Not a final product, but it's a nice step. I could see the case for future generations to have large numbers of small nuclear reactors that only power a small neighbourhood, or even a few, or single houses, and create the nuclear reactors on an assembly line. Bring the cost way down, and make them really simple to operate. Might be cheaper to build a lot of small identical units than to build 1 huge unit that requires lots of custom work.
It doesn't help that Microsoft is giving people plenty of reasons to switch to competitors though. Not upgrading their flagship browser for 10 years was a big mistake. Taking so long between XP and Vista, and then Vista being a flop was a big mistake. If Microsoft wants to stay at the top, they should constantly be releasing real upgrades to their products, to keep pace with how all the other guys are doing it. There's no reason they couldn't release a new version of Windows ever year, charge $50, and have everybody upgrade. The current model of, wait 3 or 4 years between versions, and charge $300 for it doesn't work, because nobody wants to drop $300 all at once, and they also don't want to have to buy a new computer, to get the price discounted.
Because carriers like Wind Mobile still discount the phone a little bit, or sell it at their cost, in order to entice customers to buy the phone from them. What people were doing was buying unlocked phones from Wind Mobile, and selling them on eBay the next day, and turning a profit. So Wind mobile had to start locking their phones so that people wouldn't use Wind Mobile as a supplier of mobile phones. They currently unlock the phone after 3 months of service as a company rule, so again, this law won't really change anything.
It's only very recently that actors have joined the ranks of the elite getting paid high sums of money for their work. It was the case that for many years, being an actor was seen as a very lowly job. Even now, only a very small percentage of actors make a lot of money. Most of the other actors make their livings as waiters and act only in local productions. Perhaps this is a way for small time actors to spread their work to a larger audience. I know I've got just as much enjoyment (many times more enjoyment) going to my local theatre (live play) as I have watching the latest blockbuster from Hollywood. There's no specific reason why actors should make lots of money or that films should cost a lot to make. For a short period, it was very expensive even for the basic camera equipment. However, now that things have come down in price, and you can essentially distribute and market the movie for nothing, why not move back to the old model where actors did it for the love of the work, and a little extra money, rather than paying people millions of dollars, and paying way too much to see the show. I'm not saying stuff like this will kill the hollywood blockbuster, with multimillion dollar budgets, but it may just replace stuff like TV sitcoms, where the budget could be extremely low, and you could still get just as many laughs.
The Conservatives and the Liberals don't agree on anything. So good luck on that happening. What is much more likely is the NDP getting the Liberals and the Bloc on their side with this bill and getting it passed.
The are only required to unlock it once the contract is over (or 6 months if no contract is signed) so I don't see why they would have to raise the rates.
To add to that, who actually browses porn at work. I mean, every few months, I hear a story about some politician or city employee being caught browsing porn on work hours, and I just think wow. Is your job that boring? Is your life that boring? Of all the things there are on the internet that won't get you in quite so much trouble, they choose to look at porn. Not that there's anything wrong with doing it on their own time, but they have to just know it's going to end up badly. When I'm bored at work, I visit lots of non-work related websites, but I just really don't understand the porn-at-work thing.
Even if you don't win, you can still do pretty well as a company. Nintendo did very well (in terms of profits) during the GameCube era, even though they didn't have a very high volume of sales. Outside the console market, you see this all the time. Apple sells nowhere near the majority of the market in many of their products, yet the company as a whole is doing very well. The only reason why it's important for Sony and MS to sell the most consoles is because they're relying on licensing sales for games to make up loses on the hardware. For Nintendo it's not so much of an issue, because they've built a simpler machine they can sell at a profit, and also because they make quite a few very popular games, which they also make quite a bit of money from. I think that Nintendo is pretty profitable, even without relying on the licensing fees paid for by other game vendors.
Personally I don't mind the Wiimote, except in the case where it was done really badly. The biggest example of this I can come up with is Fallout. It required you to shake the nunchuk thumbstick half to jump. This made it quite hard to jump and move forward in order to jump on top of something. I found the game almost infuriating. However, most other games i've played have made quite good use of the motion control. The Star Wars one was particularly good, especially considering so there was so much motion control used.
If you go with plain coffee, it's about the same price as most other coffee franchises. If you choose to get the coffee milkshake, or the fancy "cappuccino" and similar drinks, you can pay quite a bit.
$549 is nothing if you plan on selling your software. Assuming you charged $20 for a copy of your software, you would need to sell only 28 copies to make back the difference you spent on the IDE. That's nothing. You'll spend more on the computer to run it, almost as much on the OS, and more on electricity to power the computer. Most developers will earn $500 in a couple days, many in just 1 day. For hobby development at home, it's expensive. But if you actually are selling software, the cost is almost negligible.
By that logic, Hotmail should have a really good spam filter too, because they got a large number of emails. Same goes for Yahoo. And probably some other big webmail providers. But for some reason, Google seems to be the best. Yahoo is close second, and hotmail might as well not even have a spam filter. Everybody I know with hotmail (which is very few) have switched to only a whitelist of people they receive email from.
How many patents are there? A couple million? That's peanuts. One could easily build an application using free and open software to host and search all that data. Throw 5 geeks at it, and you could have most of the problems solved in a year. Then, the USPTO would be in complete control of the whole thing, and wouldn't have to worry about what happens when some company, decides it isn't in their best interest to host it anymore, and decides to drop it. The number of searches that would be done on a system like this would probably be low enough that you could host it on less than a rack of servers, possibly just 6U of space would be needed.
The difference between getting a new compute with Vista on it VS. getting a new computer with Redhat on it, is that for the most part, all the old software will continue to run, and you won't have to retrain all your old staff. If you need to upgrade all the computers in the department, you can't choose Linux, because it will mean rewiting a bunch of internal VBA / IE6 ActiveX apps, and getting a whole bunch of new software and training on that software even for all the COTS software you use, if it exists at all.
Which is the big problem. When IE6 came out, it wasn't all that bad either. It was actually pretty good. However, they let it stagnate for many years in the midst of some major changes and additions to HTML and CSS, as well as the introduction of many browsers which followed the old and new specs a lot better.
But what do you do with the kids who aren't interested in anything. How do you figure out if the kid is interested in science until you give them a good chance? I really don't see a problem with the way schooling is done for the most part. Up until you get to highschool, all the students take the exact same courses, because it's all basic stuff that everyone should understand. Once you hit high school, you can branch out and focus on the subjects you have discovered that you like. You like shop (auto mechanics, wood working, metal shop), take those courses. You like physical activity, take the PE class. You like music, take the music class. We didn't even have to take math after grade 10 if we didn't want to. The only class we had to take every year was English, and that's arguably important no matter what field you want to work in. Being able to read something, understand it, and being able to put your thoughts down into words is important no matter what you go on to do in life. Granted, they probably could have varied methods of teaching to different students, or just incorporate reading, essay writing, and presentations into the other courses, to make students a little more willing to do the work, and make the material more relevant. Sure you can't just start programming full time as an apprentice type situation in high school, and focus on nothing else, but that's probably a good thing.
Say it with me. "BMI has no relevance at the individual level". I don't know why people go around telling their individual BMI and saying that the whole BMI system is flawed. The BMI is a tool for dealing with populations of people. In any population, there will be outliers, people who are not fat with high BMI because of high muscle mass, people who have too much fat yet have a healthy BMI because of low muscle mass. These are outliers, and in a population discussion, it is OK to have some anomolies. You may also very well have a high BMI because you have extra fat, even though you do a lot of exercise. This depends a lot on the diet you consume along with doing the exercise. Even if you do exercise, which is a good thing, a lot of extra fat tissue is still a big health problem. Not as much as if you don't exercise, but still, it is a health problem. And there is no denying that the United States, and many other places in the world have a big problem with too many people with too much extra fat tissue.
It's like that on purpose. They make it hard to do the things they don't want you to do (change privacy settings, uninstall applications) and extremely easy to do the things they want you to do (update your status, install a new application, add a friend, join a group). As confusing as the interface of facebook is, I think it's completely intentional.
The reason apple works is because there is exactly 1 phone model. Developers know what to target, and are able to ensure their app will work properly. The reason Windows never worked in the mobile industry is because of such a large variety of phones available. Phones with different screen sizes and resolutions. Phones with differently available keys. Some phones have touch, some have accelerometers. Different processor and memory specs. Every phone is different. As long as there is this much variation in the hardware, it will never take off. Desktop is different, because you can depend on everyone having a monitor with a certain minimal resolution, keyboard with 104 keys, and mouse with 2 buttons. That gives you a good base line platform. They should do the same with phones. Define a screen size the phones must use. Define that all phones can have a keyboard, or use an onscreen one, and ensure that all phones must have a certain processor and memory spec, or they don't get to run new new Windows Phone OS. Make the phones more similar, so that developers have something easier to target, and they will come.
XP is 10 years old. But you can still buy a new computer with XP preinstalled. That says a lot about the current problem with XP. Why is Microsoft still selling licenses for XP if they aren't going to support it properly.
A simple option for no cross domain frames would really work well. Possible with abilities to provide a white list of domains where framesets can be loaded from, such as Google images. There's already mechanisms to protect against cross domain XMLHTTPRequest, as well as frames and child windows executing code from other domains. I don't see why the user shouldn't be able to disable loading frames from other domains.
I remember changing a value in some file for Wolfenstein, which made it have the synthesized voices of the guards played through the PC speaker. Wasn't great quality, but better than the standard beeps that played. I wonder how many people figured out this one?
Not a final product, but it's a nice step. I could see the case for future generations to have large numbers of small nuclear reactors that only power a small neighbourhood, or even a few, or single houses, and create the nuclear reactors on an assembly line. Bring the cost way down, and make them really simple to operate. Might be cheaper to build a lot of small identical units than to build 1 huge unit that requires lots of custom work.
It doesn't help that Microsoft is giving people plenty of reasons to switch to competitors though. Not upgrading their flagship browser for 10 years was a big mistake. Taking so long between XP and Vista, and then Vista being a flop was a big mistake. If Microsoft wants to stay at the top, they should constantly be releasing real upgrades to their products, to keep pace with how all the other guys are doing it. There's no reason they couldn't release a new version of Windows ever year, charge $50, and have everybody upgrade. The current model of, wait 3 or 4 years between versions, and charge $300 for it doesn't work, because nobody wants to drop $300 all at once, and they also don't want to have to buy a new computer, to get the price discounted.
Because carriers like Wind Mobile still discount the phone a little bit, or sell it at their cost, in order to entice customers to buy the phone from them. What people were doing was buying unlocked phones from Wind Mobile, and selling them on eBay the next day, and turning a profit. So Wind mobile had to start locking their phones so that people wouldn't use Wind Mobile as a supplier of mobile phones. They currently unlock the phone after 3 months of service as a company rule, so again, this law won't really change anything.
It's only very recently that actors have joined the ranks of the elite getting paid high sums of money for their work. It was the case that for many years, being an actor was seen as a very lowly job. Even now, only a very small percentage of actors make a lot of money. Most of the other actors make their livings as waiters and act only in local productions. Perhaps this is a way for small time actors to spread their work to a larger audience. I know I've got just as much enjoyment (many times more enjoyment) going to my local theatre (live play) as I have watching the latest blockbuster from Hollywood. There's no specific reason why actors should make lots of money or that films should cost a lot to make. For a short period, it was very expensive even for the basic camera equipment. However, now that things have come down in price, and you can essentially distribute and market the movie for nothing, why not move back to the old model where actors did it for the love of the work, and a little extra money, rather than paying people millions of dollars, and paying way too much to see the show. I'm not saying stuff like this will kill the hollywood blockbuster, with multimillion dollar budgets, but it may just replace stuff like TV sitcoms, where the budget could be extremely low, and you could still get just as many laughs.
The Conservatives and the Liberals don't agree on anything. So good luck on that happening. What is much more likely is the NDP getting the Liberals and the Bloc on their side with this bill and getting it passed.
The are only required to unlock it once the contract is over (or 6 months if no contract is signed) so I don't see why they would have to raise the rates.
To add to that, who actually browses porn at work. I mean, every few months, I hear a story about some politician or city employee being caught browsing porn on work hours, and I just think wow. Is your job that boring? Is your life that boring? Of all the things there are on the internet that won't get you in quite so much trouble, they choose to look at porn. Not that there's anything wrong with doing it on their own time, but they have to just know it's going to end up badly. When I'm bored at work, I visit lots of non-work related websites, but I just really don't understand the porn-at-work thing.
Even if you don't win, you can still do pretty well as a company. Nintendo did very well (in terms of profits) during the GameCube era, even though they didn't have a very high volume of sales. Outside the console market, you see this all the time. Apple sells nowhere near the majority of the market in many of their products, yet the company as a whole is doing very well. The only reason why it's important for Sony and MS to sell the most consoles is because they're relying on licensing sales for games to make up loses on the hardware. For Nintendo it's not so much of an issue, because they've built a simpler machine they can sell at a profit, and also because they make quite a few very popular games, which they also make quite a bit of money from. I think that Nintendo is pretty profitable, even without relying on the licensing fees paid for by other game vendors.
Personally I don't mind the Wiimote, except in the case where it was done really badly. The biggest example of this I can come up with is Fallout. It required you to shake the nunchuk thumbstick half to jump. This made it quite hard to jump and move forward in order to jump on top of something. I found the game almost infuriating. However, most other games i've played have made quite good use of the motion control. The Star Wars one was particularly good, especially considering so there was so much motion control used.
If you go with plain coffee, it's about the same price as most other coffee franchises. If you choose to get the coffee milkshake, or the fancy "cappuccino" and similar drinks, you can pay quite a bit.
$549 is nothing if you plan on selling your software. Assuming you charged $20 for a copy of your software, you would need to sell only 28 copies to make back the difference you spent on the IDE. That's nothing. You'll spend more on the computer to run it, almost as much on the OS, and more on electricity to power the computer. Most developers will earn $500 in a couple days, many in just 1 day. For hobby development at home, it's expensive. But if you actually are selling software, the cost is almost negligible.
By that logic, Hotmail should have a really good spam filter too, because they got a large number of emails. Same goes for Yahoo. And probably some other big webmail providers. But for some reason, Google seems to be the best. Yahoo is close second, and hotmail might as well not even have a spam filter. Everybody I know with hotmail (which is very few) have switched to only a whitelist of people they receive email from.
Unless it's office '97 with a bunch of applications written in VBA.
How many patents are there? A couple million? That's peanuts. One could easily build an application using free and open software to host and search all that data. Throw 5 geeks at it, and you could have most of the problems solved in a year. Then, the USPTO would be in complete control of the whole thing, and wouldn't have to worry about what happens when some company, decides it isn't in their best interest to host it anymore, and decides to drop it. The number of searches that would be done on a system like this would probably be low enough that you could host it on less than a rack of servers, possibly just 6U of space would be needed.
No, they are using csv files.
The difference between getting a new compute with Vista on it VS. getting a new computer with Redhat on it, is that for the most part, all the old software will continue to run, and you won't have to retrain all your old staff. If you need to upgrade all the computers in the department, you can't choose Linux, because it will mean rewiting a bunch of internal VBA / IE6 ActiveX apps, and getting a whole bunch of new software and training on that software even for all the COTS software you use, if it exists at all.
Which is the big problem. When IE6 came out, it wasn't all that bad either. It was actually pretty good. However, they let it stagnate for many years in the midst of some major changes and additions to HTML and CSS, as well as the introduction of many browsers which followed the old and new specs a lot better.
What traffic?
But what do you do with the kids who aren't interested in anything. How do you figure out if the kid is interested in science until you give them a good chance? I really don't see a problem with the way schooling is done for the most part. Up until you get to highschool, all the students take the exact same courses, because it's all basic stuff that everyone should understand. Once you hit high school, you can branch out and focus on the subjects you have discovered that you like. You like shop (auto mechanics, wood working, metal shop), take those courses. You like physical activity, take the PE class. You like music, take the music class. We didn't even have to take math after grade 10 if we didn't want to. The only class we had to take every year was English, and that's arguably important no matter what field you want to work in. Being able to read something, understand it, and being able to put your thoughts down into words is important no matter what you go on to do in life. Granted, they probably could have varied methods of teaching to different students, or just incorporate reading, essay writing, and presentations into the other courses, to make students a little more willing to do the work, and make the material more relevant. Sure you can't just start programming full time as an apprentice type situation in high school, and focus on nothing else, but that's probably a good thing.
Say it with me. "BMI has no relevance at the individual level". I don't know why people go around telling their individual BMI and saying that the whole BMI system is flawed. The BMI is a tool for dealing with populations of people. In any population, there will be outliers, people who are not fat with high BMI because of high muscle mass, people who have too much fat yet have a healthy BMI because of low muscle mass. These are outliers, and in a population discussion, it is OK to have some anomolies. You may also very well have a high BMI because you have extra fat, even though you do a lot of exercise. This depends a lot on the diet you consume along with doing the exercise. Even if you do exercise, which is a good thing, a lot of extra fat tissue is still a big health problem. Not as much as if you don't exercise, but still, it is a health problem. And there is no denying that the United States, and many other places in the world have a big problem with too many people with too much extra fat tissue.
It's like that on purpose. They make it hard to do the things they don't want you to do (change privacy settings, uninstall applications) and extremely easy to do the things they want you to do (update your status, install a new application, add a friend, join a group). As confusing as the interface of facebook is, I think it's completely intentional.
The reason apple works is because there is exactly 1 phone model. Developers know what to target, and are able to ensure their app will work properly. The reason Windows never worked in the mobile industry is because of such a large variety of phones available. Phones with different screen sizes and resolutions. Phones with differently available keys. Some phones have touch, some have accelerometers. Different processor and memory specs. Every phone is different. As long as there is this much variation in the hardware, it will never take off. Desktop is different, because you can depend on everyone having a monitor with a certain minimal resolution, keyboard with 104 keys, and mouse with 2 buttons. That gives you a good base line platform. They should do the same with phones. Define a screen size the phones must use. Define that all phones can have a keyboard, or use an onscreen one, and ensure that all phones must have a certain processor and memory spec, or they don't get to run new new Windows Phone OS. Make the phones more similar, so that developers have something easier to target, and they will come.
XP is 10 years old. But you can still buy a new computer with XP preinstalled. That says a lot about the current problem with XP. Why is Microsoft still selling licenses for XP if they aren't going to support it properly.
A simple option for no cross domain frames would really work well. Possible with abilities to provide a white list of domains where framesets can be loaded from, such as Google images. There's already mechanisms to protect against cross domain XMLHTTPRequest, as well as frames and child windows executing code from other domains. I don't see why the user shouldn't be able to disable loading frames from other domains.
I remember changing a value in some file for Wolfenstein, which made it have the synthesized voices of the guards played through the PC speaker. Wasn't great quality, but better than the standard beeps that played. I wonder how many people figured out this one?