Also, we have enough problems with crappy IT workers who don't know what they are doing without introducing a union. If there's a union, it would be almost impossible to fire these morons, and the morons would keep getting raises simply because they are in the union.
The problem that I find with most certifications is that even if they are well intended, and are supposed to be all the things we want them to be, they still end up letting through people who don't really know anything. I knew a guy who was an MS Certified DBA who couldn't write a simple join query. He also couldn't configure log shipping, and generally didn't know how to administer a database in any way whatsoever. The tests on just about every certification I've seen are written such that anybody with a good memory and a little common sense can pass the tests, and get certified.
How many people really go into debt for $250,000 to go to university? That sounds like an extremely high amount of money to me. Maybe if you became a doctor, and you went to Harvard, and you didn't make any money during your schooling at all, and you had absolutely no scholarships, and drank a case of beer every day, and... Anyway, that seems like you would be going into quite a bit of debt. I know people who went though school funding the whole thing with no help from their parents, and still came out debt free. You have to work a little harder, and you can't go to the fancy private schools like Harvard, but it can be done.
It probably depends on what MHz the 486 was running at. According to wikipedia, the 486 ran at speeds from as low as 16 MHz, all the way up to 100 MHz. I had a DX4 100, which ran windows 95 quite well. However, I know a lot of people who had the 33 MHz version, who's computers were much slower than mine.
I'm a Mandriva user, and I have to say, I'm kind of relieved that Mandriva isn't the only one with wireless issues. If you're looking for a nice desktop distro, then try Mandriva. It's not perfect, but if you're that unhappy with Ubuntu, then it's worth a try. By default there is no Compiz, but it can be installed quite easily. They also have the option of Metisse, which I really like a lot more than Compiz. I personally think that Ubuntu isn't all that great, and that it gets way too much press. Mandriva is at least as good, or better in my opinion, and people should really try it out if they feel they aren't getting what they want out of their chosen distro.
They are making per unit profits, but have they ever regained the money they spent on developing it? Or the money they lost on the first 50 million units? Same goes for the PS3. They may eventually start selling them for more than it costs to make them, but they are already in a deep whole. And with the PS3 not selling as well as previous generations, it will take them a long to make up all the money they lost.
Nintendo doesn't have any option but to make money on their console division, because that's the entire company. I find is amazing that Nintendo is even in the game at all anymore. When the other companies don't even have to make a profit, it becomes very hard to compete against them. They have had consoles with not-so-high sales numbers the previous 2 generations (before the Wii), but the fact that they made a profit through all that shows that they must be doing something right.
HMV just started selling video games. People often forget about them. I've seen a lot of Wii's sitting on the shelves at HMV. There's other stores too that seem to have them regularly. I see a lot of EB Games stores with Wiis in stock.
Really? Seriuosly? I've never had a problem printing a PDF in my life. I often use PDF when transporting documents from one place to another for printing, because things like changing the version of the word processor, or even just using a different printer with some word processors can have drastic results on how the document prints. When I went to get my self-designed wedding invitations printed, I brought the file on CD in about 4 different formats, and asked which ones they recommended I print from. Tgey said PDF was the best, as that's where they have the least number of printing problems.
But that's because they only have a limited amount of money, and many other things to spend it on. Going to the movies now costs $12. More if you want to buy snacks. Most teenagers want a cellphone. That costs money. They spend money on video games, movies on DVD, designer clothes, and many other things. The reason kids don't spend money on music anymore, is because they have so many other things that they would rather spend their money on.
It's a distribution problem. I live in Ottawa Canada. I could go downtown and buy 5 today if I wanted to, but I already have one, and I'm too lazy to sell them on eBay. There's a lot of places they can't be found but there's a lot of places they can easily be found. However, the distribution problem isn't the easiest one to solve, especially when shops want to have them on the shelves. It could work if they were ordered by demand, from a single source, but things don't work that way. They are manufactured, shipped out to a bunch of distributors, who ship to resellers, or other distributors, and eventually it gets to the end buyer. It's hard to make sure everyone has only as many as they are actually selling with a system like that.
But really how remote are those areas of Norway. In Canada, you can go to places where it's a 4 hour drive between anything over 50,000 people. Lets look at Saskatchewan for instance. Twice the size of Norway, and 1/4 of the population. Not only that, if you compare the top cities in Norway to the top cities in Saskatchewan, you'll see quite a difference in the number of people in those cities. The Number 10 city only has 8000 people. People from Europe don't really know what remote is. They don't really understand what sparsely populated is. I grew up in a Northern Ontario town, and considered it a short trip to drive to Ottawa which was 8.5 hours away. Toronto being only 6.5 hours was an extremely short distance from my view point. You could probably drive accross most of any European country in 8 hours.
The way I see it, you're not going to be switching providers every 2 months anyway, so why not just sign the contract, and get a cheaper phone. If buying your own phone actually gave you a cheaper monthly bill, then I would probably buy my own phone. However, it isn't. If you buy your own phone you pay the same for the monthly plan as the guy to paid $50 for the phone you just paid $300 for. The only advantage is that you can switch providers at any time. But it's not like there's many other choices. Also, if you want to switch providers, just switch providers and get their free phone. I can see absolutely no reason for buying my own phone, and not getting the discounted phone from the company. If they made my monthly bill cheaper, because they weren't subsidising my phone, then I could see it being worth it.
Personally, I've always liked CDMA more than GSM. I find the audio quality quite bad on the GSM cellphones, and they don't have a wider coverage area either. Maybe GSM is better for data services or something, but I want to use my phone as a phone, and I find that CDMA works much better for voice calls.
The point I was making was that they don't have any convictions. They may know about it, and say they care, and say they think it's terrible, but they keep on buying the music. That's very hypocritical. If you have such a big problem, stop buying the music. If you're still buying their music, you obviously don't care that much about their tactics.
I don't believe so personally, although I have to say that there's a lot of kids who get low marks in school, not because they are dumb, but because they really just don't care. Kids with below average natural intelligence will probably never be as smart as the kids who do have that naturals ability. Extra work and dedication can make their marks higher, and make them more valuable to society, but it won't make them smarter. I knew a girl in University who studied really hard, got A+ in almost all her classes, and was quite good to work with on group projects, because you could always count on her to get the job done, and get it done right. However, her programming abilities were still not up to par with many of the other students. She had to work hard to compensate. She couldn't look at a problem and just see the answer like a lot of other people. The point is, is that maybe some people don't have the smarts, but they can still be very useful people. I would rather work with someone who has average intelligence who is really dedicated, than someone who is really smart but slacks off half the time. That being said, working with someone of low intelligence, who never understands anything no matter how hard they work can be extremely frustrating.
Finally a BIG NAME record label who is starting to 'get it'.
There, fixed that for you. There's lots of smaller labels who have "got it" all along, but they're just smaller ones, and you don't hear their music on the radio, or on the TV. There's plenty of good music on the smaller labels, and if people actually had any convictions, the RIAA would have gone bust many years ago, and their member companies wouldn't have been able to sell any music. The point is that most people don't know or don't care about the RIAA tactics. My biggest question is what happens to EMI now if they do this? Will they still be able to get as much radio play their music on a regular basis? Will their bands still get invited on the talk shows? How far does the power of the RIAA really extend?
Microsoft shouldn't be required to release software for any platform it doesn't want to. However, they should be required to open of the formats so that people can read their files on other platforms. Linux has the ability to read access files, it's just that nobody has bothered (from what I know) to put a really nice interface on it. If MS Office had a real open spec that wasn't a mess, or if they just standardized on ODF, I think that MS Office would probably not lose too many customers, because it's actually not that bad of a product. However, there's no telling how far openoffice and others could advance, if they didn't have to spend so many resources trying to reverse engineer the MS formats.
My dad uses excel for just about everything. Once you learn how to use it, it's quite powerful, and you can do a lot of stuff with it. He designed his deck by making square cells and using that to map out the floor plan. Which is even more impressive, because it's not just a square deck.
You're right, my methods I've noticed has many problems, with the timer even not firing exactly when it's supposed to. However, I was just looking for a way to run a job at, for instance, 6 AM tomorrow. Usually it's within 5 minutes, and that's accurate enough. I doesn't matter that the job runs exactly at 6 AM, but that it runs around that time, and every day. Most of the posts recommending to go off every second, didn't do so because over a long period the timer was inaccurate, but simply because the writers didn't know how to calculate the number of milliseconds until the desired time. So instead of taking 20 minutes to figure it out, they use this little hack. Also, it seems kind of buggy to me, to have the timer go off every second, and then check if it's the right time, especially if the timer is so inaccurate. If it's 5:59:59 AM when the timer goes off, and then you check, it's not time yet. However, if the next time the timer goes off is 6:00:00 AM, but the computer is busy doing something else, you may not actually process the event until 6:00:01, where you would end up missing it completely. So you end up trying to check within a range, and then also have to worry about recording whether or not it already ran, so you don't accidentally run it twice.
A lot of the free online tutorials don't show best practices though. How many tutorials have you seen for PHP + MySQL where it wasn't shown that you should construct queries by concatenating strings with either not escaping quotes, using your own function (because the author has no clue that a proper function exists), using mysql_escape_string (which is deprecated), or using mysql_real_escape_string. The right answer is that in the majority of cases, people should be using prepared statements, so that they don't have to worry about whether or not they are escaping strings properly. Granted I think a lot of books get this wrong to, but most of the tutorials I've seen on the web are even worse. Most of the tutorials are extremely low quality, and I wouldn't recommend that anybody trust them as a place to learn how to write good code.
To point out how bad tutorial code on the net can get here is a little analogy. I was once looking up how to make a timer in VB.Net go off at a certain clock time, when the only argument is would accept is number of milliseconds until it goes off. I found a number of tutorials on the internet that said I should set it to 1000 milliseconds (1 second), and then just have it go off, check if it's the right time, and proceed if it is. I couldn't find anything on the web that pointed out a better solution, but I know there had to be one. Finally I figured out that if I did TimerRunTime.Subtract(Now).TotalMilliseconds, I would do exactly the thing I was looking for, without having the timer go off every second, and actually using less code.
Where are they going to get all these books from? I haven't been able to find very many up-to-date and legally obtainable textbooks on the internet, so you can strike that off. There's probably sources where you could find a lot of information, but you'd have to scrounge around quite a bit to get the whole picture. I think one thing that would really bring this project to it's full potential is for some publishing company to include a bunch of digital textbooks on the laptop, so that they could actually learn, instead of being left to scrounge around on the internet for answers.
When I went to university we mostly got the marks by going to the professors office and looking at the grades posted on their door. The only identifying information was student number, and this was pretty much the standard way of getting grades on exams and major tests. Assignments were given back by the TA during the lab/tutorial hours, by placing them on in nicely ordered piles at the front of the class and the students weeding through them in about 5 minutes. There was some professors who posted marks online, but it often went up after the marks on their door, and it was really too much bother, since we were usually on campus everyday anyway. I'm not sure what's so wrong with a system like this. Things don't have to be any more complicated. We did use WebCT for a few classes, and in general it worked much less reliably than floppy disc and printed report on in a big manila envelope.
The fact of the matter is that Google can't provide 5 GB to every single one of their users either. It's all just a ploy to get people to sign up. If every user was using 5 GB, they would not have enough hard drives to hold it all. They know that most people will never use anywhere close to 5 GB. I currently have 1200 messages in GMail, and I'm only using 39 MB. I don't think I've ever deleted a message, I just mark as read, and leave them there. With good spam filtering, it's very unlikely that any student would even reach 1 GB, let alone 5 GB, especially considering that most students are only there for 4 years.
Nah... they can just lower the bar and let students with lower marks into the colleges. There's plenty of people who want to go to college, but don't get in. If there's spots available, they will be filled, The schools aren't just going to let seats remain empty just because somebodies marks aren't high enough.
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Also, we have enough problems with crappy IT workers who don't know what they are doing without introducing a union. If there's a union, it would be almost impossible to fire these morons, and the morons would keep getting raises simply because they are in the union.
The problem that I find with most certifications is that even if they are well intended, and are supposed to be all the things we want them to be, they still end up letting through people who don't really know anything. I knew a guy who was an MS Certified DBA who couldn't write a simple join query. He also couldn't configure log shipping, and generally didn't know how to administer a database in any way whatsoever. The tests on just about every certification I've seen are written such that anybody with a good memory and a little common sense can pass the tests, and get certified.
How many people really go into debt for $250,000 to go to university? That sounds like an extremely high amount of money to me. Maybe if you became a doctor, and you went to Harvard, and you didn't make any money during your schooling at all, and you had absolutely no scholarships, and drank a case of beer every day, and... Anyway, that seems like you would be going into quite a bit of debt. I know people who went though school funding the whole thing with no help from their parents, and still came out debt free. You have to work a little harder, and you can't go to the fancy private schools like Harvard, but it can be done.
It probably depends on what MHz the 486 was running at. According to wikipedia, the 486 ran at speeds from as low as 16 MHz, all the way up to 100 MHz. I had a DX4 100, which ran windows 95 quite well. However, I know a lot of people who had the 33 MHz version, who's computers were much slower than mine.
I'm a Mandriva user, and I have to say, I'm kind of relieved that Mandriva isn't the only one with wireless issues. If you're looking for a nice desktop distro, then try Mandriva. It's not perfect, but if you're that unhappy with Ubuntu, then it's worth a try. By default there is no Compiz, but it can be installed quite easily. They also have the option of Metisse, which I really like a lot more than Compiz. I personally think that Ubuntu isn't all that great, and that it gets way too much press. Mandriva is at least as good, or better in my opinion, and people should really try it out if they feel they aren't getting what they want out of their chosen distro.
They are making per unit profits, but have they ever regained the money they spent on developing it? Or the money they lost on the first 50 million units? Same goes for the PS3. They may eventually start selling them for more than it costs to make them, but they are already in a deep whole. And with the PS3 not selling as well as previous generations, it will take them a long to make up all the money they lost.
Nintendo doesn't have any option but to make money on their console division, because that's the entire company. I find is amazing that Nintendo is even in the game at all anymore. When the other companies don't even have to make a profit, it becomes very hard to compete against them. They have had consoles with not-so-high sales numbers the previous 2 generations (before the Wii), but the fact that they made a profit through all that shows that they must be doing something right.
HMV just started selling video games. People often forget about them. I've seen a lot of Wii's sitting on the shelves at HMV. There's other stores too that seem to have them regularly. I see a lot of EB Games stores with Wiis in stock.
Really? Seriuosly? I've never had a problem printing a PDF in my life. I often use PDF when transporting documents from one place to another for printing, because things like changing the version of the word processor, or even just using a different printer with some word processors can have drastic results on how the document prints. When I went to get my self-designed wedding invitations printed, I brought the file on CD in about 4 different formats, and asked which ones they recommended I print from. Tgey said PDF was the best, as that's where they have the least number of printing problems.
But that's because they only have a limited amount of money, and many other things to spend it on. Going to the movies now costs $12. More if you want to buy snacks. Most teenagers want a cellphone. That costs money. They spend money on video games, movies on DVD, designer clothes, and many other things. The reason kids don't spend money on music anymore, is because they have so many other things that they would rather spend their money on.
It's a distribution problem. I live in Ottawa Canada. I could go downtown and buy 5 today if I wanted to, but I already have one, and I'm too lazy to sell them on eBay. There's a lot of places they can't be found but there's a lot of places they can easily be found. However, the distribution problem isn't the easiest one to solve, especially when shops want to have them on the shelves. It could work if they were ordered by demand, from a single source, but things don't work that way. They are manufactured, shipped out to a bunch of distributors, who ship to resellers, or other distributors, and eventually it gets to the end buyer. It's hard to make sure everyone has only as many as they are actually selling with a system like that.
But really how remote are those areas of Norway. In Canada, you can go to places where it's a 4 hour drive between anything over 50,000 people. Lets look at Saskatchewan for instance. Twice the size of Norway, and 1/4 of the population. Not only that, if you compare the top cities in Norway to the top cities in Saskatchewan, you'll see quite a difference in the number of people in those cities. The Number 10 city only has 8000 people. People from Europe don't really know what remote is. They don't really understand what sparsely populated is. I grew up in a Northern Ontario town, and considered it a short trip to drive to Ottawa which was 8.5 hours away. Toronto being only 6.5 hours was an extremely short distance from my view point. You could probably drive accross most of any European country in 8 hours.
The way I see it, you're not going to be switching providers every 2 months anyway, so why not just sign the contract, and get a cheaper phone. If buying your own phone actually gave you a cheaper monthly bill, then I would probably buy my own phone. However, it isn't. If you buy your own phone you pay the same for the monthly plan as the guy to paid $50 for the phone you just paid $300 for. The only advantage is that you can switch providers at any time. But it's not like there's many other choices. Also, if you want to switch providers, just switch providers and get their free phone. I can see absolutely no reason for buying my own phone, and not getting the discounted phone from the company. If they made my monthly bill cheaper, because they weren't subsidising my phone, then I could see it being worth it.
Personally, I've always liked CDMA more than GSM. I find the audio quality quite bad on the GSM cellphones, and they don't have a wider coverage area either. Maybe GSM is better for data services or something, but I want to use my phone as a phone, and I find that CDMA works much better for voice calls.
The point I was making was that they don't have any convictions. They may know about it, and say they care, and say they think it's terrible, but they keep on buying the music. That's very hypocritical. If you have such a big problem, stop buying the music. If you're still buying their music, you obviously don't care that much about their tactics.
I don't believe so personally, although I have to say that there's a lot of kids who get low marks in school, not because they are dumb, but because they really just don't care. Kids with below average natural intelligence will probably never be as smart as the kids who do have that naturals ability. Extra work and dedication can make their marks higher, and make them more valuable to society, but it won't make them smarter. I knew a girl in University who studied really hard, got A+ in almost all her classes, and was quite good to work with on group projects, because you could always count on her to get the job done, and get it done right. However, her programming abilities were still not up to par with many of the other students. She had to work hard to compensate. She couldn't look at a problem and just see the answer like a lot of other people. The point is, is that maybe some people don't have the smarts, but they can still be very useful people. I would rather work with someone who has average intelligence who is really dedicated, than someone who is really smart but slacks off half the time. That being said, working with someone of low intelligence, who never understands anything no matter how hard they work can be extremely frustrating.
Finally a BIG NAME record label who is starting to 'get it'.
There, fixed that for you. There's lots of smaller labels who have "got it" all along, but they're just smaller ones, and you don't hear their music on the radio, or on the TV. There's plenty of good music on the smaller labels, and if people actually had any convictions, the RIAA would have gone bust many years ago, and their member companies wouldn't have been able to sell any music. The point is that most people don't know or don't care about the RIAA tactics. My biggest question is what happens to EMI now if they do this? Will they still be able to get as much radio play their music on a regular basis? Will their bands still get invited on the talk shows? How far does the power of the RIAA really extend?
Microsoft shouldn't be required to release software for any platform it doesn't want to. However, they should be required to open of the formats so that people can read their files on other platforms. Linux has the ability to read access files, it's just that nobody has bothered (from what I know) to put a really nice interface on it. If MS Office had a real open spec that wasn't a mess, or if they just standardized on ODF, I think that MS Office would probably not lose too many customers, because it's actually not that bad of a product. However, there's no telling how far openoffice and others could advance, if they didn't have to spend so many resources trying to reverse engineer the MS formats.
My dad uses excel for just about everything. Once you learn how to use it, it's quite powerful, and you can do a lot of stuff with it. He designed his deck by making square cells and using that to map out the floor plan. Which is even more impressive, because it's not just a square deck.
You're right, my methods I've noticed has many problems, with the timer even not firing exactly when it's supposed to. However, I was just looking for a way to run a job at, for instance, 6 AM tomorrow. Usually it's within 5 minutes, and that's accurate enough. I doesn't matter that the job runs exactly at 6 AM, but that it runs around that time, and every day. Most of the posts recommending to go off every second, didn't do so because over a long period the timer was inaccurate, but simply because the writers didn't know how to calculate the number of milliseconds until the desired time. So instead of taking 20 minutes to figure it out, they use this little hack. Also, it seems kind of buggy to me, to have the timer go off every second, and then check if it's the right time, especially if the timer is so inaccurate. If it's 5:59:59 AM when the timer goes off, and then you check, it's not time yet. However, if the next time the timer goes off is 6:00:00 AM, but the computer is busy doing something else, you may not actually process the event until 6:00:01, where you would end up missing it completely. So you end up trying to check within a range, and then also have to worry about recording whether or not it already ran, so you don't accidentally run it twice.
A lot of the free online tutorials don't show best practices though. How many tutorials have you seen for PHP + MySQL where it wasn't shown that you should construct queries by concatenating strings with either not escaping quotes, using your own function (because the author has no clue that a proper function exists), using mysql_escape_string (which is deprecated), or using mysql_real_escape_string. The right answer is that in the majority of cases, people should be using prepared statements, so that they don't have to worry about whether or not they are escaping strings properly. Granted I think a lot of books get this wrong to, but most of the tutorials I've seen on the web are even worse. Most of the tutorials are extremely low quality, and I wouldn't recommend that anybody trust them as a place to learn how to write good code.
To point out how bad tutorial code on the net can get here is a little analogy. I was once looking up how to make a timer in VB.Net go off at a certain clock time, when the only argument is would accept is number of milliseconds until it goes off. I found a number of tutorials on the internet that said I should set it to 1000 milliseconds (1 second), and then just have it go off, check if it's the right time, and proceed if it is. I couldn't find anything on the web that pointed out a better solution, but I know there had to be one. Finally I figured out that if I did TimerRunTime.Subtract(Now).TotalMilliseconds, I would do exactly the thing I was looking for, without having the timer go off every second, and actually using less code.
Where are they going to get all these books from? I haven't been able to find very many up-to-date and legally obtainable textbooks on the internet, so you can strike that off. There's probably sources where you could find a lot of information, but you'd have to scrounge around quite a bit to get the whole picture. I think one thing that would really bring this project to it's full potential is for some publishing company to include a bunch of digital textbooks on the laptop, so that they could actually learn, instead of being left to scrounge around on the internet for answers.
When I went to university we mostly got the marks by going to the professors office and looking at the grades posted on their door. The only identifying information was student number, and this was pretty much the standard way of getting grades on exams and major tests. Assignments were given back by the TA during the lab/tutorial hours, by placing them on in nicely ordered piles at the front of the class and the students weeding through them in about 5 minutes. There was some professors who posted marks online, but it often went up after the marks on their door, and it was really too much bother, since we were usually on campus everyday anyway. I'm not sure what's so wrong with a system like this. Things don't have to be any more complicated. We did use WebCT for a few classes, and in general it worked much less reliably than floppy disc and printed report on in a big manila envelope.
The fact of the matter is that Google can't provide 5 GB to every single one of their users either. It's all just a ploy to get people to sign up. If every user was using 5 GB, they would not have enough hard drives to hold it all. They know that most people will never use anywhere close to 5 GB. I currently have 1200 messages in GMail, and I'm only using 39 MB. I don't think I've ever deleted a message, I just mark as read, and leave them there. With good spam filtering, it's very unlikely that any student would even reach 1 GB, let alone 5 GB, especially considering that most students are only there for 4 years.
Nah... they can just lower the bar and let students with lower marks into the colleges. There's plenty of people who want to go to college, but don't get in. If there's spots available, they will be filled, The schools aren't just going to let seats remain empty just because somebodies marks aren't high enough.