When I was in university doing a robotics class, I actually simulated a the robot we were using for our assignments in software. We only had a limited amount of time in the lab working with the robots, so I made a crude model of the robot from the lab using OpenGL, in order to test that the inputs we gave to the robot would provide the right behaviour by the robot. It was a basic robotic arm similar to this one. We had to take a picture and get the robot to pick up a block in the picture by analyzing the picture, figuring out where it was, and moving the arm there. The robot had to be controlled by telling it how much to move each individual motor. I found the project very interesting for something that seems relatively simple from an outside perspective.
I've already set up the router/modem that my provider gave me like this. Instead of giving me a dumb cable modem, they gave me a modem/wireless router combo unit. The first thing I did was reconfigure the box to act as dumb bridge and used my own wireless router for the boxes in my house to connect to. The router they gave me didn't have sufficient capabilities to set up the QOS properly for my VOIP provider.
You can definitely make a big dent in your net calories by using exercise, and you don't have to be a professional athlete to do it. Assuming a 2000 calorie diet, that's 14,000 calories a week. I've been working out on a stationary bike this winter, and the training tools say that I burn about 600 calories an hour. Let's assume that estimate is a bit high, and I actually only burn 500 calories per hour. If I do 2, 1 hour sessions per week, I burn an extra 1000 calories. That's 7.4% of my non-workout calorie expenditure.
Sure, you'll have a hard time getting to 2 times the regular energy expenditure with exercise, but eating 2 times your baseline energy requirements is a terrible diet anyway. Exercising can provide you with a little wiggle room for when you want to eat a few extra calories as a treat. Eating only the bare number of calories makes for some pretty uninteresting eating habits. Also, cardiovascular exercise is important for other health reasons. If you just eat the right number of calories and never exercise, you will still be in bad cardiovascular health, and will still suffer health problems because of it.
I think the issue is with how calories are reported on labels and how much people typically eat in a serving. There was a case a while back where certain cola producers were reporting the calories on the label based on a serving size of 100 mL, even though they knew that nobody only drinks part of the can when consuming it. The serving sizes reported on product labels are usually much lower than a person would typically eat, which makes the calorie count of products appear lower. Sure people should just be smart enough to do the math, but is it really too much to ask that food producers use realistic serving sizes?
I agree. The Calorie is a useful measurement. If you monitor your health by tracking Calories eaten, weight, and Calories expended then you should be able to control your weight. If your weight is going up, you have few options, reduce your Calorie intake, or increase your calorie expenditure, or some combination of the two. Maybe the numbers on the packaging don't work for you, and you actually get more energy out of the foods you are are eating than what's reported on the label. The fact still holds that if you eat less of the foods then you will be getting fewer calories, and you will be able to lose weight. If you are somehow overestimating how many Calories you are using with exercise and other baseline activities, then you simply need to increase the amount of exercise, and you will burn more calories. The important thing here is to monitor what you are eating, and how much exercise you are doing, and adjust the inputs until you get the desired output. If you aren't monitoring anything then there's no way to tell if you are headed in the right direction
Exactly. Same goes for all the boiler plate code just to get things running. We have to start with a bunch of complicated stuff like "int main(int argc, char **argv)" and "#include ". Java makes it even worth by having to declare a class simply to write hello world. Languages like basic are much simpler for beginners because there is no boiler plate code. Hello world is a single line of code, and very easy for people to understand.
This is a great idea. Any modern source control system is good, just to get experience with the general ideas. If you make them commit as they go along it's a great tool to monitor their progress as well. I made it through all of university without ever seeing a source control system in an academic setting. Luckily I found out about it myself before getting out of university.
Another recommendation is to introduce them to the debugger. Another invaluable tool that was non-existent throughout my education. It would have saved me so much time if I had only known simple features like how to set a break point, and how to step through the code. You're not doing anybody any favors by making them use the print function to figure out the state of their code.
However, Netflix probably has to pay more to license stuff for global streaming. It makes little sense for them to pay extra licenssing feese for the ability to stream French Canadian comedies to Norway if they think that only a very small percertage of the users win Norway will benefit from having that content available. Sure you could argue that just about every country would probably benefit from having hollywood blockbusters, as they are in high demand. But Netflix only has so much money to spend on licensing and much choose their content wisely. There's no point in spending the entire budget on a few movies.
You also have to look at it from the studio's perspective. If a movie is available on Netflix, then most likely Netflix subscribers will not be buying the DVD or doing digital purchases or rentals. The new Star Wars movie is supposed to come to Canadian Netflix. There's no way I'm buying a DVD if I already get access to it as part of my subscription.
Are you sure you can replace the hard drive with an SSD. For a machine from 2007, it's likely that it's not even using SATA to connect to the hard drive. If this is the model you have, you might be in luck as it uses SATA, but it's the older 1.5 gbps version, so you wouldn't be running your fancy SSD to it's full potential, although it would probably be faster than whatever is in there.
For what purpose? These are obviously meant for the server room. What need do you have for anything beyond pci-e X8 if you don't even have a video card?
You don't even have to disassemble the drive. The hole is marked on the top of the drive to make sure you don't block it. It's necessary for proper operation.
The people making spinning platter drives are just grasping at straws at this point. It won't be more than a decade before SDDs completely take over. You can already get a 1 TB SSD for about $350. A 1 TB HDD costs about $50. That's a ratio of 7:1. SSD prices have been falling a lot over the past year or two, while HDD prices have remained pretty much constant. There's very little reason for most average people to even be using HDDs at the moment apart from people who want to store giant media collections.
I don't think that public employees should be under such scrutiny, simply because they are employed with tax dollars. I think that the state needs to be accountable, but that the information shouldn't really need to linked to a name. They should only have to report the position and salary of the person. They don't need to get so specific that you can tell exactly how much each person makes. Obviously some positions like "mayor" might be obvious who holds the position, but I don't see much of a point to publishing exactly how much every garbage collector is making by name. In my jurisdiction, they only have to publish the salaries of public employees making over $100,000.
According to wikipedia the age he would be considered criminally unimputable would vary by state, but he oldest age for any state is 11. He could certainly be charged as long as he is a teen. Most states set the age at seven.
In the United States, the age varies between states, being as low as six years in South Carolina and seven years in 35 states; 11 years is the minimum age for federal crimes.
In Canada they never cancel school. They do cancel the buses some days (mostly for ice and bad road conditions, never simply because of cold), and the kids who take the buses can either stay home of their parents can drive them in. -24 is the cut-off temperature for going outside. It can be -30 and kids are still expected to walk up to 1.6 km to school. Most parents will drive their kids or keep them home at that point though.
I also live in Ottawa. Here's a run down of the distance that students are expected to walk. Kindergarten, 0.8 km/0.5miles. Grades 1 to 8, 1.6 km/1 mile. Grade 9+, 2.4 km / 1.5 miles. Within that range they are not guaranteed a bus, although some may still get a bus if they are already running a bus by the house with extra seats on it. There are allowances made if there are dangerous conditions that would make walking difficult such as crossing busy, high speed roads without a crossing guard.
Some parents I know still insist on driving their kids to school. I've let my 8 year old bike to school when the weather is nice even though she usually takes the bus. The school doesn't seem to have a problem with it. They just want you to send a note if they aren't going to be getting on the regular bus. Some parents are paranoid about the whole thing, but the school administrators and other people involved don't seem to have a problem with it.
I'm a man, so maybe I don't "get it", but I never understood the problem that women have with walking alone. Are women really more likely to be attacked by random people on the street? Just giving a quick read through this article (from Canada, where I live) it seems that the majority of assault on women happen in a residential setting, and "Men are physically assaulted in a public place outside the home more often than women" and "Women more often physically assaulted by a spouse, men by a stranger". It seems as though men should be the ones who are worried about walking alone. Looking over the whole thing, it seems like there's little that women should be worrying about. Obviously they should probably stay out of certain areas at night, but it's not like they should never go out alone, or even worry about it most of the time.
What's the lifetime of the new incandescent bulb? Do they still burn out as fast as they used to? Or does recycling the heat cause them to take longer to burn out. The major advantage I find in LEDs is that they last a long time. And with the plummeting prices (picked some up for $3.50 a piece at Walmart last week), It's going to be hard for incandescent bulbs to compete. If this was such a good solution, it could probably be used for LED lights as well, since they throw off a non-negligible amount of heat as well.
You just basically repeated what I said. PDO is the way to go, but it actually takes a little more effort to find that it exists. Why don't they deprecate MySQLi and put a warning on the documentation that you really shouldn't be using MySQL specific functions at all? If you look up tutorials for PHP and MySQL, almost none of them recommend the use of PDO or even mention it.
The only reason that DRM is so rampant is because society has proven that they can't be trusted. The law can do nothing to stop stuff from being privately copied, and therefore the publishers of the software have to take their own measure to stop pirates. Similarly to anti-theft tags on clothing, DRM is there because there actually are a lot of people who will just pirate software given the chance.
I agree that certain types of DRM that have been employed in the past (like the Sony Rootkit) go way beyond just protecting the content into the realm of damaging user property. But that doesn't mean that publishers shouldn't be able to use some means to protect their software.
I wouldn't say that PHP is built for MySQL, but that PHP isn't designed to be database agnostic. If you start doing a new project and you want it to work with MySQL, then you look up the documentation on how you connect to MySQL, you'll start going down the path of using mysqli_ and other database specific stuff. Once you are ready to move on and make it database agnostic, you are too far in, and there's too many changes to made. Unless you had the foresight to make everything database agnostic from the beginning and use something like PDO, you are going to be in for a lot of work to get everything working with a different database.
Compare that with something like.Net where all database objects inherit from a set of standard database objects. Even if you don't think about it from the beginning, 95% of the code that connects to the database will already work with any database you want to connect to. There's still the job of making sure your actual SQL works with all the various database engines, but at least a certain amount of the work is already done for you with respect to connecting to the database, sending queries, and getting results back.
That's what I was thinking. If nobody views them after a week or so, then why keep them around at all? Seems like Facebook could cut their costs quite a bit if they just deleted the data after a couple months. If you want a cloud storage provider to store your pictures indefinitely, then go ahead and get provider for that, but there's little reason why Facebook needs to hold on to stuff for more than a month.
I think that in this case T-Mobile is doing something that the streaming providers should just be doing in the first place. My kids all have iPod touches. Youtube will use a ridiculous amount of bandwidth if you let it. I limited the devices to 1 Mbit on the home network and they haven't complained of any problems. They are actually able to watch more videos while at the same time using less of the limited resource. There's almost no reason to use a high quality stream on a device with a 4 inch screen. It's just wasting bandwidth for no appreciable gain. Same goes for Netflix. I leave my default profile set up on the lowest quality. I then have another profile set up for when I want to do HD streaming. 90% of the time I don't need a high quality stream, even on my 10 inch tablet. I save the bandwidth for when I'm sitting in front of my 50 inch TV where having 1080p actually matters.
That's actually not that bad of an idea. You see, in many cases when you need to hire a lawyer, you don't actually need a lawyer. You just need somebody who knows a specific subset of the law to get you the information you need. In most cases, some kind of paralegal will end up doing a lot of the legwork, while the lawyer signs off on it. It ends up costing a lot because lawyers are required to have a lot of expensive schooling, and it's actually quite hard to become a certified lawyer.
As time goes on, we are staring to realize that maybe you don't need to see hire out the top level person just to get little things done. Many countries are now recognizing nurse practitioners, who can perform many of the functions that your regular family doctor would perform, at a much lower cost, because they didn't have to do so much schooling and therefore demand much less pay. I can even get my flu shot by going to the pharmacy and having the pharmacist give me the shot. It's much cheaper to do this way, and it's not actually that hard to train a pharmacist to give out vaccinations. Similarly, you can go see a dental hygienist to get your teeth cleaned so as not to incur extra costs by visiting a dentist when you simply want your teeth cleaned. They can take some x-rays and then refer you to a dentist to get the cavity filled if you actually need that done, but in most cases you don't actually need to get a dentist involved for your regular dental checkup.
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When I was in university doing a robotics class, I actually simulated a the robot we were using for our assignments in software. We only had a limited amount of time in the lab working with the robots, so I made a crude model of the robot from the lab using OpenGL, in order to test that the inputs we gave to the robot would provide the right behaviour by the robot. It was a basic robotic arm similar to this one. We had to take a picture and get the robot to pick up a block in the picture by analyzing the picture, figuring out where it was, and moving the arm there. The robot had to be controlled by telling it how much to move each individual motor. I found the project very interesting for something that seems relatively simple from an outside perspective.
I've already set up the router/modem that my provider gave me like this. Instead of giving me a dumb cable modem, they gave me a modem/wireless router combo unit. The first thing I did was reconfigure the box to act as dumb bridge and used my own wireless router for the boxes in my house to connect to. The router they gave me didn't have sufficient capabilities to set up the QOS properly for my VOIP provider.
You can definitely make a big dent in your net calories by using exercise, and you don't have to be a professional athlete to do it. Assuming a 2000 calorie diet, that's 14,000 calories a week. I've been working out on a stationary bike this winter, and the training tools say that I burn about 600 calories an hour. Let's assume that estimate is a bit high, and I actually only burn 500 calories per hour. If I do 2, 1 hour sessions per week, I burn an extra 1000 calories. That's 7.4% of my non-workout calorie expenditure.
Sure, you'll have a hard time getting to 2 times the regular energy expenditure with exercise, but eating 2 times your baseline energy requirements is a terrible diet anyway. Exercising can provide you with a little wiggle room for when you want to eat a few extra calories as a treat. Eating only the bare number of calories makes for some pretty uninteresting eating habits. Also, cardiovascular exercise is important for other health reasons. If you just eat the right number of calories and never exercise, you will still be in bad cardiovascular health, and will still suffer health problems because of it.
I think the issue is with how calories are reported on labels and how much people typically eat in a serving. There was a case a while back where certain cola producers were reporting the calories on the label based on a serving size of 100 mL, even though they knew that nobody only drinks part of the can when consuming it. The serving sizes reported on product labels are usually much lower than a person would typically eat, which makes the calorie count of products appear lower. Sure people should just be smart enough to do the math, but is it really too much to ask that food producers use realistic serving sizes?
I agree. The Calorie is a useful measurement. If you monitor your health by tracking Calories eaten, weight, and Calories expended then you should be able to control your weight. If your weight is going up, you have few options, reduce your Calorie intake, or increase your calorie expenditure, or some combination of the two. Maybe the numbers on the packaging don't work for you, and you actually get more energy out of the foods you are are eating than what's reported on the label. The fact still holds that if you eat less of the foods then you will be getting fewer calories, and you will be able to lose weight. If you are somehow overestimating how many Calories you are using with exercise and other baseline activities, then you simply need to increase the amount of exercise, and you will burn more calories. The important thing here is to monitor what you are eating, and how much exercise you are doing, and adjust the inputs until you get the desired output. If you aren't monitoring anything then there's no way to tell if you are headed in the right direction
Exactly. Same goes for all the boiler plate code just to get things running. We have to start with a bunch of complicated stuff like "int main(int argc, char **argv)" and "#include ". Java makes it even worth by having to declare a class simply to write hello world. Languages like basic are much simpler for beginners because there is no boiler plate code. Hello world is a single line of code, and very easy for people to understand.
This is a great idea. Any modern source control system is good, just to get experience with the general ideas. If you make them commit as they go along it's a great tool to monitor their progress as well. I made it through all of university without ever seeing a source control system in an academic setting. Luckily I found out about it myself before getting out of university.
Another recommendation is to introduce them to the debugger. Another invaluable tool that was non-existent throughout my education. It would have saved me so much time if I had only known simple features like how to set a break point, and how to step through the code. You're not doing anybody any favors by making them use the print function to figure out the state of their code.
However, Netflix probably has to pay more to license stuff for global streaming. It makes little sense for them to pay extra licenssing feese for the ability to stream French Canadian comedies to Norway if they think that only a very small percertage of the users win Norway will benefit from having that content available. Sure you could argue that just about every country would probably benefit from having hollywood blockbusters, as they are in high demand. But Netflix only has so much money to spend on licensing and much choose their content wisely. There's no point in spending the entire budget on a few movies.
You also have to look at it from the studio's perspective. If a movie is available on Netflix, then most likely Netflix subscribers will not be buying the DVD or doing digital purchases or rentals. The new Star Wars movie is supposed to come to Canadian Netflix. There's no way I'm buying a DVD if I already get access to it as part of my subscription.
I do all my banking on a virtual machine on my desktop that I only use to visit the banking websites.
Are you sure you can replace the hard drive with an SSD. For a machine from 2007, it's likely that it's not even using SATA to connect to the hard drive. If this is the model you have, you might be in luck as it uses SATA, but it's the older 1.5 gbps version, so you wouldn't be running your fancy SSD to it's full potential, although it would probably be faster than whatever is in there.
For what purpose? These are obviously meant for the server room. What need do you have for anything beyond pci-e X8 if you don't even have a video card?
You don't even have to disassemble the drive. The hole is marked on the top of the drive to make sure you don't block it. It's necessary for proper operation.
The people making spinning platter drives are just grasping at straws at this point. It won't be more than a decade before SDDs completely take over. You can already get a 1 TB SSD for about $350. A 1 TB HDD costs about $50. That's a ratio of 7:1. SSD prices have been falling a lot over the past year or two, while HDD prices have remained pretty much constant. There's very little reason for most average people to even be using HDDs at the moment apart from people who want to store giant media collections.
I don't think that public employees should be under such scrutiny, simply because they are employed with tax dollars. I think that the state needs to be accountable, but that the information shouldn't really need to linked to a name. They should only have to report the position and salary of the person. They don't need to get so specific that you can tell exactly how much each person makes. Obviously some positions like "mayor" might be obvious who holds the position, but I don't see much of a point to publishing exactly how much every garbage collector is making by name. In my jurisdiction, they only have to publish the salaries of public employees making over $100,000.
According to wikipedia the age he would be considered criminally unimputable would vary by state, but he oldest age for any state is 11. He could certainly be charged as long as he is a teen. Most states set the age at seven.
In Canada they never cancel school. They do cancel the buses some days (mostly for ice and bad road conditions, never simply because of cold), and the kids who take the buses can either stay home of their parents can drive them in. -24 is the cut-off temperature for going outside. It can be -30 and kids are still expected to walk up to 1.6 km to school. Most parents will drive their kids or keep them home at that point though.
I also live in Ottawa. Here's a run down of the distance that students are expected to walk. Kindergarten, 0.8 km/0.5miles. Grades 1 to 8, 1.6 km/1 mile. Grade 9+, 2.4 km / 1.5 miles. Within that range they are not guaranteed a bus, although some may still get a bus if they are already running a bus by the house with extra seats on it. There are allowances made if there are dangerous conditions that would make walking difficult such as crossing busy, high speed roads without a crossing guard.
Some parents I know still insist on driving their kids to school. I've let my 8 year old bike to school when the weather is nice even though she usually takes the bus. The school doesn't seem to have a problem with it. They just want you to send a note if they aren't going to be getting on the regular bus. Some parents are paranoid about the whole thing, but the school administrators and other people involved don't seem to have a problem with it.
I'm a man, so maybe I don't "get it", but I never understood the problem that women have with walking alone. Are women really more likely to be attacked by random people on the street? Just giving a quick read through this article (from Canada, where I live) it seems that the majority of assault on women happen in a residential setting, and "Men are physically assaulted in a public place outside the home more often than women" and "Women more often physically assaulted by a spouse, men by a stranger". It seems as though men should be the ones who are worried about walking alone. Looking over the whole thing, it seems like there's little that women should be worrying about. Obviously they should probably stay out of certain areas at night, but it's not like they should never go out alone, or even worry about it most of the time.
What's the lifetime of the new incandescent bulb? Do they still burn out as fast as they used to? Or does recycling the heat cause them to take longer to burn out. The major advantage I find in LEDs is that they last a long time. And with the plummeting prices (picked some up for $3.50 a piece at Walmart last week), It's going to be hard for incandescent bulbs to compete. If this was such a good solution, it could probably be used for LED lights as well, since they throw off a non-negligible amount of heat as well.
You just basically repeated what I said. PDO is the way to go, but it actually takes a little more effort to find that it exists. Why don't they deprecate MySQLi and put a warning on the documentation that you really shouldn't be using MySQL specific functions at all? If you look up tutorials for PHP and MySQL, almost none of them recommend the use of PDO or even mention it.
The only reason that DRM is so rampant is because society has proven that they can't be trusted. The law can do nothing to stop stuff from being privately copied, and therefore the publishers of the software have to take their own measure to stop pirates. Similarly to anti-theft tags on clothing, DRM is there because there actually are a lot of people who will just pirate software given the chance.
I agree that certain types of DRM that have been employed in the past (like the Sony Rootkit) go way beyond just protecting the content into the realm of damaging user property. But that doesn't mean that publishers shouldn't be able to use some means to protect their software.
I wouldn't say that PHP is built for MySQL, but that PHP isn't designed to be database agnostic. If you start doing a new project and you want it to work with MySQL, then you look up the documentation on how you connect to MySQL, you'll start going down the path of using mysqli_ and other database specific stuff. Once you are ready to move on and make it database agnostic, you are too far in, and there's too many changes to made. Unless you had the foresight to make everything database agnostic from the beginning and use something like PDO, you are going to be in for a lot of work to get everything working with a different database.
Compare that with something like .Net where all database objects inherit from a set of standard database objects. Even if you don't think about it from the beginning, 95% of the code that connects to the database will already work with any database you want to connect to. There's still the job of making sure your actual SQL works with all the various database engines, but at least a certain amount of the work is already done for you with respect to connecting to the database, sending queries, and getting results back.
That's what I was thinking. If nobody views them after a week or so, then why keep them around at all? Seems like Facebook could cut their costs quite a bit if they just deleted the data after a couple months. If you want a cloud storage provider to store your pictures indefinitely, then go ahead and get provider for that, but there's little reason why Facebook needs to hold on to stuff for more than a month.
I think that in this case T-Mobile is doing something that the streaming providers should just be doing in the first place. My kids all have iPod touches. Youtube will use a ridiculous amount of bandwidth if you let it. I limited the devices to 1 Mbit on the home network and they haven't complained of any problems. They are actually able to watch more videos while at the same time using less of the limited resource. There's almost no reason to use a high quality stream on a device with a 4 inch screen. It's just wasting bandwidth for no appreciable gain. Same goes for Netflix. I leave my default profile set up on the lowest quality. I then have another profile set up for when I want to do HD streaming. 90% of the time I don't need a high quality stream, even on my 10 inch tablet. I save the bandwidth for when I'm sitting in front of my 50 inch TV where having 1080p actually matters.
That's actually not that bad of an idea. You see, in many cases when you need to hire a lawyer, you don't actually need a lawyer. You just need somebody who knows a specific subset of the law to get you the information you need. In most cases, some kind of paralegal will end up doing a lot of the legwork, while the lawyer signs off on it. It ends up costing a lot because lawyers are required to have a lot of expensive schooling, and it's actually quite hard to become a certified lawyer.
As time goes on, we are staring to realize that maybe you don't need to see hire out the top level person just to get little things done. Many countries are now recognizing nurse practitioners, who can perform many of the functions that your regular family doctor would perform, at a much lower cost, because they didn't have to do so much schooling and therefore demand much less pay. I can even get my flu shot by going to the pharmacy and having the pharmacist give me the shot. It's much cheaper to do this way, and it's not actually that hard to train a pharmacist to give out vaccinations. Similarly, you can go see a dental hygienist to get your teeth cleaned so as not to incur extra costs by visiting a dentist when you simply want your teeth cleaned. They can take some x-rays and then refer you to a dentist to get the cavity filled if you actually need that done, but in most cases you don't actually need to get a dentist involved for your regular dental checkup.