Insurance means nothing. Once your data is lost, it is lost. Whether or not you get money out of them in compensation for the lost data is almost non-important. I would say that anything you lost would be completely non-producable, even if you had all the money in the world. A picture of your family on vacation, can't be reproduced. You can go on another vacation, but it won't be the same vacation. Any document you have typed out, could be typed out again, but it would be different each time. Unless you are talking about lost music files, in which case, you could download them again, but that's kind of the same as having a backup. Any data that's really important isn't going to reproducible.
That is true. Be responsible for your own backups. The cloud should be for convenience only, and you shouldn't expect it to always be available for the rest of your life, and at every minute of every day. That being said, I think that there could be a lot better solutions than most services seem to offer. I think the whole idea of cloud computing is flawed. I think a much better idea would be to tote all you data, and programs, and maybe even OS around on a USB key or USB Hard Drive (depending on your storage needs), and just plug that into any computer you come across. Boots up, completely customized to you. Backups can be stored on your home/work computer when you plug in your drive, and automatically synced up to a network backup if you are really paranoid. If you sync into a computer every day, the most you will lose will be one days worth of work. With the cloud, there are too many points of failure that could make you lose access to you data, and there's only one source of the data, so if you lose that source you are out of luck. With the system I described, even if you left your USB drive at home, you could still work off yesterdays image, and then resync when you brought the drive in the next day. If you had a fast enough internet connection, you could get all your stuff right off the network, if you forgot your drive, and wanted to access your stuff on a completely new computer.
Of course, the second I finished writing that post, I found this picture which from my point of view looks like Fn+F8 is used to switch between the Wacom tablet and the trackpad. I think this would be most necessary anyway, to disable the tablet when you aren't using it, because it's right under where you would be resting your wrists when typing.
Well, a lot of laptops have a simple Fn+F* combination to disable the trackpad completely. I'm sure this laptop would support something like that. If it's not built into the laptop, I'm sure a software work around could be found.
Unless they have a new type of fuel cell, what gives them the ability to patent "using a fuel cell in a camera". A fuel cell is basically a new kind of battery. There should be no need for a separate patent for each type of device somebody decides to put one in.
I would say one reason to jailbreak is so that you don't have to pay for every single app you want to use. The iPhone and accompanying service plans are already pretty expensive. Why would I want to add another $100 of applications? Also, can iPhone apps be moved to a newer iPhone model? I know for sure that if I buy an app for my iPod nano, that I can't move it to a different iPod if I get a new one. I would guess, although I could be wrong, that the iPhone also doesn't allow you transfer apps to new devices. Let's also no forget that it's not just tethering, but a lot of other functionality that has been locked out to developers of the iPhone.
Well, you'd also have to change every other reference to "Fruit" in your entire code base. This is what refactoring tools (or search and replace) are for. I think it adds a bit of help if you happen to be renaming classes. But if you are renaming classes, and you are in a dynamic language, you might have a lot of work anyway, considering you'll have to search through your entire code base for references to that class name, especially, because in your case, the "Fruit" class isn't abstract.
In PHP 5 you can use the class name as the constructor. I do it all the time. It hasn't failed me yet. And I'm just working with the default config from my hosting service. A little off topic, but why would they change that? It doesn't offer any advantages that I could think of.
But teaching to fish, doesn't require being in a classroom. I would go so far as to say that being in a classroom actually hinders the so called "learning to fish". When my parents went to school in the 60's, there used to be a grade 10 highschool diploma for those who wanted to work right out of highschool, or for those who wanted to just go right into an apprenticeship. Making people stay in highschool until they are in grade 12, when they have no desire to do any actual schooling above highschool actually just means they are wasting a couple years of their life when they could be learning actual job skills. Learning to farm, make textiles, make farming tools, and other such skills that are important for the third world aren't learned in a classroom. You can teach a child all the math and language skills they are going to need by the 8th grade.
I'm not so sure about that. 150 years ago, most of our first world countries operated the same way. As countries become more advanced, the kids have more of a reason and a need to be in school. It would be nice for every kid in these countries to have a high school level education, but what could they do with it? The same kind of thing happens in first world countries now. Too many people with university degrees in things like psychology and history, and no jobs that require the skills this education brings.
You could still do it anonymously. And even without a computer network. Have an ID written onto every card. The value is also on the card. The bus scans the card, and if there are sufficient funds on the card, you can ride the bus. When the bus is done for the day, it returns to the garage, and dumps the stored data onto the system, which will scan for inconsistencies on the cards. Since you should only be able to add value with valid machines, and money should only be taken off by the bus, these two values could easily be checked by a computer system to ensure they balance out. If invalid information is found on a card (the balance doesn't equal the deposits minus the debits), then the card could be flagged. Options for flagged cards include just disabling it so it isn't accepted the next time the person tries to board the bus, or even letting the person on, and alerting transit cops so, if they are in the vicinity, can pick the guy up at the next stop. I think it would even be appropriate for there to be a camera where you enter the bus, so that a picture could be taken of those using invalid cards. You'd probably want the system to have a secret key so that it could at least sign the information on the card, so that people couldn't make up fake account numbers and store those on the card.
What I want to know is how a system like this is even possible. Why should the value available on a smart card actually be something that can be changed by the person holding the card. Shouldn't the card just have an ID, and that ID is tied to an account, which is tied to a person. Maybe put the amount on the card, so the bus doesn't have to call home every time someone steps on a bus, but at least keep all transactions in a database so they can check for fraud after the fact. It seems like the way they have it set up, would be the equivalent of having your bank account balance completely controllable by modifying the information on your bank card. Even retail stores have this figured out so that their gift cards only hold a number, and the actual value on the card is stored in some computer database.
I never quite understood how "the pill" got so popular to begin with. Messing with your hormones is not a good idea. When so many other good methods exist, it's a miracle that women actually want to take medication, and mess with their bodies, to prevent having kids.
Well, a chunk of steel is made of atoms, and when you start looking at the atoms, even a chunk of steel is mostly empty space. There's probably something to do with the polarity (I made that up) that keeps the air molecules from leaking through the membrane, kind of like how water and oil repel eachother.
Not all Walmarts pay minimum wage, I believe that depends on local management. I also know a lot of local shops that only pay minimum wage. Some actually pay less. You can get around paying minimum wage if you pay employees under the table. Employees like it because they don't pay taxes. Businesses like it because they don't pay as much for wages. There's no way a giant like walmart would be able to pull that off for very long. Somebody would notice. Nobody is watching the small businessnes. Ever walk into a small, non chain corner store, and wonder why a lot of the transactions don't go through the cash register? Not only that, but small locally owned shops also have lots of other problems like inflexible working hours because there's no extra employees to take up the slack. At least at Walmart there's so many employees, that if somebody wants to take a day off, it doesn't throw the whole business off. With small local shops it's hard to give employees days off because you only have 2-3 employees.
But up until very recently, and still today for the most part, there's been low-skilled jobs. Do you really think that stocking shelves at walmart or working at McDonanld's (I've worked there), requires any more skill then picking grain in the field? We just recently, within the last century or so figured out how to automate things with machines. We're still learning, and still haven't gotten most stuff mechanized. There are still plenty of low skill jobs out there. However, there may come a time, when all the low skilled jobs are being done by machines. Despite people going to school longer, I don't think that a lot of people are becoming more skilled then they used to, or if they are more skilled, they certainly aren't using it. There's still a lot of people doing jobs that don't require anything more than a grade 8 education. Even less so now that they have computers to help them along in their jobs. With the introduction of self checkout in stores, to and the invention of the ATM, I see a point, maybe not soon, but possibly in the next 100 years, where there will be very few unskilled jobs.
But what happens to all the people who are only good for tedious, mind-numbing, repetitive work? If you get robots/computers doing all the unskilled jobs, what happens to the people who used to work at these jobs? You already see some of the effects. There's a lot of banks out there now that don't even have locations and tellers. Just take your money of the the ATM, and do all the other banking online. Money gets automatically deposited from your paycheck, or can be automatically transferred from other accounts.
I went to the bank the other day, and wanted to transfer money from one bank account to the other (between different banks), since I was picking up change for laundry, and the ATMs didn't give change (although some do), I asked the teller if I could transfer money from my other bank machine, she said it wasn't possible. So after I was done getting change, I walked over to the ATM, and withdrew from one account, and then put my other card in, and did a deposit. It's getting so the tellers are even less capable then the machines.
I wouldn't even call it project and maintenance. I would just call it what it is, skilled vs. unskilled. There's so many different jobs that get lumped into IT, that you can't really say how things are going one way or the other, and how it affects individuals working in "IT". IT includes everybody from the people who help out sys admins by re-imagining corporate laptops, and ISP call center people who just read from scripts, who don't even know what DNS is, all the way up to people writing file systems, and working on OS kernels, video games, and designing next generation databases. I don't think those of use doing skilled IT labour have to worry about.
I've almost always used the mouse on the left hand. Probably because of what you say. When we got our first computer, we didn't have a lot of room for the keyboard and the mouse. If you put the mouse on the right, the keyboard would have to be way off centre. So we put it on the left. So I got used to using it with my left hand, and everywhere else had it set up on the right, so I got used to both. I'm ambidextrous with mice/trackballs, but that's about as far as it goes. Right now, at work, my trackball is on the right, because it's a thumb-ball style, which can only be used on the right. But at home I have a logitech marble mouse which uses the fingers, and it's on the left.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance means nothing. Once your data is lost, it is lost. Whether or not you get money out of them in compensation for the lost data is almost non-important. I would say that anything you lost would be completely non-producable, even if you had all the money in the world. A picture of your family on vacation, can't be reproduced. You can go on another vacation, but it won't be the same vacation. Any document you have typed out, could be typed out again, but it would be different each time. Unless you are talking about lost music files, in which case, you could download them again, but that's kind of the same as having a backup. Any data that's really important isn't going to reproducible.
That is true. Be responsible for your own backups. The cloud should be for convenience only, and you shouldn't expect it to always be available for the rest of your life, and at every minute of every day. That being said, I think that there could be a lot better solutions than most services seem to offer. I think the whole idea of cloud computing is flawed. I think a much better idea would be to tote all you data, and programs, and maybe even OS around on a USB key or USB Hard Drive (depending on your storage needs), and just plug that into any computer you come across. Boots up, completely customized to you. Backups can be stored on your home/work computer when you plug in your drive, and automatically synced up to a network backup if you are really paranoid. If you sync into a computer every day, the most you will lose will be one days worth of work. With the cloud, there are too many points of failure that could make you lose access to you data, and there's only one source of the data, so if you lose that source you are out of luck. With the system I described, even if you left your USB drive at home, you could still work off yesterdays image, and then resync when you brought the drive in the next day. If you had a fast enough internet connection, you could get all your stuff right off the network, if you forgot your drive, and wanted to access your stuff on a completely new computer.
Of course, the second I finished writing that post, I found this picture which from my point of view looks like Fn+F8 is used to switch between the Wacom tablet and the trackpad. I think this would be most necessary anyway, to disable the tablet when you aren't using it, because it's right under where you would be resting your wrists when typing.
Well, a lot of laptops have a simple Fn+F* combination to disable the trackpad completely. I'm sure this laptop would support something like that. If it's not built into the laptop, I'm sure a software work around could be found.
Unless they have a new type of fuel cell, what gives them the ability to patent "using a fuel cell in a camera". A fuel cell is basically a new kind of battery. There should be no need for a separate patent for each type of device somebody decides to put one in.
I would say one reason to jailbreak is so that you don't have to pay for every single app you want to use. The iPhone and accompanying service plans are already pretty expensive. Why would I want to add another $100 of applications? Also, can iPhone apps be moved to a newer iPhone model? I know for sure that if I buy an app for my iPod nano, that I can't move it to a different iPod if I get a new one. I would guess, although I could be wrong, that the iPhone also doesn't allow you transfer apps to new devices. Let's also no forget that it's not just tethering, but a lot of other functionality that has been locked out to developers of the iPhone.
Well, you'd also have to change every other reference to "Fruit" in your entire code base. This is what refactoring tools (or search and replace) are for. I think it adds a bit of help if you happen to be renaming classes. But if you are renaming classes, and you are in a dynamic language, you might have a lot of work anyway, considering you'll have to search through your entire code base for references to that class name, especially, because in your case, the "Fruit" class isn't abstract.
In PHP 5 you can use the class name as the constructor. I do it all the time. It hasn't failed me yet. And I'm just working with the default config from my hosting service. A little off topic, but why would they change that? It doesn't offer any advantages that I could think of.
But teaching to fish, doesn't require being in a classroom. I would go so far as to say that being in a classroom actually hinders the so called "learning to fish". When my parents went to school in the 60's, there used to be a grade 10 highschool diploma for those who wanted to work right out of highschool, or for those who wanted to just go right into an apprenticeship. Making people stay in highschool until they are in grade 12, when they have no desire to do any actual schooling above highschool actually just means they are wasting a couple years of their life when they could be learning actual job skills. Learning to farm, make textiles, make farming tools, and other such skills that are important for the third world aren't learned in a classroom. You can teach a child all the math and language skills they are going to need by the 8th grade.
I'm not so sure about that. 150 years ago, most of our first world countries operated the same way. As countries become more advanced, the kids have more of a reason and a need to be in school. It would be nice for every kid in these countries to have a high school level education, but what could they do with it? The same kind of thing happens in first world countries now. Too many people with university degrees in things like psychology and history, and no jobs that require the skills this education brings.
You could still do it anonymously. And even without a computer network. Have an ID written onto every card. The value is also on the card. The bus scans the card, and if there are sufficient funds on the card, you can ride the bus. When the bus is done for the day, it returns to the garage, and dumps the stored data onto the system, which will scan for inconsistencies on the cards. Since you should only be able to add value with valid machines, and money should only be taken off by the bus, these two values could easily be checked by a computer system to ensure they balance out. If invalid information is found on a card (the balance doesn't equal the deposits minus the debits), then the card could be flagged. Options for flagged cards include just disabling it so it isn't accepted the next time the person tries to board the bus, or even letting the person on, and alerting transit cops so, if they are in the vicinity, can pick the guy up at the next stop. I think it would even be appropriate for there to be a camera where you enter the bus, so that a picture could be taken of those using invalid cards. You'd probably want the system to have a secret key so that it could at least sign the information on the card, so that people couldn't make up fake account numbers and store those on the card.
What I want to know is how a system like this is even possible. Why should the value available on a smart card actually be something that can be changed by the person holding the card. Shouldn't the card just have an ID, and that ID is tied to an account, which is tied to a person. Maybe put the amount on the card, so the bus doesn't have to call home every time someone steps on a bus, but at least keep all transactions in a database so they can check for fraud after the fact. It seems like the way they have it set up, would be the equivalent of having your bank account balance completely controllable by modifying the information on your bank card. Even retail stores have this figured out so that their gift cards only hold a number, and the actual value on the card is stored in some computer database.
Didn't they make a movie about that? I think it was called 28 Weeks Later. Or maybe it was 28 Days Later. Maybe it was I Am Legend. Oh, now I remember, it was Quarantine.
Seriously, what is with all the movies about disease that turn people into raging demons?
How you you call something that messes with the completely natural cycle of the body to be non-invasive?
I never quite understood how "the pill" got so popular to begin with. Messing with your hormones is not a good idea. When so many other good methods exist, it's a miracle that women actually want to take medication, and mess with their bodies, to prevent having kids.
Well, a chunk of steel is made of atoms, and when you start looking at the atoms, even a chunk of steel is mostly empty space. There's probably something to do with the polarity (I made that up) that keeps the air molecules from leaking through the membrane, kind of like how water and oil repel eachother.
Meh, at least this is more believable then using sticky tape to repair the steering wheel on a pirate ship.
Not all Walmarts pay minimum wage, I believe that depends on local management. I also know a lot of local shops that only pay minimum wage. Some actually pay less. You can get around paying minimum wage if you pay employees under the table. Employees like it because they don't pay taxes. Businesses like it because they don't pay as much for wages. There's no way a giant like walmart would be able to pull that off for very long. Somebody would notice. Nobody is watching the small businessnes. Ever walk into a small, non chain corner store, and wonder why a lot of the transactions don't go through the cash register? Not only that, but small locally owned shops also have lots of other problems like inflexible working hours because there's no extra employees to take up the slack. At least at Walmart there's so many employees, that if somebody wants to take a day off, it doesn't throw the whole business off. With small local shops it's hard to give employees days off because you only have 2-3 employees.
But up until very recently, and still today for the most part, there's been low-skilled jobs. Do you really think that stocking shelves at walmart or working at McDonanld's (I've worked there), requires any more skill then picking grain in the field? We just recently, within the last century or so figured out how to automate things with machines. We're still learning, and still haven't gotten most stuff mechanized. There are still plenty of low skill jobs out there. However, there may come a time, when all the low skilled jobs are being done by machines. Despite people going to school longer, I don't think that a lot of people are becoming more skilled then they used to, or if they are more skilled, they certainly aren't using it. There's still a lot of people doing jobs that don't require anything more than a grade 8 education. Even less so now that they have computers to help them along in their jobs. With the introduction of self checkout in stores, to and the invention of the ATM, I see a point, maybe not soon, but possibly in the next 100 years, where there will be very few unskilled jobs.
Sure they lost their jobs. That happens all the time. The real question is how hard it was for them to find another job.
But what happens to all the people who are only good for tedious, mind-numbing, repetitive work? If you get robots/computers doing all the unskilled jobs, what happens to the people who used to work at these jobs? You already see some of the effects. There's a lot of banks out there now that don't even have locations and tellers. Just take your money of the the ATM, and do all the other banking online. Money gets automatically deposited from your paycheck, or can be automatically transferred from other accounts.
I went to the bank the other day, and wanted to transfer money from one bank account to the other (between different banks), since I was picking up change for laundry, and the ATMs didn't give change (although some do), I asked the teller if I could transfer money from my other bank machine, she said it wasn't possible. So after I was done getting change, I walked over to the ATM, and withdrew from one account, and then put my other card in, and did a deposit. It's getting so the tellers are even less capable then the machines.
I wouldn't even call it project and maintenance. I would just call it what it is, skilled vs. unskilled. There's so many different jobs that get lumped into IT, that you can't really say how things are going one way or the other, and how it affects individuals working in "IT". IT includes everybody from the people who help out sys admins by re-imagining corporate laptops, and ISP call center people who just read from scripts, who don't even know what DNS is, all the way up to people writing file systems, and working on OS kernels, video games, and designing next generation databases. I don't think those of use doing skilled IT labour have to worry about.
I've almost always used the mouse on the left hand. Probably because of what you say. When we got our first computer, we didn't have a lot of room for the keyboard and the mouse. If you put the mouse on the right, the keyboard would have to be way off centre. So we put it on the left. So I got used to using it with my left hand, and everywhere else had it set up on the right, so I got used to both. I'm ambidextrous with mice/trackballs, but that's about as far as it goes. Right now, at work, my trackball is on the right, because it's a thumb-ball style, which can only be used on the right. But at home I have a logitech marble mouse which uses the fingers, and it's on the left.
Well, you could just use a trackball where you use the fingers to control the ball. That's what I find most useful.
But the problem is that COBOL is different enough to most modern programming languages that you might as well be looking at Prolog, or WhiteSpace.