Actually, I see lots of people with no disposable income buy lots of luxury items. That's what credit cards are for. It seems to me that the less money a person has, the more percentage of their money they spend on luxury items. I know people who can barely put food on the table, but they insist on shopping at expensive clothing stores, getting cable TV, highspeed internet, having a cell phone, and lots of other luxury items.
Does anybody else remember the story of somebody (in China I'm pretty sure) selling old Gamecube games in Wii packaging to make them look like new Wii games. That's the extent they go to for this piracy.
I live in Canada, and we have socialized healthcare. If I call up my doctor, i can get an appointment within days, or the same day if it's actually something that I really need to have looked at on that day. Scheduled appointments are booked in advance. There's no problem getting one. There's a lot of horror stories that get passed around, like long waiting times, and not being able to find a family doctor. Some are true, some are hyperbole, some are outright false. But none of those are as bad as the ones I hear about the US health system. Where even people who have been paying their insurance, are denied payment, because of some inconsistency in the way they filled out the forms, or because a certain type of treatment isn't covered, or because they didn't get pre-approval (for emergency care no less). I probably sound a lot like a certain Michael Moore movie, but to me, that is what I find to be the worst thing about privatized health care. Even if you are paying, and you have insurance, you may not be covered, and you may still not be able to afford treatment when you get sick.
No, you won't be able to sell achievements, because the achievements will be tied to a key unique to your device. So, you could sell the device itself, but then you'd be selling all your achievements.
When I was working for the government during one of my co-op terms, they what was basically a fridge full of hard drives. They had this giant SAN, that took up an entire rack cabinet. I asked about it, they said it wasn't even turned on. Great use of tax payer dollars right there. Buy a giant SAN, just to use up the budget, but they don't even have any use for it. That machine was using about 0 watts, as it wasn't even plugged in.
That doesn't really strike me as the first application of these drives. For something like a laptop, I could see it being very useful, where power usage is extremely important, and you don't mind waiting for the disk to spin up. In a datacentre, you most likely aren't going to be running the drive under conditions where it would have time to slow down, or you wouldn't be willing to make the sacrifice in speed that slowing down the drive would bring.
Also, I have to wonder what the power requirements of these chips will be. My cell phone currently drains itself exteremely quickly, when you're actually talking on it. Most cell phones get a maximum of 4 hours talk time. Same with my Laptop. Start doing heavy internet downloading, and the battery usage really drops. It seems to me that for watching video, it's much more efficient to just have it stored locally. Just download it from home, and put it on an SD card or the Harddrive.
They kind of do that in Canada, but it's justified a little differently. They don't charge tax on groceries. So if you buy a single donut, it get's taxed. However, if you buy a dozen donuts, it's considered a grocery, and because they are bakery goods (even if they are from Tim Hortons) then it is not taxed. Things like potato chips, chocolate bars, and other snack foods are taxed because they are classified as "not groceries". I kind of like it. There was a tax-free sale at my local grocery store, and I remarked to my wife, that it's a stupid sale because most stuff isn't taxed anyway. On a typical grocery store trip, I'll only have about 5 items that are taxed. with the vast majority being untaxed.
Most distros (except Ubuntu for some reason) are on DVD now. DVDs are cheaper than CDs because they don't have the levy. I haven't bought blank CDs in years. I can't seem to think of a single time I've actually put music on a burned CD.
Treatment of someone who is grossly obese, or who never exercises is also much more expensive than treatment for someone who exercises regularly, and watches what they eat. Maybe they should start to tax unhealthy food. Either than, or somehow offer tax refunds for those who maintain a healthy lifestyle.
They may be ahead in overall numbers, but that's only because the XBox 360 was out a full year earlier than the PS3. Accorinding to this chart the PS3 and the XBox 360 have had pretty much equal sales at the same point in their lifetime.
But the PS2 didn't cost $500. Don't you see the difference. PS2 was able to include the DVD player without adding much to the cost of the console. The PS3 or XBox 360 with HD-DVD are much more expensive than the standard console. So, while it's true that it would be a cheaper HD player, it's still more than most people are willing to pay for HD video. Also, everyone seems to forget that VHS to DVD was a huge leap. DVD to HD, not so much.
If they started implementing this, I would probably just have to stop buying music altogether. It's getting way too annoying for me to buy music without being ripped off by the industry. I use eMusic to buy my music, and if I had to pay this extra fee, I would cancel my account, and let them know exactly why. If enough online music stores had enough customers quit, then I think that the backlash from these companies would make the government change their mind about this kind of stuff. Also, trying to make things like this retroactive, would make it even worse. The industry complains that people are pirating music, and then hits their customers with crap like this. I've gone completely legit for the last few years, because I feel that it's right to support the artists, but stuff like this makes me want to go back to downloading everything over IRC. If they are just going to assume that we are pirating all their content, we might as well do it, because they certainly don't deserve our money.
Tried it. It works, but it's still kind of kludgy, as windows doesn't support this functionality natively, and therefore you have to do some clever hacks to make it work. It's much slower on windows, and doesn't quite operate as smoothly as it does on Linux.
That's how MS works. Even though they had six years, Vista still wasn't ready, but they still had to release it before all their users switched over to something else, or their investors got anxious. Anyway, I think MS would have been much better off not making Vista at all. People would have just kept on using XP, and they would have saved a ton on not developing a new OS that nobody wants.
That's why I make my taskbar 2 units high, and move the quicklaunch bar off to another panel on the right side of my screen. I have almost every application I use on my quick launch bar. So I can start any application I normally use with one click, or with my extremely large taskbar, and grouping disabled, go to any window which I have open, again with one click. Even better when I have Compiz. Go to top right of screen, quickly identify which window is the one you're looking for, and click.
Since when is the Mac OS X interface superior to Linux. How long is it going to take for Windows or OSX to get multiple desktops? Sure disable by default or something, because most users won't understand when they hit the wrong key and all their applications disappear, but why can't they just support this in some OS other than Linux and Unix?
This just made me think of a really good idea. There's this guy who built a belt that vibrated on whichever side of his body was facing north. After a couple of weeks, he said he had a really good sense of direction, and always knew what direction it was to his house, or to some other firmiliar place. Anyway, if pilots could use this type of technology to have more spacial awareness about where they were. From my experiences in flight simulator, and Descent, it's very easy to get disoriented, and forget which direction is up, and to figure out where you're located when you're focused on the enemy. Having some cues other than the visual ones to clue you into where you are could be quite useful.
While I think that resolution is a little low, I have a 19" set to the same resolution, you bring up a good point. A lot of the Newer CRTs try to push the resolution a bit too far, so you'll see 17 inch monitors with 1280x1024 resolution. What ends up happening is that the user either doesn't change the DPI, and all the fonts end up looking too small to read, or they do adjust the DPI, and then a bunch of applications start misbehaving, with fonts running outside of their container, and therefore some characters aren't displayed.
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It even works with completely unmodified search strings
Actually, I see lots of people with no disposable income buy lots of luxury items. That's what credit cards are for. It seems to me that the less money a person has, the more percentage of their money they spend on luxury items. I know people who can barely put food on the table, but they insist on shopping at expensive clothing stores, getting cable TV, highspeed internet, having a cell phone, and lots of other luxury items.
Does anybody else remember the story of somebody (in China I'm pretty sure) selling old Gamecube games in Wii packaging to make them look like new Wii games. That's the extent they go to for this piracy.
I live in Canada, and we have socialized healthcare. If I call up my doctor, i can get an appointment within days, or the same day if it's actually something that I really need to have looked at on that day. Scheduled appointments are booked in advance. There's no problem getting one. There's a lot of horror stories that get passed around, like long waiting times, and not being able to find a family doctor. Some are true, some are hyperbole, some are outright false. But none of those are as bad as the ones I hear about the US health system. Where even people who have been paying their insurance, are denied payment, because of some inconsistency in the way they filled out the forms, or because a certain type of treatment isn't covered, or because they didn't get pre-approval (for emergency care no less). I probably sound a lot like a certain Michael Moore movie, but to me, that is what I find to be the worst thing about privatized health care. Even if you are paying, and you have insurance, you may not be covered, and you may still not be able to afford treatment when you get sick.
No, you won't be able to sell achievements, because the achievements will be tied to a key unique to your device. So, you could sell the device itself, but then you'd be selling all your achievements.
And how much more efficient is this than using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophcrack">Rainbow tables. Using rainbow tables, Ophcrack can break passwords in seconds.
When I was working for the government during one of my co-op terms, they what was basically a fridge full of hard drives. They had this giant SAN, that took up an entire rack cabinet. I asked about it, they said it wasn't even turned on. Great use of tax payer dollars right there. Buy a giant SAN, just to use up the budget, but they don't even have any use for it. That machine was using about 0 watts, as it wasn't even plugged in.
My laptop uses on 20 watts while operating, so cutting out 6 watts would be quite beneficial.
That doesn't really strike me as the first application of these drives. For something like a laptop, I could see it being very useful, where power usage is extremely important, and you don't mind waiting for the disk to spin up. In a datacentre, you most likely aren't going to be running the drive under conditions where it would have time to slow down, or you wouldn't be willing to make the sacrifice in speed that slowing down the drive would bring.
Also, I have to wonder what the power requirements of these chips will be. My cell phone currently drains itself exteremely quickly, when you're actually talking on it. Most cell phones get a maximum of 4 hours talk time. Same with my Laptop. Start doing heavy internet downloading, and the battery usage really drops. It seems to me that for watching video, it's much more efficient to just have it stored locally. Just download it from home, and put it on an SD card or the Harddrive.
They kind of do that in Canada, but it's justified a little differently. They don't charge tax on groceries. So if you buy a single donut, it get's taxed. However, if you buy a dozen donuts, it's considered a grocery, and because they are bakery goods (even if they are from Tim Hortons) then it is not taxed. Things like potato chips, chocolate bars, and other snack foods are taxed because they are classified as "not groceries". I kind of like it. There was a tax-free sale at my local grocery store, and I remarked to my wife, that it's a stupid sale because most stuff isn't taxed anyway. On a typical grocery store trip, I'll only have about 5 items that are taxed. with the vast majority being untaxed.
Most distros (except Ubuntu for some reason) are on DVD now. DVDs are cheaper than CDs because they don't have the levy. I haven't bought blank CDs in years. I can't seem to think of a single time I've actually put music on a burned CD.
Treatment of someone who is grossly obese, or who never exercises is also much more expensive than treatment for someone who exercises regularly, and watches what they eat. Maybe they should start to tax unhealthy food. Either than, or somehow offer tax refunds for those who maintain a healthy lifestyle.
According to the pricing history, you're either a liar, European, or you got ripped off.
They may be ahead in overall numbers, but that's only because the XBox 360 was out a full year earlier than the PS3. Accorinding to this chart the PS3 and the XBox 360 have had pretty much equal sales at the same point in their lifetime.
But the PS2 didn't cost $500. Don't you see the difference. PS2 was able to include the DVD player without adding much to the cost of the console. The PS3 or XBox 360 with HD-DVD are much more expensive than the standard console. So, while it's true that it would be a cheaper HD player, it's still more than most people are willing to pay for HD video. Also, everyone seems to forget that VHS to DVD was a huge leap. DVD to HD, not so much.
If they started implementing this, I would probably just have to stop buying music altogether. It's getting way too annoying for me to buy music without being ripped off by the industry. I use eMusic to buy my music, and if I had to pay this extra fee, I would cancel my account, and let them know exactly why. If enough online music stores had enough customers quit, then I think that the backlash from these companies would make the government change their mind about this kind of stuff. Also, trying to make things like this retroactive, would make it even worse. The industry complains that people are pirating music, and then hits their customers with crap like this. I've gone completely legit for the last few years, because I feel that it's right to support the artists, but stuff like this makes me want to go back to downloading everything over IRC. If they are just going to assume that we are pirating all their content, we might as well do it, because they certainly don't deserve our money.
Tried it. It works, but it's still kind of kludgy, as windows doesn't support this functionality natively, and therefore you have to do some clever hacks to make it work. It's much slower on windows, and doesn't quite operate as smoothly as it does on Linux.
That's how MS works. Even though they had six years, Vista still wasn't ready, but they still had to release it before all their users switched over to something else, or their investors got anxious. Anyway, I think MS would have been much better off not making Vista at all. People would have just kept on using XP, and they would have saved a ton on not developing a new OS that nobody wants.
That's why I make my taskbar 2 units high, and move the quicklaunch bar off to another panel on the right side of my screen. I have almost every application I use on my quick launch bar. So I can start any application I normally use with one click, or with my extremely large taskbar, and grouping disabled, go to any window which I have open, again with one click. Even better when I have Compiz. Go to top right of screen, quickly identify which window is the one you're looking for, and click.
Since when is the Mac OS X interface superior to Linux. How long is it going to take for Windows or OSX to get multiple desktops? Sure disable by default or something, because most users won't understand when they hit the wrong key and all their applications disappear, but why can't they just support this in some OS other than Linux and Unix?
8 whole megs was a lot compared to a floppy drive, and it was probably a lot faster and more reliable.
I almost didn't believe you, until I Googled it, and found this train simulator controller.
This just made me think of a really good idea. There's this guy who built a belt that vibrated on whichever side of his body was facing north. After a couple of weeks, he said he had a really good sense of direction, and always knew what direction it was to his house, or to some other firmiliar place. Anyway, if pilots could use this type of technology to have more spacial awareness about where they were. From my experiences in flight simulator, and Descent, it's very easy to get disoriented, and forget which direction is up, and to figure out where you're located when you're focused on the enemy. Having some cues other than the visual ones to clue you into where you are could be quite useful.
While I think that resolution is a little low, I have a 19" set to the same resolution, you bring up a good point. A lot of the Newer CRTs try to push the resolution a bit too far, so you'll see 17 inch monitors with 1280x1024 resolution. What ends up happening is that the user either doesn't change the DPI, and all the fonts end up looking too small to read, or they do adjust the DPI, and then a bunch of applications start misbehaving, with fonts running outside of their container, and therefore some characters aren't displayed.