Same goes for all those people who develop plugins for VS.Net. Eventually all those plugins, if remotely popular, will become core features of VS.Net, putting you completely out of business. I still don't understand why MS hasn't built a PDF converter into MS Word. If they did, they would probable wipe out half of acrobats user base.
Can't wait until this comes out for the Wii. Sadly, they don't operate outside the US. I wonder if they could make it work in Canada. Ever since Nintendo came out with the "Nintendo Channel" I've been thinking that a lot of other people need to start streaming video to consoles. At lot harder for people to hack and steal the streams, and a lot easier for people to integrate with their regular entertainment system. I would gladly pay a few bucks for a YouTube channel that works well (it sucks through the Wii internet browser), as well as many other channels. Apple could reach a lot more people if they had a movie trailer channel on consoles that you could watch the trailers on.
Well, maybe we can then conclude that iPod App store users are cheap, and that there isn't any money to be made in that market. Probably better off developing for WiiWare, or making low end computer games like Bejeweled.
There's also the issue of ensuring the software isn't changed "AFTER" it is installed on the machine. MS, Sony, and Nintendo have put a lot of research into not getting pirated games to run on their system. They still haven't done it right. I don't see how the companies making the voting machines could do any better.
I think a much better idea would be to rewrite Outlook to use a real database as a backend. They already have SQL Server. Why not just store all your mail in a SQL Server database? You wouldn't have problems with maximum file sizes. You would have much better scalability for those with gigabytes of email, and you could have a common interface working with the data in the terms of running SQL queries. I don't know why no other email client like thunderbird wouldn't do the same. Make it easy to access your email store, and you could easily write tons of applications to access your email.
Just like in the book, Never Cry Wolf (Farley Mowat). The wolves can live off mostly mice, because they eat the entire mouse. If you try to live off only the meat on the mouse, you will surely suffer from malnutrition. But, if you puree the whole thing in a blender, you can get all the nutrients you need.
You should charge more. A $2 price tag says to me that your game is too crappy for me to bother paying anything. Put a $10-$15 price tag on the game. Then I will at least think the game is worth playing. Seriously. People are used to paying a lot of money for games. Don't ask for such rediculously low prices. People will assume that your product sucks, and think you are just ripping them off by not giving it for free. However if you charge more, people will think that you believe, and that your product is actually, worth something.
Which is so much worse than the electronic voting places, where they have to have enough computers to keep up with demand. Of course, they never do have enough machines, or they end up breaking down, so you end up having to wait in line for an hour or three. Contrast that with paper systems, where you can set up another ballot station with a piece of cardboard.
Problem with computers is that there is no way of verifying what software is running on them when I walk up to them on election day. And since there are many people (who I wouldn't trust) handling the machines, transporting them from the factory to the warehouse, guarding the warehouse, cleaning the warehouse, transporting to the polling station, setting them up at the polling station. I would be much more inclined to trust pen and paper as I could check the box was empty at the start of the day, check that my vote makes it into the box, and then watch them count at the end of the day. Of course not everybody personally has to watch the process, but you can, and as long as enough interested people do, the system is sufficiently trustworthy. At least way more so than a computer, which I really can't see what it is doing on the inside. Just because it's says I voted for candidate X on the screen, and prints out a receipt, doesn't mean it actually registered the same on the hard drive. And we shouldn't have to call for a recount to have some assurance of getting votes counted properly, recounts are hard to get, unless you can show huge problems with the results.
That depends on where you live. In some places, the internet is a human right. Although I would guess that the law was put in place specifically to prevent the EU from enforcing laws that would cut off people from internet access.
If it wasn't for Disney et al, it would be as easy as dropping your latest DVD purchase into your computer, and clicking the Copy To Computer/copy to ipod/copy to video game system/copy to another DVD button. But since they insist on making it illegal to copy your own discs for your own private use, we have to resort to convoluted methods of making those copies. Think about how easy it is to copy a CD to your library in iTunes. It should be just as easy for a DVD movie, but I don't think that Disney, or anybody else would stand for such a simple to use, widely available method of doing this.
My thoughts exactly. With ion engines looking ready for testing on a moon mission in 2013, there's really no reason to be thinking about these multi year trips to Mars. The ion engines are supposed to get to Mars in 39 days, which is quick enough to not have to wait for the planets to realign again for the trip back.
I shouldn't be able to verify my own vote. If I can verify my vote, I can prove to myself after the fact how I voted, and therefore I can prove it to somebody else. That somebody else might try to coherce me into voting a specific way. I much prefer paper, pen, and hand counted. That way, I can verify the box is empty before everyone puts their vote in. Verify that my vote went into the box, and verify that the box was opened and that all votes in the box were counted correctly. I wouldn't be able to identify my ballot apart from the other ballots in the box, but that would be good, because nobody would be able to coherce me to vote a particular way. Just knowing that my vote was an a box, and that the box was counted correctly is enough for me to know that my vote was counted correctly.
Very true. Sometimes organizations only want to support one database, so whatever database they end up picking (Oracle, MS SQL Server) get's used for absolutely everything, regardless of the fact that a free database (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) would do the job just fine. It comes down to, pay the license for each need, or pay database admins to manage multiple RDBMSs.
Also, does this mean that the bus has to stop at every stop. Often when I'm riding buses in the morning (not in Shanghai mind you), the bus will just skip stops because it's completely filled up and nobody wants to get off, or because there's another bus with the exact same route directly in front of it, and stopping would just waste time. Basically this just seems like it would slow down the whole system, as buses would have to wait at each stop and you would have to make sure that there was enough charging stations at each stop to accommodate the number of buses that may get backed up at any one stop.
They are just theory, but in Canada, but from what I recall, people with math degrees basically have a 100% (or close to it) job placement rate. The stuff you learn is often not directly applicable, but neither is most stuff in computer science. Thing is, there are a lot of jobs that you can do very well in if you are good at math. If you are strong in statistics, then anything where you have to analyze any kind of statistics can be a job opportunity. So everything from the weather, to baseball, to the stock market requires people who are good at statistics.
I always like to think of gambling in terms of a very high risk investment. There's low risk, like your savings account where you may get 3% interest, and it's garaunteed, and you can access your money whenever you want. Then there's GICs, which you get a higher interest rate, garaunteed, but your money is tied up for a certain period of time. Then there's stocks and mutual funds, where the payout is usually higher, but there's a chance you could lose some or all of your money, if things don't perform favorably. Then there's gambling, where you are most likely going to lose money but the potential for earning inordinately large amounts of cash is there, so investing a small amount ($5 a week for lottery tickets) isn't necessarily a completely stupid idea. I mean, sure you will probably lose that $5 every week. But people spend $5 a week on many things that have absolutely no payout, like fancy coffee. So gambling can be ok provided you spend only a little amount of money, simply because if you do win the big prize, you could be set for life, whereas no other investment you could possibly do would result in such a large payout for such a small investment.
That only matters with conventional shufflers. There's no reason one couldn't design a device to reshuffle quickly between each hand. Maybe just have 8 decks, and as the cards are finished with, it just puts them back in a random space in the pile. No shuffling is ever needed because cards aren't placed back in a neat little pile, but instead randomly inserted into the pile as they are fed back into the sorter.
So does the US, it's called Alaska, and it's bigger than Finland. There's also a lot of other areas in the US that are pretty much devoid of people. Like the whole middle of the country. Apart from a few major inland cities, most Americans live along the east and west coasts
Really, because it doesn't seem so. Nintendo has rolled out many updates that didn't even bother removing homebrew. The latest update did, but it was soooo easy to work around that it looked like they wanted it to be worked around.
Yes, but the effect of letting you level up is to make the game too easy for someone who wants to spend hours leveling up. Almost all RPGs fail in this respect. If you aren't good enough, just spend a few hours fighting boars and you are now good enough. I more enjoy games like Zelda where you still go on a quest, but there is no arbitrary way to make yourself twice as powerful as one would normally be at that point in the game. It requires a lot more skill play a game where the strength of your character is limited.
In MarioKart you could use this against the computer. If you did 2 player grand prix (which doesn't exist in Wii), and the one player drove really slowly, the other player could basically lap all computer players while the computer tried to match speeds with the slower of the two human players.
Also, if you're far enough ahead of the pack, even a blue shell or two won't give the others enough time to catch up. I've had it happen a quite a bit while playing against less skilled friends of mine. Also, if I'm not mistaken, MarioKart (wii at least) does give the option to turn off the handicapped weapon selection.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, and in windows Vista, you can print to Microsoft XPS Document Writer, which is basically MS's version of PDF.
Same goes for all those people who develop plugins for VS.Net. Eventually all those plugins, if remotely popular, will become core features of VS.Net, putting you completely out of business. I still don't understand why MS hasn't built a PDF converter into MS Word. If they did, they would probable wipe out half of acrobats user base.
Can't wait until this comes out for the Wii. Sadly, they don't operate outside the US. I wonder if they could make it work in Canada. Ever since Nintendo came out with the "Nintendo Channel" I've been thinking that a lot of other people need to start streaming video to consoles. At lot harder for people to hack and steal the streams, and a lot easier for people to integrate with their regular entertainment system. I would gladly pay a few bucks for a YouTube channel that works well (it sucks through the Wii internet browser), as well as many other channels. Apple could reach a lot more people if they had a movie trailer channel on consoles that you could watch the trailers on.
Well, maybe we can then conclude that iPod App store users are cheap, and that there isn't any money to be made in that market. Probably better off developing for WiiWare, or making low end computer games like Bejeweled.
There's also the issue of ensuring the software isn't changed "AFTER" it is installed on the machine. MS, Sony, and Nintendo have put a lot of research into not getting pirated games to run on their system. They still haven't done it right. I don't see how the companies making the voting machines could do any better.
That's a modest proposal.
I think a much better idea would be to rewrite Outlook to use a real database as a backend. They already have SQL Server. Why not just store all your mail in a SQL Server database? You wouldn't have problems with maximum file sizes. You would have much better scalability for those with gigabytes of email, and you could have a common interface working with the data in the terms of running SQL queries. I don't know why no other email client like thunderbird wouldn't do the same. Make it easy to access your email store, and you could easily write tons of applications to access your email.
Just like in the book, Never Cry Wolf (Farley Mowat). The wolves can live off mostly mice, because they eat the entire mouse. If you try to live off only the meat on the mouse, you will surely suffer from malnutrition. But, if you puree the whole thing in a blender, you can get all the nutrients you need.
You should charge more. A $2 price tag says to me that your game is too crappy for me to bother paying anything. Put a $10-$15 price tag on the game. Then I will at least think the game is worth playing. Seriously. People are used to paying a lot of money for games. Don't ask for such rediculously low prices. People will assume that your product sucks, and think you are just ripping them off by not giving it for free. However if you charge more, people will think that you believe, and that your product is actually, worth something.
Which is so much worse than the electronic voting places, where they have to have enough computers to keep up with demand. Of course, they never do have enough machines, or they end up breaking down, so you end up having to wait in line for an hour or three. Contrast that with paper systems, where you can set up another ballot station with a piece of cardboard.
Problem with computers is that there is no way of verifying what software is running on them when I walk up to them on election day. And since there are many people (who I wouldn't trust) handling the machines, transporting them from the factory to the warehouse, guarding the warehouse, cleaning the warehouse, transporting to the polling station, setting them up at the polling station. I would be much more inclined to trust pen and paper as I could check the box was empty at the start of the day, check that my vote makes it into the box, and then watch them count at the end of the day. Of course not everybody personally has to watch the process, but you can, and as long as enough interested people do, the system is sufficiently trustworthy. At least way more so than a computer, which I really can't see what it is doing on the inside. Just because it's says I voted for candidate X on the screen, and prints out a receipt, doesn't mean it actually registered the same on the hard drive. And we shouldn't have to call for a recount to have some assurance of getting votes counted properly, recounts are hard to get, unless you can show huge problems with the results.
That depends on where you live. In some places, the internet is a human right. Although I would guess that the law was put in place specifically to prevent the EU from enforcing laws that would cut off people from internet access.
If it wasn't for Disney et al, it would be as easy as dropping your latest DVD purchase into your computer, and clicking the Copy To Computer/copy to ipod/copy to video game system/copy to another DVD button. But since they insist on making it illegal to copy your own discs for your own private use, we have to resort to convoluted methods of making those copies. Think about how easy it is to copy a CD to your library in iTunes. It should be just as easy for a DVD movie, but I don't think that Disney, or anybody else would stand for such a simple to use, widely available method of doing this.
My thoughts exactly. With ion engines looking ready for testing on a moon mission in 2013, there's really no reason to be thinking about these multi year trips to Mars. The ion engines are supposed to get to Mars in 39 days, which is quick enough to not have to wait for the planets to realign again for the trip back.
I shouldn't be able to verify my own vote. If I can verify my vote, I can prove to myself after the fact how I voted, and therefore I can prove it to somebody else. That somebody else might try to coherce me into voting a specific way. I much prefer paper, pen, and hand counted. That way, I can verify the box is empty before everyone puts their vote in. Verify that my vote went into the box, and verify that the box was opened and that all votes in the box were counted correctly. I wouldn't be able to identify my ballot apart from the other ballots in the box, but that would be good, because nobody would be able to coherce me to vote a particular way. Just knowing that my vote was an a box, and that the box was counted correctly is enough for me to know that my vote was counted correctly.
Very true. Sometimes organizations only want to support one database, so whatever database they end up picking (Oracle, MS SQL Server) get's used for absolutely everything, regardless of the fact that a free database (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) would do the job just fine. It comes down to, pay the license for each need, or pay database admins to manage multiple RDBMSs.
Also, does this mean that the bus has to stop at every stop. Often when I'm riding buses in the morning (not in Shanghai mind you), the bus will just skip stops because it's completely filled up and nobody wants to get off, or because there's another bus with the exact same route directly in front of it, and stopping would just waste time. Basically this just seems like it would slow down the whole system, as buses would have to wait at each stop and you would have to make sure that there was enough charging stations at each stop to accommodate the number of buses that may get backed up at any one stop.
They are just theory, but in Canada, but from what I recall, people with math degrees basically have a 100% (or close to it) job placement rate. The stuff you learn is often not directly applicable, but neither is most stuff in computer science. Thing is, there are a lot of jobs that you can do very well in if you are good at math. If you are strong in statistics, then anything where you have to analyze any kind of statistics can be a job opportunity. So everything from the weather, to baseball, to the stock market requires people who are good at statistics.
I always like to think of gambling in terms of a very high risk investment. There's low risk, like your savings account where you may get 3% interest, and it's garaunteed, and you can access your money whenever you want. Then there's GICs, which you get a higher interest rate, garaunteed, but your money is tied up for a certain period of time. Then there's stocks and mutual funds, where the payout is usually higher, but there's a chance you could lose some or all of your money, if things don't perform favorably. Then there's gambling, where you are most likely going to lose money but the potential for earning inordinately large amounts of cash is there, so investing a small amount ($5 a week for lottery tickets) isn't necessarily a completely stupid idea. I mean, sure you will probably lose that $5 every week. But people spend $5 a week on many things that have absolutely no payout, like fancy coffee. So gambling can be ok provided you spend only a little amount of money, simply because if you do win the big prize, you could be set for life, whereas no other investment you could possibly do would result in such a large payout for such a small investment.
That only matters with conventional shufflers. There's no reason one couldn't design a device to reshuffle quickly between each hand. Maybe just have 8 decks, and as the cards are finished with, it just puts them back in a random space in the pile. No shuffling is ever needed because cards aren't placed back in a neat little pile, but instead randomly inserted into the pile as they are fed back into the sorter.
So does the US, it's called Alaska, and it's bigger than Finland. There's also a lot of other areas in the US that are pretty much devoid of people. Like the whole middle of the country. Apart from a few major inland cities, most Americans live along the east and west coasts
Really, because it doesn't seem so. Nintendo has rolled out many updates that didn't even bother removing homebrew. The latest update did, but it was soooo easy to work around that it looked like they wanted it to be worked around.
Yes, but the effect of letting you level up is to make the game too easy for someone who wants to spend hours leveling up. Almost all RPGs fail in this respect. If you aren't good enough, just spend a few hours fighting boars and you are now good enough. I more enjoy games like Zelda where you still go on a quest, but there is no arbitrary way to make yourself twice as powerful as one would normally be at that point in the game. It requires a lot more skill play a game where the strength of your character is limited.
In MarioKart you could use this against the computer. If you did 2 player grand prix (which doesn't exist in Wii), and the one player drove really slowly, the other player could basically lap all computer players while the computer tried to match speeds with the slower of the two human players.
Also, if you're far enough ahead of the pack, even a blue shell or two won't give the others enough time to catch up. I've had it happen a quite a bit while playing against less skilled friends of mine. Also, if I'm not mistaken, MarioKart (wii at least) does give the option to turn off the handicapped weapon selection.