I didn't know the Neo Geo was supposed to be a rental unit. Anyway, the only place I ever say it was at my local rental shop. My local video game rental shop had set up their own arcade. They had a bunch of SNES/Genesis/Neo Geo machines set up, and you payed by the hour to play the games. I think you could buy time in 15 minute or half hour slots. I'm sure they made a killing this way. First, you could try out the consoles and games before you bought them, and it got people into the store to rent games. There would also be a lot of people just standing around and watching, just like in the real arcade, but most of them ended up renting games, so it was good for business. Plus pay by the hour was a much better model for arcade games, since it didn't matter if you sucked, you didn't have to spend extra money. Eventually they closed down. However, I wish I could still find places like this.
Are there any programming magazines that still have code listings? or that ship with a CD with the code on it, which would be preferable? It seems like most of the good reading for programmers has moved to the web. Do any print magazines still exist? On a less related note, I was at the grocery store and realized that not one of the magazines in the checkout line was targeted to men. I know the demographic means that most of the shoppers will be women, but I don't see why there should be no magazines for men. Anyway, it seems like the only magazines that are still around are the ones that will sell huge numbers of copies.
While the target audiences are different, the target audiences overlapped. Nintendo chose to build a console that almost everyone would like in some way. Sony chose to build a console that only a small portion of people would like. Sony limited their market by making it cost so much, that even a lot of people who would probably want one, aren't buying one. Same thing happened to NeoGeo. Everybody that I knew who saw the thing said they wanted one, but I don't know anybody who actually bought one. I would like to own a PS3, but it is way out of my price range. So by having a smaller number of people who actually want the product, and by making it really expensive, they have really cut down on sales. Decreasing the price will bring up sales, but it won't capture as many sales as the Wii, because their target market is "everybody".
Actually, according to Plato, the best form of governance would be a benevolent dictator. However, this has yet to happen in actuality. It would probably be the best thing. But finding a human with absolute power, who wouldn't get corrupted in some way or another is hard/impossible to come by. It may make sense to have a computer making the decisions for everyone such that the rules end up making the most people happy, instead of the people with the most money, as things tend to go now. Since a computer has no need for money, and can't be threatened, it would actually be able to do the job fairly well.
Those look pretty good for showing you the end result of how your page renders, but I'm not sure how well they would work when you need to debug something and constantly change and recheck the HTML. Also, I doesn't (as least from what I understand) tell you how javascript runs on the browser, as it doesn't give you an interactive experience. Also, the prices seem to be a little bit on the high side. The minimum fee for a year is $399. At that price, you might as well get a Mac Mini.
The idea of actually having people have to vote isn't a bad idea. From my understanding of the US system, they vote on absolutely everything. If you could strike an "none of the above" option on the vote to basically say "I don't care, and have no idea who these people are, or why I'm voting on such stupid trivial matters all the time", then I'm sure that a lot of the things they are voting on would go away. In Canada we have 3 votes. One for municipal government (mayor and councillors), One provincial vote where you make vote for your member of provincial parliament, and one for federal where you vote for your member of parliament. That's it, 3 votes, held during different times, and the two biggest ones require that you check a single box.
And the Mexicans are wondering, Why don't they all use two question marks? Of course from my preview, it looks like slashdot doesn't support upside down question marks
How come Canada is doing so much better than the US. Our country is bigger than yours, and has 1/10 of the population. The US has a population density of 31 people per square kilometer, while Canada's population density is 3.2 people per square kilometer. If it's all about population density, then why does Canada have a much better broadband penetration.
So if I had somebody working for me who was an alcoholic, and came in drunk everyday, then I wouldn't be able to fire him, and would actually have to make accommodations for him and his "disability"? What kind of accomodations are we talking about here? Sounds kind of messed up to me.
If web developers want to test on mac, then they should get a mac. Just as testing using Konquerer doesn't show the same results as Safari on Mac, so too will be the experience when using Safari for Windows. If you are really hard up for cash, and can't afford a mac for every web developer in your office, then get a single Mac Mini, and run 4 copies of VNC on 4 different logged in users. It's a little slow but you're just testing web pages, so it really shouldn't matter. If that is still too far outside your budget, or you are a one man shop, and it's not within your budget to get a Mac, then it doesn't matter enough to you that you aren't testing on Safari. If it matters to you, you will find the $599 to buy a Mac Mini.
How many times does it have to be said that you can't give voters the ability to verify at home that their vote was counted for a certain candidate because it takes the "anonymity" out of the voting process. If you can show yourself, and someone else who you voted for, then people can buy/force votes. Also, after watching Hacking Democracy, I would say this also doesn't verify anything. Because they started out 1 candidate with negative votes, and the other with positive votes. In this instance, everybody checking would see that their vote was counted correctly, but the finally tally would still be off.
Nobody is watching the counters. That is the problem. With tradition hand counted paper ballots, votes are allowed to stick around after the election and watch them count the votes to ensure they are being counted right.
It's really funny that you bring up those statistics about the poor and car ownership. I live in Canada so things may be a bit different here, but I find that poor people will do everything they can to own a car, even if it's a really unreliable car that's falling apart. I know lots of people without cars, and most of the time it's not that they can't afford it but rather they've decided it costs too much to have something that's really reliable, and they wouldn't really use it that much anyway. And they don't feel they need to have it to show off their status.
Counting votes is not a serial process. It can be highly parallelized. The fact that you have 10 times as many people also means you have 10 times as many people to count them. Even India uses paper ballots, and if they can do it with their population, I'm sure the US can handle it too.
I'm Canadian, and currently we use pen and paper ballots counted by hand. I'm not going to say our voting process is problem free, but it seems to have a lot less problems then what exists in the US system. Seems to me like fighting for OSS and paper trails in the voting process is the wrong battle, and that you should be fighting to go back to paper, hand counted votes. It's a lot more transparent to the voters that things are being messed with. With software and computers thrown into the mix, most voters have no idea how to verify that the voting is done in a reliable manner.
But I don't want to manage my own hardware node, and I imagine lots of other people don't either. Oh, maybe we could pay somebody else to take care of our hardware node needs. We'll pay them the cost of the node, plus some money for all the time they spend managing the nodes. Then there will be a bunch of different people managing a bunch of different nodes. Maybe they will get together and pool their resources to make things even more efficient and have a bigger profit. I don't want to manage my own internet node, just like I don't want to fix my own car, make my own clothes, or grow my own food. I'm happy paying someone else for the cost plus profit, if it means I don't have to do everything myself.
I don't make a lot of long distance calls, but even if I did, there are good rates available. I can get 3-4 cent per minute calls anywhere in Canada and US, and most of Europe can be done for under 10 cents a minute.
This is kind of like my idea for torrents. Back when SuprNova was crashing under the pressure of too many users, I thought they should just make a daily torrent of all the torrents, and have a web server with static links to those torrents. So, you download the torrent list over bit torrent, and browse and search it on your own computer. Then you just download the stuff you want. Simple, with no websites needed to distribute the actual torrents, and the authorities have nobody to shut down.
$750 per month? Even if I got the best packages available, I wouldn't even be paying half of that. I'm not sure where you live, but those rates are extremely high.
Have you ever had a piece of snail-mail not reach you? I know I have. If it wasn't for all the junk mail, maybe the postal service could spend more time ensuring that your mail actually gets delivered, and to the correct address. This is the reason I quit Zip.CA. Too many movies didn't show up in my locked (because I live in an apartment) mailbox.
You need to have a computer sorting your parcels for you. With things like spamassassin, you don't need to weed through the 500 spam messages to get the three requested emails. It's all done automatically. I get lots of spam directed at my email address, However I don't actually have to see that much of it because I have good filters.
It's amazing the number of people who replied to the quotes who seem like they didn't get the reference. I'm a big Kubrick fan, so I got it right away. However, I don't find it that bad, as I've tried to get my wife to watch it many times to no avail. For some reason, if I mention any movie made before 1990, then I get some weird look.
That project course can sometimes be really bad, or really good depending on how it is organized. I took software engineering, but I know a lot of people who took computer science.
Here's how the project course works in software engineering. In a group of 4 to 6 people, do a project either for a professor, business, or your own product for the open market. Go through all the requirements, design, implementation, testing, and documentation. The project lasts for 2 semesters. If you happen to be in co-op, and you don't have 2 consecutive semesters, then the project ends 12 months after it starts, but you aren't expected to work on the project for the 4 months you're on coop (although everyone does).
Here's how it worked in computer science. Work in a "group" of 2 people. The project lasts 1 semester. You get 1 month to figure out what project you are doing, and the project must be completed before the exams. This gives you 2 months to complete your project. There is no customer per se, and you can pretty much just make up and do whichever kind of programming assignment you want. Documentation is minimal because of the constrained time requirements and the fact that there's only 2 people in the group.
I've taken courses that require more work for the assignments then the CS project at my university, not even counting time spend on studying for exams and lectures. I'm not saying that CS is worse than Software Engineering, but how a course is implemented can greatly affect how useful it is to the students.
Not to mention the latency of internet on cell phones. Even on 56K modem the response time can be OK for Ajax stuff as long as you're not trying to send too much data. However with cell phones, the latency is so high, that even the "who want's to be a millionaire" game I run over my cell phone is painfully slow.
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I didn't know the Neo Geo was supposed to be a rental unit. Anyway, the only place I ever say it was at my local rental shop. My local video game rental shop had set up their own arcade. They had a bunch of SNES/Genesis/Neo Geo machines set up, and you payed by the hour to play the games. I think you could buy time in 15 minute or half hour slots. I'm sure they made a killing this way. First, you could try out the consoles and games before you bought them, and it got people into the store to rent games. There would also be a lot of people just standing around and watching, just like in the real arcade, but most of them ended up renting games, so it was good for business. Plus pay by the hour was a much better model for arcade games, since it didn't matter if you sucked, you didn't have to spend extra money. Eventually they closed down. However, I wish I could still find places like this.
Are there any programming magazines that still have code listings? or that ship with a CD with the code on it, which would be preferable? It seems like most of the good reading for programmers has moved to the web. Do any print magazines still exist? On a less related note, I was at the grocery store and realized that not one of the magazines in the checkout line was targeted to men. I know the demographic means that most of the shoppers will be women, but I don't see why there should be no magazines for men. Anyway, it seems like the only magazines that are still around are the ones that will sell huge numbers of copies.
Just curious. What things has Nintendo done that you consider "evil"?
While the target audiences are different, the target audiences overlapped. Nintendo chose to build a console that almost everyone would like in some way. Sony chose to build a console that only a small portion of people would like. Sony limited their market by making it cost so much, that even a lot of people who would probably want one, aren't buying one. Same thing happened to NeoGeo. Everybody that I knew who saw the thing said they wanted one, but I don't know anybody who actually bought one. I would like to own a PS3, but it is way out of my price range. So by having a smaller number of people who actually want the product, and by making it really expensive, they have really cut down on sales. Decreasing the price will bring up sales, but it won't capture as many sales as the Wii, because their target market is "everybody".
Actually, according to Plato, the best form of governance would be a benevolent dictator. However, this has yet to happen in actuality. It would probably be the best thing. But finding a human with absolute power, who wouldn't get corrupted in some way or another is hard/impossible to come by. It may make sense to have a computer making the decisions for everyone such that the rules end up making the most people happy, instead of the people with the most money, as things tend to go now. Since a computer has no need for money, and can't be threatened, it would actually be able to do the job fairly well.
Those look pretty good for showing you the end result of how your page renders, but I'm not sure how well they would work when you need to debug something and constantly change and recheck the HTML. Also, I doesn't (as least from what I understand) tell you how javascript runs on the browser, as it doesn't give you an interactive experience. Also, the prices seem to be a little bit on the high side. The minimum fee for a year is $399. At that price, you might as well get a Mac Mini.
The idea of actually having people have to vote isn't a bad idea. From my understanding of the US system, they vote on absolutely everything. If you could strike an "none of the above" option on the vote to basically say "I don't care, and have no idea who these people are, or why I'm voting on such stupid trivial matters all the time", then I'm sure that a lot of the things they are voting on would go away. In Canada we have 3 votes. One for municipal government (mayor and councillors), One provincial vote where you make vote for your member of provincial parliament, and one for federal where you vote for your member of parliament. That's it, 3 votes, held during different times, and the two biggest ones require that you check a single box.
And the Mexicans are wondering, Why don't they all use two question marks? Of course from my preview, it looks like slashdot doesn't support upside down question marks
How come Canada is doing so much better than the US. Our country is bigger than yours, and has 1/10 of the population. The US has a population density of 31 people per square kilometer, while Canada's population density is 3.2 people per square kilometer. If it's all about population density, then why does Canada have a much better broadband penetration.
So if I had somebody working for me who was an alcoholic, and came in drunk everyday, then I wouldn't be able to fire him, and would actually have to make accommodations for him and his "disability"? What kind of accomodations are we talking about here? Sounds kind of messed up to me.
If web developers want to test on mac, then they should get a mac. Just as testing using Konquerer doesn't show the same results as Safari on Mac, so too will be the experience when using Safari for Windows. If you are really hard up for cash, and can't afford a mac for every web developer in your office, then get a single Mac Mini, and run 4 copies of VNC on 4 different logged in users. It's a little slow but you're just testing web pages, so it really shouldn't matter. If that is still too far outside your budget, or you are a one man shop, and it's not within your budget to get a Mac, then it doesn't matter enough to you that you aren't testing on Safari. If it matters to you, you will find the $599 to buy a Mac Mini.
How many times does it have to be said that you can't give voters the ability to verify at home that their vote was counted for a certain candidate because it takes the "anonymity" out of the voting process. If you can show yourself, and someone else who you voted for, then people can buy/force votes. Also, after watching Hacking Democracy, I would say this also doesn't verify anything. Because they started out 1 candidate with negative votes, and the other with positive votes. In this instance, everybody checking would see that their vote was counted correctly, but the finally tally would still be off.
Nobody is watching the counters. That is the problem. With tradition hand counted paper ballots, votes are allowed to stick around after the election and watch them count the votes to ensure they are being counted right.
It's really funny that you bring up those statistics about the poor and car ownership. I live in Canada so things may be a bit different here, but I find that poor people will do everything they can to own a car, even if it's a really unreliable car that's falling apart. I know lots of people without cars, and most of the time it's not that they can't afford it but rather they've decided it costs too much to have something that's really reliable, and they wouldn't really use it that much anyway. And they don't feel they need to have it to show off their status.
Counting votes is not a serial process. It can be highly parallelized. The fact that you have 10 times as many people also means you have 10 times as many people to count them. Even India uses paper ballots, and if they can do it with their population, I'm sure the US can handle it too.
I'm Canadian, and currently we use pen and paper ballots counted by hand. I'm not going to say our voting process is problem free, but it seems to have a lot less problems then what exists in the US system. Seems to me like fighting for OSS and paper trails in the voting process is the wrong battle, and that you should be fighting to go back to paper, hand counted votes. It's a lot more transparent to the voters that things are being messed with. With software and computers thrown into the mix, most voters have no idea how to verify that the voting is done in a reliable manner.
But I don't want to manage my own hardware node, and I imagine lots of other people don't either. Oh, maybe we could pay somebody else to take care of our hardware node needs. We'll pay them the cost of the node, plus some money for all the time they spend managing the nodes. Then there will be a bunch of different people managing a bunch of different nodes. Maybe they will get together and pool their resources to make things even more efficient and have a bigger profit. I don't want to manage my own internet node, just like I don't want to fix my own car, make my own clothes, or grow my own food. I'm happy paying someone else for the cost plus profit, if it means I don't have to do everything myself.
I don't make a lot of long distance calls, but even if I did, there are good rates available. I can get 3-4 cent per minute calls anywhere in Canada and US, and most of Europe can be done for under 10 cents a minute.
This is kind of like my idea for torrents. Back when SuprNova was crashing under the pressure of too many users, I thought they should just make a daily torrent of all the torrents, and have a web server with static links to those torrents. So, you download the torrent list over bit torrent, and browse and search it on your own computer. Then you just download the stuff you want. Simple, with no websites needed to distribute the actual torrents, and the authorities have nobody to shut down.
$750 per month? Even if I got the best packages available, I wouldn't even be paying half of that. I'm not sure where you live, but those rates are extremely high.
Have you ever had a piece of snail-mail not reach you? I know I have. If it wasn't for all the junk mail, maybe the postal service could spend more time ensuring that your mail actually gets delivered, and to the correct address. This is the reason I quit Zip.CA. Too many movies didn't show up in my locked (because I live in an apartment) mailbox.
You need to have a computer sorting your parcels for you. With things like spamassassin, you don't need to weed through the 500 spam messages to get the three requested emails. It's all done automatically. I get lots of spam directed at my email address, However I don't actually have to see that much of it because I have good filters.
It's amazing the number of people who replied to the quotes who seem like they didn't get the reference. I'm a big Kubrick fan, so I got it right away. However, I don't find it that bad, as I've tried to get my wife to watch it many times to no avail. For some reason, if I mention any movie made before 1990, then I get some weird look.
That project course can sometimes be really bad, or really good depending on how it is organized. I took software engineering, but I know a lot of people who took computer science.
Here's how the project course works in software engineering. In a group of 4 to 6 people, do a project either for a professor, business, or your own product for the open market. Go through all the requirements, design, implementation, testing, and documentation. The project lasts for 2 semesters. If you happen to be in co-op, and you don't have 2 consecutive semesters, then the project ends 12 months after it starts, but you aren't expected to work on the project for the 4 months you're on coop (although everyone does).
Here's how it worked in computer science. Work in a "group" of 2 people. The project lasts 1 semester. You get 1 month to figure out what project you are doing, and the project must be completed before the exams. This gives you 2 months to complete your project. There is no customer per se, and you can pretty much just make up and do whichever kind of programming assignment you want. Documentation is minimal because of the constrained time requirements and the fact that there's only 2 people in the group.
I've taken courses that require more work for the assignments then the CS project at my university, not even counting time spend on studying for exams and lectures. I'm not saying that CS is worse than Software Engineering, but how a course is implemented can greatly affect how useful it is to the students.
Not to mention the latency of internet on cell phones. Even on 56K modem the response time can be OK for Ajax stuff as long as you're not trying to send too much data. However with cell phones, the latency is so high, that even the "who want's to be a millionaire" game I run over my cell phone is painfully slow.