentially counted against the option you would preferred had you been informed.
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I had a professor in university who required students to log into an SSH session to edit the files with VIM. Not only that, but he required that you committed them to a CVS repository. This was a good way of getting rid of cheating. You had to check in any work you did daily. Sure you could pay people to log into your account and do the work from there, but that's more than most people are willing to do. The kind of cheating most people do is wait until the day before the assignment is due, copy the code from another student, change all the variable names and a little bit of the structure, and hand it in. This kind of thing basically put an end to that.
Maybe you don't want this, but many people are perfectly fine running game consoles and tablets, simply because of the walled garden. I don't hear people complaining about how their game console doesn't work, unless there is an actual hardware problem. Contrast that with the complaints I hear all the time about the how people can no longer get their computer to boot because it's filled up with so much malware. The walled garden is a welcome change for most people. With the amount of junk installed on the average person's computer, I would have to say that most people should be in some sort of walled garden.
Yeah, but youtube has a couple of limitations that make it different than a site such as this. First, all the files it hosts are videos. So that changes the type of content they have to deal with. Second, all the files uploaded to Youtube are not encrypted. This makes it possible for Youtube to see if the content is actually infringing. The way these file sharing sites usually work, is that encrypted rars are uploaded with non-descript file names. This way the authorities have no way to discover which files are pirated unless they scour the forums, looking for the passphrase. Thirdly, Youtube's content is completely searchable and discoverable by any user. This site on the other hand, the only way to find any content is to already have the link. Again making it really difficult for copyright holders to track down who is sharing their content. Since these sites have completely different service models, I would have to say that we should wait until it goes to court (if it ever does) before we decide just how legit it is. Just from an outside perspective, it seems like it will be just like any other rapidshare/megaupload/whatever site where 99.9% will be pirated content, and the rest will be homework assignments from people who forget their USB stick.
I agree. If they want to go truly legit, files should be unencrypted and pre-screened by a human prior to the file being made available to the public. If they aren't doing that, then they really can't claim they are going legit. Not that I'm saying anybody wants a service like that, but it's really the only way to make sure things are "legit"
I'm using it for my database. Just make sure you use the Blackhole storage engine on MySQL. Otherwise the database may not work as designed.
I was hoping it would be available on the Wii Homebrew scene.
Besides, who uses these services anyway. Anybody I know who wants a little web server just pays the $5 a month and gets a shared hosting package. You get a lot more features this way. Most Home ISP web server packages only let you serve up static files, with no scripting abilities or anything. I personally can't even believe they have the service at all.
I thought the same thing. Why the sudden drop from $400 to $99 for the firesale. Why not lower the price first to $300 and see how many units they could get rid of at that price. Every 2 weeks or month, lower the price a little more enticing even more people to buy them. Sure some people might catch on and wait until price dropped really low, but they would be risking not having anything to buy.
Maybe the charging stations could get a better price on power for the end user since they would be a bigger consumer than a single person, and therefore be able to work out better deals with the power company. Maybe they could have onsite solar and wind operations allowing them to generate some of their own power, further reducing the costs to the end users.
We have already sent nuclear generators into space.
Probably because a used, empty propane tank is probably worth about $5, where as a load of EV grade batteries is probably somewhere in the thousands. There'd probably be too much of a problem with people swapping good batteries for bad ones. Or people would have to have a really good credit rating simply to "fill up" their car.
Possibly, although you have to realize that people really like their cars. I don't own a car, and let me tell you, people think I'm crazy. I do just fine with bikes and the bus system, and I have a wife and 3 kids. It's not because of lack of money either, but not owning a car sure does free up a lot of money. But most people can't imagine not owning a car, and driving it daily. Most people I know drive their car everywhere, even if it's just something that would be a short walk, simply because they have a car.
I agree. This makes me think of stuff like Linq. SQL is a much nicer language for representing this stuff. Now, they could have added support for some kind of inline sql that could work on objects. Instead, they tried to shoehorn the functionality of SQL into C#/VB.Net syntax, creating something that is just more difficult to use. It's not that hard to learn 3 languages to do web development. Most web developers already know at least 3, languages such as SQL, PHP, and Javascript. Most serious web developers probably know SQL, Javascript, and 3 or 4 different server side languages. Languages are easy once you have the concepts down.
Isn't there a truecrypt feature that allows you to have 2 passwords, each one showing a different partition. This allows you plausible deniability. Just hand over the dummy password and they can see the stuff you want them to see.
Assuming you can afford to buy both a notebook and a tablet, you're right, they aren't competitors. But once you have to decide to buy one or the other, for most people the notebook is winner. If tablets can come down to netbook prices (I saw one for $179 today) then maybe the question of affording both will disappear. However, the decent tablets aren't anywhere close to that price yet. Most of them are $400+. For that you could buy a very capable notebook. For the cost of a tablet and a minimal notebook, you could buy a really nice notebook, even something like the MacBook air if you want something ultra-portable like a tablet.
I agree with you on the hockey there. I actually find it more enjoyable to watch amateur and university games as there aren't all the stoppages in play for TV commercials. I didn't pay $60+ a ticket to watch the TimBits play hockey. Olympic hockey used to be good, although I think the last time around they incorporated commercial breaks as well.
No, unless you want to pay extra for it. The iPad2 with 16GB of storage is only $499.
This has always been my opinion as well. The tablet is a good third device. Most people don't want to work all day long on a laptop, unless they hook it up to a full monitor/keyboard/mouse. And most people can't do everything they want to do with a tablet that they can do with a laptop. So most people who are happy with their tablets are the kind of people who own all 3. I do know a few people who are happy with just a tablet, but these people aren't heavy computer users, and are really just using it for facebook, and a few games.
I'm not sure where companies come up with these numbers. If you can sell a full netbook for $229, there's no reason that tablets should cost over $400. The only thing they have that's more expensive is the touch screen, but they are missing a lot of parts too. Flash memory is expensive, but it's not like they are using high end solid state drives in these things. And most of them only come with 16-32 GB, which isn't all that much. They should be able to sell these things pretty cheap. If you can get Chinese knock-off tablets for under $100, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get a nice tablet at the $200-$300 price point.
I very much agree with this. Look at the average house of the 50s. No cable TV, No cell phones, No internet. If the average house hold cut off these monthly services, they would probably save at least $200. People don't make as much food from scratch anymore either. You could probably save at least another $200 a month on food if you didn't eat out at the restaurant so much, or eat out of boxes of pre-made food. And that's only counting recurring costs. Once you start to get into items that people buy like dishwashers, computers, cell phones, video game systems, lattes, and everythign else people didn't even thing of buying in the 50s, you can save a whole bunch more money. People think they are so much worse off because they have less money at the end of the month to put away into savings. But if people wanted to just live like people lived in the 50s, they would probably quickly discover how rich they were.
I've known plenty of people who buy cars with cash. They often don't have as nice of cars as others in their same income bracket, but they have pretty respectable cars. Houses are about the only thing I would say that most people cannot buy cash. But I don't see that as so much of a problem, because houses tend to appreciate in value, even if left alone, except in the status of the US housing crash. Even then, the house continues to be usable for decades, assuming you bought a house which was in good condition. Contrast that with cars, which degrade very quickly in value and usability 5-10 years after you purchase them.
I think this has a lot to do with when you started using computers/word processors. If you learned on something like WordPerfect 5, it seems perfectly normal to do almost everything using only the keyboard. Even getting things in the menu can be done easiliy done on the keyboard. Contrast that with someone who learned on Word for windows, or ever later. Many functions weren't available without going through menus. And there wasn't that handy strip of paper above the F keys describing all the different things you could do.
I live in Canada, and the one thing I don't get about the American (United Statesian) system is that so many things are being voted on. When we have a federal or provincial election, there is exactly 1 question on the ballot. The question is, who are you using for your member of (provincial) parliament. That's it. Once in a while there'll be a referendum on something really major like when they wanted to change to MMP from first past the post (didn't happen). This is why we elect officials, so that we don't have to vote on a million little insignificant things.
No, he probably lives in Canada, where realistically you don't have to wait to vote most of the time. This is because we don't use machines. But rather voting booths made out of cardboard resting on a table. This makes it cheap and easy to set up any number of voting booths in any number of public buildings (schools usually, although sometimes they set up in an apartment building if it's big enough, that's right, if you live in a large apartment building, you may not even have to go outside to vote). This ensures that everybody can vote without waiting for hours in line. Online voting would be silly. They'd have to have enough servers provisioned to handle the load of everybody voting in a single day but then the servers would most likely go unused for the next 4 years until the next election, at which point they would probably have to replace the whole lot. And don't even talk about using Amazon EC2 or some server virtualization thing. That's just ripe for spying and vote fixing .
Very similar to something that happened here in Ontario a few years back. We had a referendum to see if we should adopt a Mixed Member Proportional instead of first past the post system. Many voters had no clue what was being asked. The news media (for whatever reason) told people if they don't understand the question, they should just vote no (the status quo). Which is completely the wrong advice. If you don't know what you are voting on, you should either educate yourself, or you should leave the ballot empty so your vote isn't potentially counted against the option you would preferred had you been informed.