However the smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are headed out the door, and that they should invest in solid state technology, lest they be left in the dust. There's nothing really stopping the availability of high capacity SSDs except cost. You can already get 1.28 TB SSDs with insane speeds (1.1 GB/s read, 1.5 GB/s write), if only you're willing to pay the cash. As prices come down, there will be no reason to get a spinning platter drive. Notice how all the SSD makers are not the big HardDisk makers. They should be shaking in their boots, because a large part of their business is going to go away within 5 years. If spinning platter makers don't change something soon, their market is going to be reduced to a small fraction of what it was.
Making code that's maintainable and understandable to other coders is also an art. I've seen a lot of code that worked, but from looking at it, you wouldn't understand how or why, and you couldn't make any changes to it without breaking it, and again, not knowing how or why it broke. Programming has a lot more art to it than most people realize. It's hard to quantify what makes nice code, and you can't just set up a bunch of rules and expect people to produce beautiful code. You say the users don't care about what the code looks like underneath. But they do care about speed, low resource usage, and not crashing. Writing code that can do those things is almost more of an art than a science.
Not only that, but if you ever turned on WiFiFoFum. You'll find that just walking down the street, you'll run into hundreds of wifi routers. I turned it on in the parking lot of my office building, and got about 50 separate SSIDs. Seriously, the school is probably the place the the lowest amount of Wifi in the town. There is usually quite a bit if room around the schools for the kids to play in. Just sitting inside my house, I pick up 10 WiFi routers. Which may be more than you could pick up in a school.
So what. You don't get your lottery ticket money back when you lose. You enter a sports tournament and don't win, you don't get your money back. They still get your entrance fee. They still get to keep all the money from the spectators who paid to see you. As long as the contest wasn't rigged, I don't see where the problem is. That's the point of a contest. A bunch of people complete, for no reason at all, except to see who is the best. The winners get prizes. The losers get nothing. The people holding the contest make a bunch of money, or in the case of a programming contest, get a bunch of free work. It's like saying, don't enter the golf tournament, because if you don't win, you lose the entry fee, and you wasted all your time golfing. And the golf course may have made money from people paying to see you play. People enter these contests because they enjoy programming, and enjoy the challenge. They are probably so popular because even a lot of the good programmers are stuck doing boring programming because it pays well. So once in a while, they like to go out and do some interesting programming for fun.
Yes, but if everyone was skinny, we wouldn't need big honking trucks to carry people around. Think about what happens when a 300 pound man gets into a honda civic. The car is tilted to one side, the man has trouble getting out of the car. This is the reason he buys the SUV. So he can fit in the thing without weighing it down, and so we can easily get in and out.
This is why we really should be moving to all cars with 4WD or AWD. It's much safe, and the technology is cheap enough, that I can't see why more people don't get cars with AWD. Especially in Canada.
I was thinking more along the lines of CAT5 sockets. Maybe even some power outlets. So much stuff lately is moving towards wireless. But really the best way is with wires. Wouldn't it be nice if your entire home was wired up with fibre optics. Wouldn't add much to the cost of the house, since most of the cost of the house is land, and has nothing to do with actual building costs. Same goes for a car. Just have retractable Ethernet cables in the doors. Plug right into your laptop. Sure wireless is nice, but nothing beats a wired connection.
My school offered something similar. Students who entered with a high enough average were given a scholarship, based on their admittance average. Anywhere from $1500 to $3500 a year. Tuition was around $4000 a year. You got to keep the scholarship in each successive year, but only if you maintained an 8.0/10.0 average. Even though the monetary incentive was there, most people still didn't get their scholarship in the second year. I think it's because the scale was so screwed up.
A+ = 10, A = 9, A- = 8, B+ = 7, B = 6, C+ = 5, C = 4, D + = 3, D = 2, E = 1, F = 0. So, if you got 1 B mark in any of yor courses, to bring your average up to an 8, you would have to get an A in 2 courses, and A+. It was very hard to maintain such an average. A single bad course could through your average way off.
While I think that Facebook and Google should do what they can to protect their users, what these people say holds a lot of truth. If you are really that worried about somebody finding out about what you are doing, then you shouldn't be doing it. Even if you don't even use Facebook or Google. You never know what one of your friends, or even just some interested onlooker will record and post on the Net. Celebrities (the smart ones) have known for a long time that they should be very cautious of what they do, because there are people watching them all the time, and their actions will be recorded. It's only in the last few years that this kind of thing has become something that everyday people should worry about.
This is what I do. I use PasswordSafe, and have it autogenerate a 16 character string for these questions. It's kind of funny, that a high percentage (16%) of identity theft is done by those who know you, and yet their security questions, are ones that could easily be figured out by someone you know. Not only that, but the actual answers are very hard to remember. Especially ones such as "What is your favourite x?", as tastes change.
Here's another car analogy. When cars first came out, people who owned them knew a lot about how they worked. You had to. You couldn't just call a tow truck and get them to bring it to a garage and fix it. Over the years cars got more and more complex. And not only did it become common place for people to know nothing about their cars, but it became common place for the makers of cars to make it difficult to repair them on your own,such as putting commonly replaced parts in hard to reach places, or requiring specialized tools. Computers are basically the same. When they first came out, there wasn't much software for them, and all the people using them knew how to program them. You also couldn't easily get them fixed, because there wasn't a lot of shops that could fix them. Fast forward to today, where nobody knows how a computer works. Nobody sees the command line, or really understands what's going on behind the glossy finish of the OS, or what the individual parts of the computer do. You can buy a program that does anything you want, so you don't ever have to write your own programs. You can also get it easily repaired, or completely replaced, for very little cost. The makers of PCs have actually gone the route of discouraging fixing problems at all. If there's a software problem, the first solution is factory reinstall, without even trying to troubleshoot the issue. There's very little incentive other than raw personal interest why somebody would learn how a computer operates.
Sometimes one just needs a little something to get back on track. I think people are really afraid of taking sleep medications, because of the horror stories of becoming hooked on it. When I was just graduated from university, I was going over some hard times, having trouble finding a (real) job and such. going into my final exams in my last semester, I was going on about 3-4 hours sleep a night for a few weeks, not because I wanted to, but just because my brain wouldn't stop, and I couldn't fall asleep. Finally broke down and took Nytol, an over the counter medication for a couple days. This helped me get back into my regular rhythm. It really helped a lot. I think that if I just would have tried something after the first week, I would have saved myself a lot of stress.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. It was one thing to make games look good 15-20 years ago, when you couldn't make it look anywhere close to real life, and another thing to make games "look good" now, when you can basically make them look however you want. I'd rather have a game that looks like a cartoon, such as World of Goo, Mario Galaxy, or Zelda WindWaker, over something that tries to look like the real world. Real world graphics work for things like flight sims, and some driving games, but for the most part, I'd much rather have something with cartoon type graphics. Does anybody else really hate the way current sports games look? By trying to look so close to real life, they almost look worse in some ways than the older games. There is no art in something that is just an exact replica of something in real life.
Then these emails really aren't nuisance emails, as they are actually voicing real concerns of his constituents. You don't have to read and respond to all your emails. Set up your filters appropriately. If you get a lot of email on a particular issue, maybe it's something that you should look into. Maybe it's something that people care about, and if you do something about it, you could get more votes. If I was one of his constituents, I would try to organize a mass letter writing campaign, and see how many people I could get to send him real mail. See if it's easier for him to deal with real mail, than it is to deal with emails.
Granted, as long as you didn't have an actual receiver, you could get away from paying the TV license. You could just use a 30 Inch Computer monitor to watch all your shows. Or even better, a projector. I think that as long as you don't have a way of receiving signals, you don't have to pay the TV License. Might be changed now with iPlayer, since any computer with internet can now access the BBC, but I don't think it's changed, since, for the most part, anybody with a computer and internet will also have a TV.
It's the new way to make money. Our old POTS (landline telephone) provider, Bell, has now mostly gone to pushing satellite TV, Cell Phone, and DSL. Sure they still offer regular phone lines, but from their commercials, you wouldn't know it. Basically, in Canada, you can have 1 company provide you with all your communications needs. I'm not saying that this is the average bill, or my bill, but many people I know easily pay $150 to Rogers every month for Cable + Internet. If it was just me, I could personally put do with just Internet, from some other provider, and a cell phone. That's all I need, but the wife and kids want cable TV, and a real phone line.
Well, not sure about ComCast, but Rogers, the main cable provider in Canada could probably easily serve you a $320 bill.
$99 a month for Ultimate 50 Mbps internet
$70 a month for a cell phone with small data plan (could cost more)
$100 for VIP Ultimate Cable TV.
$35 for VOIP home phone service.
Equals $304 a month. Add in Tax, and the bill would be way over $320. Sure it's not all going to the cable company, but the bill would still be greater than $320. Plus your cell phone cost could be much higher. Add in a few pay per view movies at $6 a pop, digital terminal rental, cable modem rental, and one could get a very high bill.
This has a lot of truth to it. My business professor told a story to illustrate the same point. His wife goes out an buys a new leather jacket. When she gets home, he asks why she spent all that money on a new jacket. She says, it was on sale, So she save $100. To which he replies. Great, go out and buy 10 more and we can pay the rent. Nothing is every free. Whenever you see a sale, the business is still making money off the sale of the item. It is extremely rare that something is sold below cost.
Still, you could only learn what's on the MSDN. Which isn't a whole lot. Sure they got all the libraries listed out for you, but there has always been books with that kind of information. You still aren't going to learn all that stuff that they teach in Algorithms, Data Structures, or Compilers. And you won't learn all the set theory and boolean logic that comes up so often when programming. You'll learn a lot about particular languages and technologies on the MSDN site, but you won't get the underlying base that you need to apply it properly in complex situations.
Even then, from what I recall, 2D Boy also reported that World of Goo has around 90% piracy. But I don't think they really care, because they still sold a ton of copies.
Personally, I think it won't be long, possibly 1 or 2 more generations, until one of the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendo) release a console with no disc slot, no memory card slot, and encase the motherboard in epoxy, such that nobody will be able to modify it in any way to run pirated software. The only software will come via download from their signed servers, and there will be no way to trick the unit into running unsigned code. The reason it seems that piracy has been possible with current and older units is because people have been able to put their own data on the unit, and then exploit a data execution bug. Either that, or attach a mod chip. Now, encasing the board in epoxy would make such feat beyond what most people would be willing to subject their game console to. It's hard to say whether such a unit would sell or not. Personally, I bought a Wii, and while I've put some software to play movies on it, and do some other thing for which sanctioned apps don't exist, I have paid for all the games I have for it, and don't run any pirated software on it. I only buy a couple games a year, as that's all I really have time for. I think there's a lot of people out there who pirate, but there's also a lot of people out there who just buy games, and aren't even aware of where to start pirating games, especially for consoles. It's a scary thing. Loading your own firmware onto one of these devices. Who knows what it's going to screw up. It's not like a PC where you can just format the entire thing and start over.
I remember hearing that pound for pound (of meat) that kangaroos just produce way less methane than cows. So if we all started eating kangaroos instead of cows, then we could really cut down on the amount of methane. Of course, you won't be able to change everyone's diet. If you could, you could just declare that everyone should be a vegetarian, and really cut down on methane. Really, people (in general) eat way too much meat, and if for no other reason than individual health, we should probably cut down. But stuff like this isn't likely to change. Nobody wants to be told what they should eat.
Looking at the picture of the one I linked to, it seems like all of them can be removed. I don't see why they would only make some of them removable. Although I don't think there would be that many people who would would remove the motherboard cable.
I used to make quite good use of 2 drives when I got my first CD Burner. One drive for reading, one for writing, that way you didn't fill up your tiny 4GB Hard drive with CD images. It was also useful if you wanted background music for games that also required the CD to be present. It worked really well when CD drives used to be just passive audio fed directly into the sound card, because you could have whatever music you wanted playing in your games, without using extra processor cycles.
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However the smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are headed out the door, and that they should invest in solid state technology, lest they be left in the dust. There's nothing really stopping the availability of high capacity SSDs except cost. You can already get 1.28 TB SSDs with insane speeds (1.1 GB/s read, 1.5 GB/s write), if only you're willing to pay the cash. As prices come down, there will be no reason to get a spinning platter drive. Notice how all the SSD makers are not the big HardDisk makers. They should be shaking in their boots, because a large part of their business is going to go away within 5 years. If spinning platter makers don't change something soon, their market is going to be reduced to a small fraction of what it was.
Making code that's maintainable and understandable to other coders is also an art. I've seen a lot of code that worked, but from looking at it, you wouldn't understand how or why, and you couldn't make any changes to it without breaking it, and again, not knowing how or why it broke. Programming has a lot more art to it than most people realize. It's hard to quantify what makes nice code, and you can't just set up a bunch of rules and expect people to produce beautiful code. You say the users don't care about what the code looks like underneath. But they do care about speed, low resource usage, and not crashing. Writing code that can do those things is almost more of an art than a science.
Not only that, but if you ever turned on WiFiFoFum. You'll find that just walking down the street, you'll run into hundreds of wifi routers. I turned it on in the parking lot of my office building, and got about 50 separate SSIDs. Seriously, the school is probably the place the the lowest amount of Wifi in the town. There is usually quite a bit if room around the schools for the kids to play in. Just sitting inside my house, I pick up 10 WiFi routers. Which may be more than you could pick up in a school.
So what. You don't get your lottery ticket money back when you lose. You enter a sports tournament and don't win, you don't get your money back. They still get your entrance fee. They still get to keep all the money from the spectators who paid to see you. As long as the contest wasn't rigged, I don't see where the problem is. That's the point of a contest. A bunch of people complete, for no reason at all, except to see who is the best. The winners get prizes. The losers get nothing. The people holding the contest make a bunch of money, or in the case of a programming contest, get a bunch of free work. It's like saying, don't enter the golf tournament, because if you don't win, you lose the entry fee, and you wasted all your time golfing. And the golf course may have made money from people paying to see you play. People enter these contests because they enjoy programming, and enjoy the challenge. They are probably so popular because even a lot of the good programmers are stuck doing boring programming because it pays well. So once in a while, they like to go out and do some interesting programming for fun.
Yes, but if everyone was skinny, we wouldn't need big honking trucks to carry people around. Think about what happens when a 300 pound man gets into a honda civic. The car is tilted to one side, the man has trouble getting out of the car. This is the reason he buys the SUV. So he can fit in the thing without weighing it down, and so we can easily get in and out.
This is why we really should be moving to all cars with 4WD or AWD. It's much safe, and the technology is cheap enough, that I can't see why more people don't get cars with AWD. Especially in Canada.
I was thinking more along the lines of CAT5 sockets. Maybe even some power outlets. So much stuff lately is moving towards wireless. But really the best way is with wires. Wouldn't it be nice if your entire home was wired up with fibre optics. Wouldn't add much to the cost of the house, since most of the cost of the house is land, and has nothing to do with actual building costs. Same goes for a car. Just have retractable Ethernet cables in the doors. Plug right into your laptop. Sure wireless is nice, but nothing beats a wired connection.
My school offered something similar. Students who entered with a high enough average were given a scholarship, based on their admittance average. Anywhere from $1500 to $3500 a year. Tuition was around $4000 a year. You got to keep the scholarship in each successive year, but only if you maintained an 8.0/10.0 average. Even though the monetary incentive was there, most people still didn't get their scholarship in the second year. I think it's because the scale was so screwed up. A+ = 10, A = 9, A- = 8, B+ = 7, B = 6, C+ = 5, C = 4, D + = 3, D = 2, E = 1, F = 0. So, if you got 1 B mark in any of yor courses, to bring your average up to an 8, you would have to get an A in 2 courses, and A+. It was very hard to maintain such an average. A single bad course could through your average way off.
While I think that Facebook and Google should do what they can to protect their users, what these people say holds a lot of truth. If you are really that worried about somebody finding out about what you are doing, then you shouldn't be doing it. Even if you don't even use Facebook or Google. You never know what one of your friends, or even just some interested onlooker will record and post on the Net. Celebrities (the smart ones) have known for a long time that they should be very cautious of what they do, because there are people watching them all the time, and their actions will be recorded. It's only in the last few years that this kind of thing has become something that everyday people should worry about.
This is what I do. I use PasswordSafe, and have it autogenerate a 16 character string for these questions. It's kind of funny, that a high percentage (16%) of identity theft is done by those who know you, and yet their security questions, are ones that could easily be figured out by someone you know. Not only that, but the actual answers are very hard to remember. Especially ones such as "What is your favourite x?", as tastes change.
Here's another car analogy. When cars first came out, people who owned them knew a lot about how they worked. You had to. You couldn't just call a tow truck and get them to bring it to a garage and fix it. Over the years cars got more and more complex. And not only did it become common place for people to know nothing about their cars, but it became common place for the makers of cars to make it difficult to repair them on your own ,such as putting commonly replaced parts in hard to reach places, or requiring specialized tools. Computers are basically the same. When they first came out, there wasn't much software for them, and all the people using them knew how to program them. You also couldn't easily get them fixed, because there wasn't a lot of shops that could fix them. Fast forward to today, where nobody knows how a computer works. Nobody sees the command line, or really understands what's going on behind the glossy finish of the OS, or what the individual parts of the computer do. You can buy a program that does anything you want, so you don't ever have to write your own programs. You can also get it easily repaired, or completely replaced, for very little cost. The makers of PCs have actually gone the route of discouraging fixing problems at all. If there's a software problem, the first solution is factory reinstall, without even trying to troubleshoot the issue. There's very little incentive other than raw personal interest why somebody would learn how a computer operates.
Sometimes one just needs a little something to get back on track. I think people are really afraid of taking sleep medications, because of the horror stories of becoming hooked on it. When I was just graduated from university, I was going over some hard times, having trouble finding a (real) job and such. going into my final exams in my last semester, I was going on about 3-4 hours sleep a night for a few weeks, not because I wanted to, but just because my brain wouldn't stop, and I couldn't fall asleep. Finally broke down and took Nytol, an over the counter medication for a couple days. This helped me get back into my regular rhythm. It really helped a lot. I think that if I just would have tried something after the first week, I would have saved myself a lot of stress.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. It was one thing to make games look good 15-20 years ago, when you couldn't make it look anywhere close to real life, and another thing to make games "look good" now, when you can basically make them look however you want. I'd rather have a game that looks like a cartoon, such as World of Goo, Mario Galaxy, or Zelda WindWaker, over something that tries to look like the real world. Real world graphics work for things like flight sims, and some driving games, but for the most part, I'd much rather have something with cartoon type graphics. Does anybody else really hate the way current sports games look? By trying to look so close to real life, they almost look worse in some ways than the older games. There is no art in something that is just an exact replica of something in real life.
Then these emails really aren't nuisance emails, as they are actually voicing real concerns of his constituents. You don't have to read and respond to all your emails. Set up your filters appropriately. If you get a lot of email on a particular issue, maybe it's something that you should look into. Maybe it's something that people care about, and if you do something about it, you could get more votes. If I was one of his constituents, I would try to organize a mass letter writing campaign, and see how many people I could get to send him real mail. See if it's easier for him to deal with real mail, than it is to deal with emails.
Granted, as long as you didn't have an actual receiver, you could get away from paying the TV license. You could just use a 30 Inch Computer monitor to watch all your shows. Or even better, a projector. I think that as long as you don't have a way of receiving signals, you don't have to pay the TV License. Might be changed now with iPlayer, since any computer with internet can now access the BBC, but I don't think it's changed, since, for the most part, anybody with a computer and internet will also have a TV.
It's the new way to make money. Our old POTS (landline telephone) provider, Bell, has now mostly gone to pushing satellite TV, Cell Phone, and DSL. Sure they still offer regular phone lines, but from their commercials, you wouldn't know it. Basically, in Canada, you can have 1 company provide you with all your communications needs. I'm not saying that this is the average bill, or my bill, but many people I know easily pay $150 to Rogers every month for Cable + Internet. If it was just me, I could personally put do with just Internet, from some other provider, and a cell phone. That's all I need, but the wife and kids want cable TV, and a real phone line.
Well, not sure about ComCast, but Rogers, the main cable provider in Canada could probably easily serve you a $320 bill.
$99 a month for Ultimate 50 Mbps internet
$70 a month for a cell phone with small data plan (could cost more)
$100 for VIP Ultimate Cable TV.
$35 for VOIP home phone service.
Equals $304 a month. Add in Tax, and the bill would be way over $320. Sure it's not all going to the cable company, but the bill would still be greater than $320. Plus your cell phone cost could be much higher. Add in a few pay per view movies at $6 a pop, digital terminal rental, cable modem rental, and one could get a very high bill.
This has a lot of truth to it. My business professor told a story to illustrate the same point. His wife goes out an buys a new leather jacket. When she gets home, he asks why she spent all that money on a new jacket. She says, it was on sale, So she save $100. To which he replies. Great, go out and buy 10 more and we can pay the rent. Nothing is every free. Whenever you see a sale, the business is still making money off the sale of the item. It is extremely rare that something is sold below cost.
Still, you could only learn what's on the MSDN. Which isn't a whole lot. Sure they got all the libraries listed out for you, but there has always been books with that kind of information. You still aren't going to learn all that stuff that they teach in Algorithms, Data Structures, or Compilers. And you won't learn all the set theory and boolean logic that comes up so often when programming. You'll learn a lot about particular languages and technologies on the MSDN site, but you won't get the underlying base that you need to apply it properly in complex situations.
Even then, from what I recall, 2D Boy also reported that World of Goo has around 90% piracy. But I don't think they really care, because they still sold a ton of copies.
Personally, I think it won't be long, possibly 1 or 2 more generations, until one of the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendo) release a console with no disc slot, no memory card slot, and encase the motherboard in epoxy, such that nobody will be able to modify it in any way to run pirated software. The only software will come via download from their signed servers, and there will be no way to trick the unit into running unsigned code. The reason it seems that piracy has been possible with current and older units is because people have been able to put their own data on the unit, and then exploit a data execution bug. Either that, or attach a mod chip. Now, encasing the board in epoxy would make such feat beyond what most people would be willing to subject their game console to. It's hard to say whether such a unit would sell or not. Personally, I bought a Wii, and while I've put some software to play movies on it, and do some other thing for which sanctioned apps don't exist, I have paid for all the games I have for it, and don't run any pirated software on it. I only buy a couple games a year, as that's all I really have time for. I think there's a lot of people out there who pirate, but there's also a lot of people out there who just buy games, and aren't even aware of where to start pirating games, especially for consoles. It's a scary thing. Loading your own firmware onto one of these devices. Who knows what it's going to screw up. It's not like a PC where you can just format the entire thing and start over.
I remember hearing that pound for pound (of meat) that kangaroos just produce way less methane than cows. So if we all started eating kangaroos instead of cows, then we could really cut down on the amount of methane. Of course, you won't be able to change everyone's diet. If you could, you could just declare that everyone should be a vegetarian, and really cut down on methane. Really, people (in general) eat way too much meat, and if for no other reason than individual health, we should probably cut down. But stuff like this isn't likely to change. Nobody wants to be told what they should eat.
Looking at the picture of the one I linked to, it seems like all of them can be removed. I don't see why they would only make some of them removable. Although I don't think there would be that many people who would would remove the motherboard cable.
You could probably vent it out of the top of the computer.
I used to make quite good use of 2 drives when I got my first CD Burner. One drive for reading, one for writing, that way you didn't fill up your tiny 4GB Hard drive with CD images. It was also useful if you wanted background music for games that also required the CD to be present. It worked really well when CD drives used to be just passive audio fed directly into the sound card, because you could have whatever music you wanted playing in your games, without using extra processor cycles.