I think the major reason that this wouldn't work is because some people don't drive at all, so they defintely shouldn't pay insurance. Also, some people's cars are worth more than others, so their insurance would have to be more. You could have insurance cost PRICE_OF_CAR * X_PERCENT and that might work out pretty well. However, you still have to take into account that some cars, while cheap, are expensive to repair, and other cars, like big dodge 2500's are expensive, yet less likely to undergo serious damage becaus they have real bumpers.
My thoughts exactly. How long until the next console doesn't even have a disk drive. All games are downloaded to the console and tied to your hardware. You can still buy games in the store, but they come on a proprietary SD-Like (although not SD) that has built in hard ware so that once the card is read by 1 console, the ID of that console is saved, and it will only ever output the data for that console. Oh, and the console innards are encased in black epoxy, so good luck trying to use a modchip or anything else to modify the hardware. It may not happen in the next generation, but most likely by the year 2030. Seems like a long way off, but it's in my lifetime.
Personally I don't experience this problem. My computer with windows XP at home has bee running for 3 years without being reinstalled once. And that one has gone through a complete hardware swap (Motherboard + CPU + RAM). My Work computer has been running for 3 years on windows XP with no problems. Maybe the trick is to not install every program that you see. I only install stuff that I really really need. Probably about 20 programs. I think it would be quite a pain to go reinstalling everything every year. I mean, it takes a while to set up things like SQL Server, Visual Studio, and all the other things that are more complicated than WinZip. Plus there's reconfiguring all the stupid settings like hiding file extensions. It probably takes about 2 months of using a computer before I actually have everything set up the way I like it. I would hate to start over from scratch every year.
Why not just send them off with 3 or 4 terabyte hard drives filled with movies. Sure it would use a little bit of power to power screen and stuff to show the movie, but I'd opt for having an extra solar panel over having absolutely nothing for these guys to do for 105 days.
Good point. However no everybody is in a good enough financial position to be able to risk getting fired. Sure it would probably be classified as wrongful dismissal, but then, the employee would have an expensive legal battle ahead of them to try and prove it. The employee shouldn't have to keep in check with all the laws either. How is the employee supposed to know it's actually illegal. Sure it sounds devious, but a lot of stuff in the current business world is devious, yet not illegal. The employee has to have some assurance that they won't be arrested because they did something their employer told them to do was illegal. The employee should be able to assume that the employer isn't telling them to do illegal things. Do you charge the guy who drives the truck when illegal dumping is done, or do you fine the company who told him to do it? Hard decision in some cases, but you can't expect the employee to go trying to identify the contents of the unmarked barrels and try to figure out if dumping the stuff is legal.
Re:You missed the point of your own story
on
Hello World!
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· Score: 2, Informative
Good point. Also, how do you really get somebody interested in programming in this day and age? I think it would be very hard to impress a kid with a "Hello World" console program with the current state of technology. I mean, when QBasic Gorillas was right up there with the most advanced games, and you could learn how to modify it yourself in a week, then you got interested really fast, because you realized that programming wasn't some kind of magic. But compare that to now, where it would take years of learning to get anything close to a current program, and it could be a difficult thing to get someone interested in the first place.
Re:Users can't tell the difference
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
Since most modern cars don't have carburetors, and instead have fuel injectors, I don't think most people should care about what it does.
Using SFTP as opposed to FTP won't help if they brute forced your password. While it is possible to read an FTP password as it travels over the wire, most hackers won't go to these lenghts to break into a shared hosting account. If they brute force your password, SFTP won't help you at all.
And that's pretty much what they do anyway. Manufacturers pay for prime shelf space. So if you walk into your local Best Buy, and you see only Sony TVs prominently displayed on the end of the aisle, while all the LGs are placed near the middle of the aisle, then you know Sony paid for that. If you go to the Best Buy website, and see a big Sony TV on the front page, then Sony paid for that. If you get a flyer in the mail, and there's a Sony TV on the front, then Sony paid for that. I know a guy who worked at Best Buy, and there was a program from HP, where if you went to their website, read their marketing material, and learned about their products, you could take a test to get points towards getting a free PDA or Laptop or whatever. So you know more about their stuff, so you are able to sell it easier. I don't doubt that if we don't already have it, there's stores that push unsuspecting consumers to one brand or another based on who is paying to have their product pushed.
I greatly agree with you, and would like to add, how to properly use IDEs and debuggers. But that's where the interesting part is. Computer Science isn't really about teaching you how to be a programmer in the real world. It's about teaching you about how computers do things. You could probably teach an entire CS curriculum without ever learning a real language. Just do everything in pseudo code. You'd probably get a much better understanding of the core concepts if you spent more time working thinking about the problem, and less time trying to appease the compiler. Even if you do all your undergrad only using C++, you will still know very little about the use of C++ in the real world, and how to apply it to a project with 1 million lines of code. I took software engineering in university, and it had a much more real world approach to programming. It still didn't prepare me quite as well for the real world as I would have liked, but it did a much better job than from what I saw of those taking computer science. The two main things that helped were, Co-op (paid internship), which helped me get some real on the job experience. 4 semesters of real work experience puts you miles ahead of anybody who didn't do this. A final project which consisted of working on a project for a real world customer (non-paid, but we got to keep the source), which lasted an entire calendar year. So, my big advice is. If your school offers some kind of internship or co-op experience, take full advantage of it. Even if it costs a little extra, or takes longer to finish, you definitely won't regret it in the end.
It exists to fix the bugs that were there when it was released. So, not only does Windows XP not depreciate as time goes on, it actually gains quality and functionality as patches are released.
Which brings up my biggest pet peeves about starcraft. You can only have groups of 8 (12?) units. What I really liked about C&C is that you could select 100 units, and put them all in 1 group, so you could move them across the map easily. Then, you could split those 100 units into other groups, of whatever number you wanted when attacking the enemy.
Even if I had said best, I could have been correct, in my own opinion. Best is subjective. Now most popular, Starcraft probably wins hands down. But that is definitely not what I was trying to say.
Just because you type some stuff into some website, doesn't mean the web site has to give you a nice easy automated way of getting all that data back out again. Take a look at slashdot Just from browsing my profile, I can only see my comments until some time back in November 2008. Yet I've been posting for years. If you want a copy of any information that you post on facebook, keep a copy on your own computer. Facebook provides a free service, and if they don't think there's any value in you being able to take that data out, then that's their perogative. All social networking sites thrive on the same concept. Create non-standard restrictive technologies for connection groups of people, so that the people can't just leave, lest they be disconnected from their social group. Personally, I liked it better when it was all just email and geocities pages. At least when you didn't like Geocities anymore, you could take your html and post it on tripod. Social networking was a page of links to all your friends sites. Sure we had to do a little more work ourselves, but we were a lot more in control of our own data.
Actually, I do this with voice podcasts. It works great. However, with music, it's often the case that a lot of the music is only on the left or right channel, and therefore I miss out on a lot of the music. If only my iPod had a balance setting.
The people who eat vegetables and soup, and go to the gym 3 times a week are doing it wrong. Your body will think it is starving, and it probably will be. So it will switch to a mode to store every possible ounce of fat. Although, I have to agree with that last part. Some people think that going out for a 1/2 hour stroll around the neighbourhood is going to solve all their problems. While it does help more than doing nothing at all, it won't help that much. If you aren't pushing yourself, and aren't getting your heart rate and breathing up, then you shouldn't expect any results. Also, I've seen a lot of people try for a month or 2 and then give up because it's not working. It takes long term commitment.
C&C has always been my favourite RTS series. It has a nice balance of not being overly complicated, so that you can focus on the actually strategy part, without being overly involved with micromanaging things like upgrading buildings and researching new technologies. I am looking forward to playing this one.
Processed fast foods are already more expensive then healthy whole foods. Go to McD's and it costs $7 for a burger, fries and a drink. Now go down to the grocery store, and spend the same amount on food, and you could make a healthy dinner for a family of 4. Sure it would probable take longer to prepare, but it's definitely cheaper to eat when you prepare your own healthy food. You can get 3 lbs. of carrots for $2. Those 1 lbs. hungry man premade dinners cost a lot more than making your own dinner.
I agree, that obesity is a big problem in our society. However, I don't think it's something that we can solve. Unless you give out food rations to each person, and have forced exercise, there isn't much you can do, short of educating them about the problems it will cause with their health. If somebody sees no problem with the way they are, or lacks the willpower to change their ways, then there isn't much you can do to help them.
I would wonder if some people already have these organisms as part of their bacteria in their body. If these organisms that convert fat to CO2 were already present in your digestive system, you could just get them to do the work for you.
Actually not a bad idea. A lot of time I would like to wear my iPod while doing house work, but I don't because I can't hear the baby cry. If I had an iPod that could recognize when the baby was crying, and play it over the headphones in place of my music, so that I knew the baby was crying, then I would really appreciate this feature. Same goes for somebody calling out my name. Even if there was a 1 second delay, it would be awesome.
Personally I agree with you. The ATM shouldn't be running any kind of consumer level OS. At the very least they should be using a stripped down version of Linux, if not a completely customized system. These machines only need to run 1 application. I don't see any reason why they should run a commodity OS. Not to say this would be guaranteed cut down on vulnerabilities, but if you reduce the amount of code down to manageable levels, then you won't have so many problems.
I'm not the OP, but I'm guess "expsensive" is relative to the $2/hour people who are going to support the system. In the previous sentence, he said "hire the cheapest people they can to implement ill-defined code", so I'm guessing those are the $10/hour programmers.
Great point. I may write a book, and it may have some very non obvious and novel story lines, but the book isn't patentable. Books have copyright protection. The way patent law was written it specifically says you can't patent an algorithm, no matter now original it may be.
You say that cars last 10 years or more, but that software advanced much more slowly. I would have to disagree. I mean, many of us are still using Windows XP, and saying you can pry it from my cold dead hands. Also, software doesn't lose any functionality as time goes on. It doesn't break down. Cars, due to their mechanical nature only last 200,000-500,000 km, and then the cost to maintain becomes more than the cost to buy a newer one, so you are stuck getting a new car. You could keep using windows XP for the next 70 years (assuming you could find compatible hardware), and it wouldn't get any worse. Personally, I think if the government is mandating that you use "technology X" for whatever reason, that they remove any patent encumberments from using "technology x". I mean, Toyota is in no way required to license their patents. If they didn't, could they possibly be the only car company that following government regulations?
I really have to agree. There is no real skill in a game if a complete noob can pick up someone else's character and do pretty well. Compare that with an RTS or an RPG, where using somebody else's character doesn't really help you at all. Character is just the way you look on the screen, and has no bearing on how high you can jump, or how accurately you can shoot. I think games like this are much better for online play, because when you win, you know you are actually better than the other guy. Whereas, with a game that has leveling, you have only really proved that you spent more time playing the game and therefore your character is more powerful.
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I think the major reason that this wouldn't work is because some people don't drive at all, so they defintely shouldn't pay insurance. Also, some people's cars are worth more than others, so their insurance would have to be more. You could have insurance cost PRICE_OF_CAR * X_PERCENT and that might work out pretty well. However, you still have to take into account that some cars, while cheap, are expensive to repair, and other cars, like big dodge 2500's are expensive, yet less likely to undergo serious damage becaus they have real bumpers.
My thoughts exactly. How long until the next console doesn't even have a disk drive. All games are downloaded to the console and tied to your hardware. You can still buy games in the store, but they come on a proprietary SD-Like (although not SD) that has built in hard ware so that once the card is read by 1 console, the ID of that console is saved, and it will only ever output the data for that console. Oh, and the console innards are encased in black epoxy, so good luck trying to use a modchip or anything else to modify the hardware. It may not happen in the next generation, but most likely by the year 2030. Seems like a long way off, but it's in my lifetime.
Personally I don't experience this problem. My computer with windows XP at home has bee running for 3 years without being reinstalled once. And that one has gone through a complete hardware swap (Motherboard + CPU + RAM). My Work computer has been running for 3 years on windows XP with no problems. Maybe the trick is to not install every program that you see. I only install stuff that I really really need. Probably about 20 programs. I think it would be quite a pain to go reinstalling everything every year. I mean, it takes a while to set up things like SQL Server, Visual Studio, and all the other things that are more complicated than WinZip. Plus there's reconfiguring all the stupid settings like hiding file extensions. It probably takes about 2 months of using a computer before I actually have everything set up the way I like it. I would hate to start over from scratch every year.
Why not just send them off with 3 or 4 terabyte hard drives filled with movies. Sure it would use a little bit of power to power screen and stuff to show the movie, but I'd opt for having an extra solar panel over having absolutely nothing for these guys to do for 105 days.
Good point. However no everybody is in a good enough financial position to be able to risk getting fired. Sure it would probably be classified as wrongful dismissal, but then, the employee would have an expensive legal battle ahead of them to try and prove it. The employee shouldn't have to keep in check with all the laws either. How is the employee supposed to know it's actually illegal. Sure it sounds devious, but a lot of stuff in the current business world is devious, yet not illegal. The employee has to have some assurance that they won't be arrested because they did something their employer told them to do was illegal. The employee should be able to assume that the employer isn't telling them to do illegal things. Do you charge the guy who drives the truck when illegal dumping is done, or do you fine the company who told him to do it? Hard decision in some cases, but you can't expect the employee to go trying to identify the contents of the unmarked barrels and try to figure out if dumping the stuff is legal.
Good point. Also, how do you really get somebody interested in programming in this day and age? I think it would be very hard to impress a kid with a "Hello World" console program with the current state of technology. I mean, when QBasic Gorillas was right up there with the most advanced games, and you could learn how to modify it yourself in a week, then you got interested really fast, because you realized that programming wasn't some kind of magic. But compare that to now, where it would take years of learning to get anything close to a current program, and it could be a difficult thing to get someone interested in the first place.
Since most modern cars don't have carburetors, and instead have fuel injectors, I don't think most people should care about what it does.
Using SFTP as opposed to FTP won't help if they brute forced your password. While it is possible to read an FTP password as it travels over the wire, most hackers won't go to these lenghts to break into a shared hosting account. If they brute force your password, SFTP won't help you at all.
And that's pretty much what they do anyway. Manufacturers pay for prime shelf space. So if you walk into your local Best Buy, and you see only Sony TVs prominently displayed on the end of the aisle, while all the LGs are placed near the middle of the aisle, then you know Sony paid for that. If you go to the Best Buy website, and see a big Sony TV on the front page, then Sony paid for that. If you get a flyer in the mail, and there's a Sony TV on the front, then Sony paid for that. I know a guy who worked at Best Buy, and there was a program from HP, where if you went to their website, read their marketing material, and learned about their products, you could take a test to get points towards getting a free PDA or Laptop or whatever. So you know more about their stuff, so you are able to sell it easier. I don't doubt that if we don't already have it, there's stores that push unsuspecting consumers to one brand or another based on who is paying to have their product pushed.
I greatly agree with you, and would like to add, how to properly use IDEs and debuggers. But that's where the interesting part is. Computer Science isn't really about teaching you how to be a programmer in the real world. It's about teaching you about how computers do things. You could probably teach an entire CS curriculum without ever learning a real language. Just do everything in pseudo code. You'd probably get a much better understanding of the core concepts if you spent more time working thinking about the problem, and less time trying to appease the compiler. Even if you do all your undergrad only using C++, you will still know very little about the use of C++ in the real world, and how to apply it to a project with 1 million lines of code. I took software engineering in university, and it had a much more real world approach to programming. It still didn't prepare me quite as well for the real world as I would have liked, but it did a much better job than from what I saw of those taking computer science. The two main things that helped were, Co-op (paid internship), which helped me get some real on the job experience. 4 semesters of real work experience puts you miles ahead of anybody who didn't do this. A final project which consisted of working on a project for a real world customer (non-paid, but we got to keep the source), which lasted an entire calendar year. So, my big advice is. If your school offers some kind of internship or co-op experience, take full advantage of it. Even if it costs a little extra, or takes longer to finish, you definitely won't regret it in the end.
It exists to fix the bugs that were there when it was released. So, not only does Windows XP not depreciate as time goes on, it actually gains quality and functionality as patches are released.
Which brings up my biggest pet peeves about starcraft. You can only have groups of 8 (12?) units. What I really liked about C&C is that you could select 100 units, and put them all in 1 group, so you could move them across the map easily. Then, you could split those 100 units into other groups, of whatever number you wanted when attacking the enemy.
Even if I had said best, I could have been correct, in my own opinion. Best is subjective. Now most popular, Starcraft probably wins hands down. But that is definitely not what I was trying to say.
Just because you type some stuff into some website, doesn't mean the web site has to give you a nice easy automated way of getting all that data back out again. Take a look at slashdot Just from browsing my profile, I can only see my comments until some time back in November 2008. Yet I've been posting for years. If you want a copy of any information that you post on facebook, keep a copy on your own computer. Facebook provides a free service, and if they don't think there's any value in you being able to take that data out, then that's their perogative. All social networking sites thrive on the same concept. Create non-standard restrictive technologies for connection groups of people, so that the people can't just leave, lest they be disconnected from their social group. Personally, I liked it better when it was all just email and geocities pages. At least when you didn't like Geocities anymore, you could take your html and post it on tripod. Social networking was a page of links to all your friends sites. Sure we had to do a little more work ourselves, but we were a lot more in control of our own data.
Actually, I do this with voice podcasts. It works great. However, with music, it's often the case that a lot of the music is only on the left or right channel, and therefore I miss out on a lot of the music. If only my iPod had a balance setting.
The people who eat vegetables and soup, and go to the gym 3 times a week are doing it wrong. Your body will think it is starving, and it probably will be. So it will switch to a mode to store every possible ounce of fat. Although, I have to agree with that last part. Some people think that going out for a 1/2 hour stroll around the neighbourhood is going to solve all their problems. While it does help more than doing nothing at all, it won't help that much. If you aren't pushing yourself, and aren't getting your heart rate and breathing up, then you shouldn't expect any results. Also, I've seen a lot of people try for a month or 2 and then give up because it's not working. It takes long term commitment.
C&C has always been my favourite RTS series. It has a nice balance of not being overly complicated, so that you can focus on the actually strategy part, without being overly involved with micromanaging things like upgrading buildings and researching new technologies. I am looking forward to playing this one.
Processed fast foods are already more expensive then healthy whole foods. Go to McD's and it costs $7 for a burger, fries and a drink. Now go down to the grocery store, and spend the same amount on food, and you could make a healthy dinner for a family of 4. Sure it would probable take longer to prepare, but it's definitely cheaper to eat when you prepare your own healthy food. You can get 3 lbs. of carrots for $2. Those 1 lbs. hungry man premade dinners cost a lot more than making your own dinner. I agree, that obesity is a big problem in our society. However, I don't think it's something that we can solve. Unless you give out food rations to each person, and have forced exercise, there isn't much you can do, short of educating them about the problems it will cause with their health. If somebody sees no problem with the way they are, or lacks the willpower to change their ways, then there isn't much you can do to help them.
I would wonder if some people already have these organisms as part of their bacteria in their body. If these organisms that convert fat to CO2 were already present in your digestive system, you could just get them to do the work for you.
Actually not a bad idea. A lot of time I would like to wear my iPod while doing house work, but I don't because I can't hear the baby cry. If I had an iPod that could recognize when the baby was crying, and play it over the headphones in place of my music, so that I knew the baby was crying, then I would really appreciate this feature. Same goes for somebody calling out my name. Even if there was a 1 second delay, it would be awesome.
Personally I agree with you. The ATM shouldn't be running any kind of consumer level OS. At the very least they should be using a stripped down version of Linux, if not a completely customized system. These machines only need to run 1 application. I don't see any reason why they should run a commodity OS. Not to say this would be guaranteed cut down on vulnerabilities, but if you reduce the amount of code down to manageable levels, then you won't have so many problems.
I'm not the OP, but I'm guess "expsensive" is relative to the $2/hour people who are going to support the system. In the previous sentence, he said "hire the cheapest people they can to implement ill-defined code", so I'm guessing those are the $10/hour programmers.
Great point. I may write a book, and it may have some very non obvious and novel story lines, but the book isn't patentable. Books have copyright protection. The way patent law was written it specifically says you can't patent an algorithm, no matter now original it may be.
You say that cars last 10 years or more, but that software advanced much more slowly. I would have to disagree. I mean, many of us are still using Windows XP, and saying you can pry it from my cold dead hands. Also, software doesn't lose any functionality as time goes on. It doesn't break down. Cars, due to their mechanical nature only last 200,000-500,000 km, and then the cost to maintain becomes more than the cost to buy a newer one, so you are stuck getting a new car. You could keep using windows XP for the next 70 years (assuming you could find compatible hardware), and it wouldn't get any worse. Personally, I think if the government is mandating that you use "technology X" for whatever reason, that they remove any patent encumberments from using "technology x". I mean, Toyota is in no way required to license their patents. If they didn't, could they possibly be the only car company that following government regulations?
I really have to agree. There is no real skill in a game if a complete noob can pick up someone else's character and do pretty well. Compare that with an RTS or an RPG, where using somebody else's character doesn't really help you at all. Character is just the way you look on the screen, and has no bearing on how high you can jump, or how accurately you can shoot. I think games like this are much better for online play, because when you win, you know you are actually better than the other guy. Whereas, with a game that has leveling, you have only really proved that you spent more time playing the game and therefore your character is more powerful.