I think the problem is, is that for some reason we have gotten to the point where a highschool diploma is something that everyone should have. The solution that most places have taken is to make it easy enough to get a diploma that just about anybody can do it, rather than set the standards based on what people should be learning, and then encouraging students to meet those standards. I think that we had a big problem in society, as soon as we started to require diplomas for everybody. The same is becoming true for university degrees.
I think it goes both ways though. Many students will just do what is required of them to get their highschool diploma. If you don't require that they take certain classes, they never will. I live in Canada, so my experiences are a bit different, but I always found it odd that they made you take 5 english courses, but only 2 math courses. Same goes for science and many other subjects. While I wouldn't say English is not important, I would have to say that understanding the scientific method, or understanding the logic and deductive reasoning for math is at least as important, if not more important that understanding how to analyse the symbolism and archetypes of some 400 year old text. While English is also about being able to read and comprehend text, and coherently write about a topic, that could be done in just about every other class, without actually having to study english as a class on it's own.
That kind of exists anyway. When I go to buy something, I'll often just buy from Amazon because I have experience with them, and know they will get it shipped out on time, and that they have a good return policy, or any other number of factors. I usually don't buy from somebody who just happens to have the lowest price, because there are a whole lot of other things to consider. Maybe more of the smaller retailers would have to adopt something like PayPal so that I don't have to trust the site directly, and then I could just trust PayPal.
Little anecdote, My university professor who was quite knowledgable in the area of of SSL and other related matters said that SSL addresses the wrong problem. The problem generally isn't somebody sniffing your credit card number as it travels over the ether, but rather that you shouldn't have to give your actual credit card number to the retailer in the first place. That way, I don't have to worry about how secure the retailer's operation is. It should work kind of like OpenID, where I log into "VISA" for instance, and authorize a one time payment from my account to the retailer. The retailer doesn't get any of my credit card information, but instead gets a certificate with an authorization number signed by my credit card company that the payment was valid. Paypal pretty much solves this problem, but it is still a third party. The credit card companies should maintain this system on their own, so that no third party has access to this information.
I've always thought this was probably the best solution. The number of "really secure" sites that most people need is probably about 20. For the rest of sites, you could probably use some kind of self signing system, with a web of trust, to determine if you have the right key. There's no necessity for slashdot to have the same level of security as a bank.
Thanks to the advent of the internet, you can usually find out someone's name, phone number, and address, with just one of those pieces of information. Pick a random address, look it up on a reverse directory, and you can find out the name, and the phone number of the person who lives there. Unless they don't have a land line, or they are pretty careful with their privacy, it works almost every time.
I've been saying the same thing for years. The driverless car will never catch on because people want to be in control. I'm still amazed we have autopilots landing aircraft. Granted the pilot is paying attention at all times (or should be) and is ready to take control in case of a malfunction. For driverless cars the dream is that you can read the newspaper while going to work. But the reality is, that even if your car is driving itself, you should still be there to take over in case something malfunctions. If you have to pay attention anyway, you might as well be driving.
Swapping their script for your own version would be a nightmare. What happens when Google updates the official script, or a related one, and your script no longer functions because of incompatible code. What happens when even simple HTML is changed, causing your script to stop working. It would be equivalent to getting data off a website via screen-scraping. Every time the site changed some minor thing, your scripts would become useless.
I currently pay $10 a month for a shared hosting account. I could host it on that. It's pretty reliable. You can get other accounts on other hosting companies for less than $7 a month. If that's not cheap enough, I'm sure some company would be willing to hook you up with some free server space in exchange for looking at some ads while you look at your social networking stuff. Point is, is that you would have a choice. You could host it on a free site and look at ads, or host it on a paid service, and never have to look at ads.
But when you really get down to it, how much more portable is a netbook than a laptop. Not very much. It's not like you can fit either in your jacket pocket. Like I said, if you have the money to buy an iPad along with a laptop, then that's probably not that bad of an idea, but if you don't have that kind of money, and can only buy 1, iPad is just a really bad idea.
Sadly, I live in Ontario, and hence can't rightfully boycott Samsung unless I get off the electrical grid. They recently set up a deal with the government to build a giant wind farm here.
I'm all for punishing those responsible, but do you think the CEO really has knowledge of every piece of software that comes installed on every model of laptop they sell? Sure ultimately the CEO is the one in charge, but I don't think that every little decision is run by the CEO. It was probably some middle manager who ulimately signed off on the idea, and who rightfully should be punished.
That's what I did with my latest laptop. Days after getting my new laptop I downloaded a Windows 7 disc, used my new product key, and I was up and running in no time. It's amazing how much better a computer runs without all that crap on there. Don't know if I'm a special case, but Windows 7 has gotten really good with product keys. No special OEM only product keys where you have to find a special install CD. My Product key worked with a standard off the shelf windows 7 disk.
I very much agree with this. Most netbooks go for around $250 to $300 (can go higher). For $400 you can get a full laptop with 4GB RAM vs. 1 GB RAM, 500 GB HD vs. 160 GB HD, Dual Core real processor VS. Atom, and Battery live is about the same. Only thing netbook saves you is the weight, but that's been coming down on regular notebooks too. Unless you have gobs of money and can afford both, real laptop is definitely the way to go. Same goes for tables, only worse. Because they cost even more than the laptop, and the specs are even worse.
I've always thought this was a much more viable solution. Host your own data on your own servers, or get a free/paid account from and account provider. Kind of like the way email works. Design a set of protocols for sharing this information, and let everyone use whatever provider they want. Let everyone be in control of their own data.
I've always found Rogers internet service to be great. Never experienced any throttling. I really think it varies by where you live. Everyone I know in Ottawa has never had a problem with traffic of any kind being throttled. They even have a new feature that detects available bandwidth in the network, and lets you go beyond your maximum speed. Because of this, my 3 mbit connections runs almost exclusively at 10 mbit. I would like to know where people are reporting these throttling problems from. Because living in Ottawa for 10+ years, and being on cable internet 10 years, I can say I've never seen any evidence of this.
Individual security is the only way. That is, taking individual responsibility for your own security, of your own systems. I haven't had a virus in a very long time, and it's because I don't do stupid things. A vast majority of people who have problems with security have problems because of their own incompetence, and their own misunderstanding of the situation. And that not only goes for people, but for organizations as well.
Also, even if we have a clean source of electricity, what kind of strain does this put on the electrical system. I'm not too sure of the specifics, but I remember hearing that charging a chevy volt was equivalent to running your air conditioner. Many power systems across North America already have problems with people running air conditioners in the summer. Just image the extra load from 1or 2 extra cars for every household. And you can't just add more powerplants. the equipment in each neighbourhood also needs to be upgraded, as the small transformers aren't built to meet that kind of load.
Maybe the reason users can't tell the difference between 5600 (5400??) RPM and 10,000 RPM is because for the most part what is slowing things down is the seek latency. In both those drives, they seek latency is going to be 12 ms and 7 ms respectively. Which you're right, the user probably won't notice. But a solid state drive will give you a seek time of about 0.1 ms which will make a huge difference in many situations. Most users will probably notice a change like this because seek time is probably what is slowing down the computer most of the time.
This is my exact opinion. eSATA was out way before USB 3.0, and is much better suited to the task. I always wondered what the point of USB 3 was. Perhaps if you want to hook up something like an external Gigabit ethernet card or something along those lines. If you're just using it for hard drives, you're much better off with eSATA.
Well, you only have 2 ears, and you hear surround sound just fine.:) The ears can be tricked into thinking a sound is behind them or above them with just two speakers. I'm not sure whether games employ these techniques, but it can be done.
Maybe you should get noise cancelling headphones. Am I the only one who likes using headphones more than anything else. Much better stereo effects. Maybe not as good as a full surround setup, but who has room and money for that anyway? A decent pair of headphones (even in the $30-$50 range) can produce some pretty good sound.
That's what I thought. There's no reason you couldn't just send the information out on another email service. Or set up a dropbox account, and post the files to that. There's a million different ways to get the data out there. Like you said, once you have confidential documents, a browser, and an internet connection, all bets are off. Unless you are running with a small white-list of sites, and you are really sure of what is on those web sites.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem is, is that for some reason we have gotten to the point where a highschool diploma is something that everyone should have. The solution that most places have taken is to make it easy enough to get a diploma that just about anybody can do it, rather than set the standards based on what people should be learning, and then encouraging students to meet those standards. I think that we had a big problem in society, as soon as we started to require diplomas for everybody. The same is becoming true for university degrees.
I think it goes both ways though. Many students will just do what is required of them to get their highschool diploma. If you don't require that they take certain classes, they never will. I live in Canada, so my experiences are a bit different, but I always found it odd that they made you take 5 english courses, but only 2 math courses. Same goes for science and many other subjects. While I wouldn't say English is not important, I would have to say that understanding the scientific method, or understanding the logic and deductive reasoning for math is at least as important, if not more important that understanding how to analyse the symbolism and archetypes of some 400 year old text. While English is also about being able to read and comprehend text, and coherently write about a topic, that could be done in just about every other class, without actually having to study english as a class on it's own.
That kind of exists anyway. When I go to buy something, I'll often just buy from Amazon because I have experience with them, and know they will get it shipped out on time, and that they have a good return policy, or any other number of factors. I usually don't buy from somebody who just happens to have the lowest price, because there are a whole lot of other things to consider. Maybe more of the smaller retailers would have to adopt something like PayPal so that I don't have to trust the site directly, and then I could just trust PayPal.
Little anecdote, My university professor who was quite knowledgable in the area of of SSL and other related matters said that SSL addresses the wrong problem. The problem generally isn't somebody sniffing your credit card number as it travels over the ether, but rather that you shouldn't have to give your actual credit card number to the retailer in the first place. That way, I don't have to worry about how secure the retailer's operation is. It should work kind of like OpenID, where I log into "VISA" for instance, and authorize a one time payment from my account to the retailer. The retailer doesn't get any of my credit card information, but instead gets a certificate with an authorization number signed by my credit card company that the payment was valid. Paypal pretty much solves this problem, but it is still a third party. The credit card companies should maintain this system on their own, so that no third party has access to this information.
I've always thought this was probably the best solution. The number of "really secure" sites that most people need is probably about 20. For the rest of sites, you could probably use some kind of self signing system, with a web of trust, to determine if you have the right key. There's no necessity for slashdot to have the same level of security as a bank.
Many governments already have this stance. Maybe not the USA government, but many other countries around the world have rejected software patents.
Thanks to the advent of the internet, you can usually find out someone's name, phone number, and address, with just one of those pieces of information. Pick a random address, look it up on a reverse directory, and you can find out the name, and the phone number of the person who lives there. Unless they don't have a land line, or they are pretty careful with their privacy, it works almost every time.
I've been saying the same thing for years. The driverless car will never catch on because people want to be in control. I'm still amazed we have autopilots landing aircraft. Granted the pilot is paying attention at all times (or should be) and is ready to take control in case of a malfunction. For driverless cars the dream is that you can read the newspaper while going to work. But the reality is, that even if your car is driving itself, you should still be there to take over in case something malfunctions. If you have to pay attention anyway, you might as well be driving.
Let's start with all the all the middle managers and phone cleaners. We'll send them off in ship B.
Swapping their script for your own version would be a nightmare. What happens when Google updates the official script, or a related one, and your script no longer functions because of incompatible code. What happens when even simple HTML is changed, causing your script to stop working. It would be equivalent to getting data off a website via screen-scraping. Every time the site changed some minor thing, your scripts would become useless.
Reminds me of this story. Stackoverflow employee who decided to stop playing WOW, and start leveling up at real life.
I currently pay $10 a month for a shared hosting account. I could host it on that. It's pretty reliable. You can get other accounts on other hosting companies for less than $7 a month. If that's not cheap enough, I'm sure some company would be willing to hook you up with some free server space in exchange for looking at some ads while you look at your social networking stuff. Point is, is that you would have a choice. You could host it on a free site and look at ads, or host it on a paid service, and never have to look at ads.
But when you really get down to it, how much more portable is a netbook than a laptop. Not very much. It's not like you can fit either in your jacket pocket. Like I said, if you have the money to buy an iPad along with a laptop, then that's probably not that bad of an idea, but if you don't have that kind of money, and can only buy 1, iPad is just a really bad idea.
Sadly, I live in Ontario, and hence can't rightfully boycott Samsung unless I get off the electrical grid. They recently set up a deal with the government to build a giant wind farm here.
I'm all for punishing those responsible, but do you think the CEO really has knowledge of every piece of software that comes installed on every model of laptop they sell? Sure ultimately the CEO is the one in charge, but I don't think that every little decision is run by the CEO. It was probably some middle manager who ulimately signed off on the idea, and who rightfully should be punished.
That's what I did with my latest laptop. Days after getting my new laptop I downloaded a Windows 7 disc, used my new product key, and I was up and running in no time. It's amazing how much better a computer runs without all that crap on there. Don't know if I'm a special case, but Windows 7 has gotten really good with product keys. No special OEM only product keys where you have to find a special install CD. My Product key worked with a standard off the shelf windows 7 disk.
I very much agree with this. Most netbooks go for around $250 to $300 (can go higher). For $400 you can get a full laptop with 4GB RAM vs. 1 GB RAM, 500 GB HD vs. 160 GB HD, Dual Core real processor VS. Atom, and Battery live is about the same. Only thing netbook saves you is the weight, but that's been coming down on regular notebooks too. Unless you have gobs of money and can afford both, real laptop is definitely the way to go. Same goes for tables, only worse. Because they cost even more than the laptop, and the specs are even worse.
I've always thought this was a much more viable solution. Host your own data on your own servers, or get a free/paid account from and account provider. Kind of like the way email works. Design a set of protocols for sharing this information, and let everyone use whatever provider they want. Let everyone be in control of their own data.
I've always found Rogers internet service to be great. Never experienced any throttling. I really think it varies by where you live. Everyone I know in Ottawa has never had a problem with traffic of any kind being throttled. They even have a new feature that detects available bandwidth in the network, and lets you go beyond your maximum speed. Because of this, my 3 mbit connections runs almost exclusively at 10 mbit. I would like to know where people are reporting these throttling problems from. Because living in Ottawa for 10+ years, and being on cable internet 10 years, I can say I've never seen any evidence of this.
Individual security is the only way. That is, taking individual responsibility for your own security, of your own systems. I haven't had a virus in a very long time, and it's because I don't do stupid things. A vast majority of people who have problems with security have problems because of their own incompetence, and their own misunderstanding of the situation. And that not only goes for people, but for organizations as well.
Also, even if we have a clean source of electricity, what kind of strain does this put on the electrical system. I'm not too sure of the specifics, but I remember hearing that charging a chevy volt was equivalent to running your air conditioner. Many power systems across North America already have problems with people running air conditioners in the summer. Just image the extra load from 1or 2 extra cars for every household. And you can't just add more powerplants. the equipment in each neighbourhood also needs to be upgraded, as the small transformers aren't built to meet that kind of load.
Maybe the reason users can't tell the difference between 5600 (5400??) RPM and 10,000 RPM is because for the most part what is slowing things down is the seek latency. In both those drives, they seek latency is going to be 12 ms and 7 ms respectively. Which you're right, the user probably won't notice. But a solid state drive will give you a seek time of about 0.1 ms which will make a huge difference in many situations. Most users will probably notice a change like this because seek time is probably what is slowing down the computer most of the time.
This is my exact opinion. eSATA was out way before USB 3.0, and is much better suited to the task. I always wondered what the point of USB 3 was. Perhaps if you want to hook up something like an external Gigabit ethernet card or something along those lines. If you're just using it for hard drives, you're much better off with eSATA.
Well, you only have 2 ears, and you hear surround sound just fine. :) The ears can be tricked into thinking a sound is behind them or above them with just two speakers. I'm not sure whether games employ these techniques, but it can be done.
Maybe you should get noise cancelling headphones. Am I the only one who likes using headphones more than anything else. Much better stereo effects. Maybe not as good as a full surround setup, but who has room and money for that anyway? A decent pair of headphones (even in the $30-$50 range) can produce some pretty good sound.
That's what I thought. There's no reason you couldn't just send the information out on another email service. Or set up a dropbox account, and post the files to that. There's a million different ways to get the data out there. Like you said, once you have confidential documents, a browser, and an internet connection, all bets are off. Unless you are running with a small white-list of sites, and you are really sure of what is on those web sites.