Sometimes its nice just to sit down and play for half an hour. I was playing Zelda Twilight Princess (GC) last night, and I already had 2 key shards from the second dungeon from when I saved last time, I was right up to the point before where you fight the big fat rolling stone guy. It still took me an hour to finish the dungeon. And it's not like I got particularly stuck on any section. I spend another half hour running around the town afterwards collecting stuff, and buying new items. I like the game a lot. It's tons of fun. Probably the best Zelda game I've ever played. But it's not something you can just sit down and play for 30 minutes. By the time your 30 minutes is up, you're just getting into it. Games need to be of all kinds to attract the widest audience. When I want to play for 30 minutes, I get super monkey ball, Mario Kart, or something else like that. We need games of all types. Even for people like me, who enjoy playing long drawn out games.
It looks pretty bad when you can get 500 GB hard disks for less than $150. 25 times the storage for 15 times the price isn't bad. Also, I've never seen rewritable media that comes anywhere close to the reliability of a hard drive.
Seniority doesn't equal doing a better job. If they are in fact a better teacher, than they should get paid more. Just as the more experienced developer who's better should get paid more. However, I've seen a lot of mediocre teachers who get paid more just by the fact that they've been there longer, and not because they are any better than any of the other teachers. Just like my example with bus drivers, just because you've been doing it for 25 years, doesn't mean that you're doing it any better. You can only be so good at driving a bus. As long as you stick to the schedule, and are courteous to the riders (something missing from a lot of the older drivers), and obey the traffic laws, you are doing about as good as you can do. I don't think that a developer who's been around for 25 years deserves more than the guy who's been around for 5 if he's never upgraded his skills, and actually does a worse job than the guy who'd only been around for 5 years. I'm not against people getting paid more for doing something better. However I am against people getting paid more just from the virtue of being there a long time.
You have pretty high standards for what constitutes living comfortably. Many people are never able to buy a house, nor are they able to pay for their children's education. My parents didn't pay for my education, and I was able to get one. It's great to be able to finance your child's education, but that is a luxury. Like I said, 30 K is quite enough money, especially as a starting salary. If you don't think so, you need to re-evaluate your priorities. Also, your calculations are off, because you aren't considering that there's a second person making money in the family. While some people still have the wife stay home, the vast majority of families have both parents working. So, your 600K becomes 1.2 Million. Just as a reference point, I'm currently making $45,000 a year, and my wife isn't working, because she stays home and looks after the kids. I have no problem paying the bills, and actually have quite a bit of money left over at the end of each month. And we are still paying off our student loans (Total $300 a month). In 3 years, I'll have enough saved up for a down payment and I'll be able to buy a house.
Not only that, but the hours are really good. Find me another job where you have 2 weeks off at Christmas, another week off for march break, and over 2 months off every summer, And you only have to work 8-4. And you get 1 hour lunch break. You also get benefits (all the teachers I know do), and you get to be part of a union, which gives you really good job security. It's a really sweet deal when you think about it. The top end is a little low, but why should experienced teachers get more money than the new teachers. They are doing the same job. They should make a little more because they have more experience, but I don't think they deserve anthing like twice as much. Otherwise you end up with the situation like with city bus drivers, where people are getting paid $70,000 to drive a bus. Sure they've been doing the job for 25 years, but that doesn't mean the are actually worth any more than the guy who's only been driving the bus for 5 years.
$30K is more than enough to put food on the table in most areas. If you don't think so, you are either living in a very expensive area, or need to get your priorities in order. When I graduated (3 years ago) I made $30K at my first job. I was glad to be making so much money. I wasn't rich, but I wasn't scrounging for money all the time either. And I had student loans to pay off too. If I didn't have those, I would have been rolling in the cash.
I don't find MS's offerings to be all that consistent either. Take office 12. It's a complete redesign of the UI, and although it's touted as being "better" it's still extremely inconsistent, and unlike anything else out there. Most MS Apps I see aren't very consistent with other MS Apps, because they were built by different teams, at different times, and they had no communication. The downside of using windows is that if you don't want to use the UI that windows offers, it's quite hard to change it.
The benefit is that they can reproduce without a mate, not that they have to. Obviously to have diversity in the species, mating is necessary, but it's better to have offspring with no diversity rather than no offspring at all. This type of reproduction is good as a last resort, not as the norm.
Since you brought car analogies into it, lets equate people's stupidity with computers to that with driving. The way most people act with a computer (something they use every day), and a car (another thing they use every day) is completely different. When the car starts to beep because it's running low on gas, most people pull into a gas station and fill up the tank. When you computer displays a warning that it's running low on disk space, most people freak out, try to figure out what it means (which takes 10 minutes), and promptly start to delete things like windows DLLs, because they've never used them before and don't know what all those files are for. Or they will just ignore it, and then start to complain in two weeks, when they can't save their latest word document, because they are completely out of space.
Um, human interface designers come in at the point where you want the average person to be able to use it. You better believe M$ has a small army of them that they throw at every project that comes through their system.
And look at the great results that MS gets. I'm not saying that Linux has an amazing UI, but I don't really see where it's any worse than the average MS offering.
Because these people happened to buy an Apple laptop. They have nothing to sue anybody else for, because they never bought a computer from them. If they win, maybe those who bought displays from other manufacturers could bring up their own lawsuit.
I think in the US it works like this. You can advertise a drug. But if you want to advertise what it actually does, you have to list out all the side effects, along with a bunch of other information. This is why many magazines have drug ads, followed by a full page of fine print with all the stuff they are legally required to have. Or you get the ads that just say the name brand, without actually saying what they do. This works well for things that are already well known, like Tylenol, and Advil.
Also, who cares about re-releases of movies that came out years ago. If you like the movies, then you likely already have them on DVD, and most people aren't going to run out and buy them again. I often wonder why they try to push old movies that most fans probably already own, while simultaneously not releasing new movies in HD formats. The same thing happened with DVD. I'm not saying it garauntees them to fail or anything like that, but as a consumer it's just play annoying to have this new technology, and the only content being stuff I already own.
Re:distributed network computing?
on
A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Really it's not that bad of an idea. Create something that looks like image spam. Hide the encrypted information using stenography in the image, and send it out to millions of people, including the intended recipient. Everybody except the intended recipient deletes the message. It makes it harder to track down who you are communicating with, and harder to find out which messages actually contain useful information. It's similar to in olden days when they used to put a secret message in the classifieds of the newspaper. Only the people who know that it was supposed to be there could actually get the hidden message, but it was there for everyone to see.
Re:distributed network computing?
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But with this kind of computation time, you just have to send lots of junk traffic to make them waste all their computing resources. If you send out 500 messages a day, only 1 of which has actual usable information in it, then they are going to be wasting a lot of computing resources just to find out which messages actually have usable information. With computation times this high, it would be easy to flood them with data so that they wouldn't have enough time to decrypt everything.
Re:Why Does Encryption Need to "Scramble" Informat
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 1
Isn't this the way some cryptography systems work? Using Diffie Helman key exchange to decide a secret key. Assuming nobody knows the key is what makes it secure. Just like in WWII, they assumed the enemy didn't understand Navajo. I'm not sure what kind of computing would be necessary for the computers to agree on a decryption/encryption language. They'd probably have a set list of ciphers that they both supported. I don't think there's any way to create strong ciphers on the fly. Another problem is how to transfer the cipher language to the other machine without anybody being able to intercept it. I guess the best solution would be to use diffie-helman key exchange to generate a key that's the same length as the message, and use that to encrypt the message. You would effectively create a one time pad. However, I think that something of this nature is currently too resource intensive for any reasonable size of message.
I never really understood the need for scripting in an office application myself. I certainly think it causes more problems then it solves. And not just in the security aspects. It seems to me that the only things that result from scripting is security holes, and tying the user to the word processor, ala, we can't use OpenOffice, because we've programmed our entire business into MS Word macros, making it impossible to switch. Also, when scripting is provided, it should be sandboxed to ensure that nothing really bad happens. You don't need scripts that can open sockets in your word processor, or reading arbitrary files on the hard disk. Scripts should only have the ability to do things that the user would normally do with the application they are using.
My wife can hear when the TV is on. It bugs me because she'll come in the room and complain that I left the TV on, meanwhile, I'm completely unaware that it's on. I'll leave it on when I turn off the cable box, or the game system, so the TV is black, and there's no sound coming from the speakers. If I really try and listen, then I can hear it, but it's not something that i'll notice above all the other sounds that you generally hear living in the city, and having a computer in the same room.
I'm not at all surprised by this. The majority of ISPs would love to sell $50 a month internet service to everyone and tell them it's a 5 MBit connection with a 100 GB traffic cap and have them only use it for eMail and browsing sites that contain mostly text. However, I think that things are going to have to change in the future. With all the high bandwidth content being offered online, they are going to have to accept that some people are going to be using a lot of traffic. And they should start charging what they think is fair and stop complaining that people are using their allotted bandwidth.
But as one of your sibling posters mentioned, It's a recognized disability in Sweden. Even with all this evidence against it, it seems as though you can still claim that there is something wrong with you, even if it is completely undetectable. I remember hearing about this on my local news, and they talked about this like it was a real problem, and didn't even mention that there was no studies supporting it, or lots of studies that said there was no effects. It's the same problem with lots of other disabilities you see people with. People will claim their back hurts, so they can sit around at home and collect a cheque instead of working. Even though they have no problem doing all the gardening, and every one of their neighbours knows they don't have back problems, it's really hard to prove that someone isn't feeling pain. People are just looking for a free ride and will get it any way they can.
Here's the problem though. The reason they aren't including the codecs is because they are proprietary, and would require royalty payments. If they just have some script that automatically downloads and installs a script at the click of 1 button just by trying to open the file, then I don't see how this really gets around any royalty issues. What's the difference between including it in the base installation, and installing it automatically when the user clicks on a file?
I see lots of complaints of this. People who are extra sensitive to electronics and such. I would like to submit these people to a double blind study so that we can prove (or disprove) the effects are real, and not people who just have something else wrong with them that makes them feel more tired, or have headaches, or unable to concentrate, or whatever other symptoms they have. It seems to me like there's a lot of anecdotal evidence, but that there isn't any real studies being done.
That's the same frequency as many cordless phones. How many people spend hours with one of those things right up against the side of their head. Why isn't anybody complaining about those. As far as I remember from my physics classes electromagnetic waves lose power as a square of the distance. And since my cordless phone and wifi network have similar range, they must use the waves of the same strength. So, I must say that if we're going to be worried about wifi, that we should all throw out our cordless phones right now.
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Shooting at a cop is already illegal. If you're going to fire a bullet at a cop, then the legality of the bullets isn't going to stop you.
It mentions how well it compares on stopping a bullet, but what about other factors like weight, or maneuverability while wearing the vest.
Sometimes its nice just to sit down and play for half an hour. I was playing Zelda Twilight Princess (GC) last night, and I already had 2 key shards from the second dungeon from when I saved last time, I was right up to the point before where you fight the big fat rolling stone guy. It still took me an hour to finish the dungeon. And it's not like I got particularly stuck on any section. I spend another half hour running around the town afterwards collecting stuff, and buying new items. I like the game a lot. It's tons of fun. Probably the best Zelda game I've ever played. But it's not something you can just sit down and play for 30 minutes. By the time your 30 minutes is up, you're just getting into it. Games need to be of all kinds to attract the widest audience. When I want to play for 30 minutes, I get super monkey ball, Mario Kart, or something else like that. We need games of all types. Even for people like me, who enjoy playing long drawn out games.
It looks pretty bad when you can get 500 GB hard disks for less than $150. 25 times the storage for 15 times the price isn't bad. Also, I've never seen rewritable media that comes anywhere close to the reliability of a hard drive.
You have pretty high standards for what constitutes living comfortably. Many people are never able to buy a house, nor are they able to pay for their children's education. My parents didn't pay for my education, and I was able to get one. It's great to be able to finance your child's education, but that is a luxury. Like I said, 30 K is quite enough money, especially as a starting salary. If you don't think so, you need to re-evaluate your priorities. Also, your calculations are off, because you aren't considering that there's a second person making money in the family. While some people still have the wife stay home, the vast majority of families have both parents working. So, your 600K becomes 1.2 Million. Just as a reference point, I'm currently making $45,000 a year, and my wife isn't working, because she stays home and looks after the kids. I have no problem paying the bills, and actually have quite a bit of money left over at the end of each month. And we are still paying off our student loans (Total $300 a month). In 3 years, I'll have enough saved up for a down payment and I'll be able to buy a house.
Not only that, but the hours are really good. Find me another job where you have 2 weeks off at Christmas, another week off for march break, and over 2 months off every summer, And you only have to work 8-4. And you get 1 hour lunch break. You also get benefits (all the teachers I know do), and you get to be part of a union, which gives you really good job security. It's a really sweet deal when you think about it. The top end is a little low, but why should experienced teachers get more money than the new teachers. They are doing the same job. They should make a little more because they have more experience, but I don't think they deserve anthing like twice as much. Otherwise you end up with the situation like with city bus drivers, where people are getting paid $70,000 to drive a bus. Sure they've been doing the job for 25 years, but that doesn't mean the are actually worth any more than the guy who's only been driving the bus for 5 years.
$30K is more than enough to put food on the table in most areas. If you don't think so, you are either living in a very expensive area, or need to get your priorities in order. When I graduated (3 years ago) I made $30K at my first job. I was glad to be making so much money. I wasn't rich, but I wasn't scrounging for money all the time either. And I had student loans to pay off too. If I didn't have those, I would have been rolling in the cash.
I don't find MS's offerings to be all that consistent either. Take office 12. It's a complete redesign of the UI, and although it's touted as being "better" it's still extremely inconsistent, and unlike anything else out there. Most MS Apps I see aren't very consistent with other MS Apps, because they were built by different teams, at different times, and they had no communication. The downside of using windows is that if you don't want to use the UI that windows offers, it's quite hard to change it.
The benefit is that they can reproduce without a mate, not that they have to. Obviously to have diversity in the species, mating is necessary, but it's better to have offspring with no diversity rather than no offspring at all. This type of reproduction is good as a last resort, not as the norm.
Since you brought car analogies into it, lets equate people's stupidity with computers to that with driving. The way most people act with a computer (something they use every day), and a car (another thing they use every day) is completely different. When the car starts to beep because it's running low on gas, most people pull into a gas station and fill up the tank. When you computer displays a warning that it's running low on disk space, most people freak out, try to figure out what it means (which takes 10 minutes), and promptly start to delete things like windows DLLs, because they've never used them before and don't know what all those files are for. Or they will just ignore it, and then start to complain in two weeks, when they can't save their latest word document, because they are completely out of space.
Because these people happened to buy an Apple laptop. They have nothing to sue anybody else for, because they never bought a computer from them. If they win, maybe those who bought displays from other manufacturers could bring up their own lawsuit.
I think in the US it works like this. You can advertise a drug. But if you want to advertise what it actually does, you have to list out all the side effects, along with a bunch of other information. This is why many magazines have drug ads, followed by a full page of fine print with all the stuff they are legally required to have. Or you get the ads that just say the name brand, without actually saying what they do. This works well for things that are already well known, like Tylenol, and Advil.
Also, who cares about re-releases of movies that came out years ago. If you like the movies, then you likely already have them on DVD, and most people aren't going to run out and buy them again. I often wonder why they try to push old movies that most fans probably already own, while simultaneously not releasing new movies in HD formats. The same thing happened with DVD. I'm not saying it garauntees them to fail or anything like that, but as a consumer it's just play annoying to have this new technology, and the only content being stuff I already own.
Really it's not that bad of an idea. Create something that looks like image spam. Hide the encrypted information using stenography in the image, and send it out to millions of people, including the intended recipient. Everybody except the intended recipient deletes the message. It makes it harder to track down who you are communicating with, and harder to find out which messages actually contain useful information. It's similar to in olden days when they used to put a secret message in the classifieds of the newspaper. Only the people who know that it was supposed to be there could actually get the hidden message, but it was there for everyone to see.
But with this kind of computation time, you just have to send lots of junk traffic to make them waste all their computing resources. If you send out 500 messages a day, only 1 of which has actual usable information in it, then they are going to be wasting a lot of computing resources just to find out which messages actually have usable information. With computation times this high, it would be easy to flood them with data so that they wouldn't have enough time to decrypt everything.
Isn't this the way some cryptography systems work? Using Diffie Helman key exchange to decide a secret key. Assuming nobody knows the key is what makes it secure. Just like in WWII, they assumed the enemy didn't understand Navajo. I'm not sure what kind of computing would be necessary for the computers to agree on a decryption/encryption language. They'd probably have a set list of ciphers that they both supported. I don't think there's any way to create strong ciphers on the fly. Another problem is how to transfer the cipher language to the other machine without anybody being able to intercept it. I guess the best solution would be to use diffie-helman key exchange to generate a key that's the same length as the message, and use that to encrypt the message. You would effectively create a one time pad. However, I think that something of this nature is currently too resource intensive for any reasonable size of message.
I never really understood the need for scripting in an office application myself. I certainly think it causes more problems then it solves. And not just in the security aspects. It seems to me that the only things that result from scripting is security holes, and tying the user to the word processor, ala, we can't use OpenOffice, because we've programmed our entire business into MS Word macros, making it impossible to switch. Also, when scripting is provided, it should be sandboxed to ensure that nothing really bad happens. You don't need scripts that can open sockets in your word processor, or reading arbitrary files on the hard disk. Scripts should only have the ability to do things that the user would normally do with the application they are using.
My wife can hear when the TV is on. It bugs me because she'll come in the room and complain that I left the TV on, meanwhile, I'm completely unaware that it's on. I'll leave it on when I turn off the cable box, or the game system, so the TV is black, and there's no sound coming from the speakers. If I really try and listen, then I can hear it, but it's not something that i'll notice above all the other sounds that you generally hear living in the city, and having a computer in the same room.
I'm not at all surprised by this. The majority of ISPs would love to sell $50 a month internet service to everyone and tell them it's a 5 MBit connection with a 100 GB traffic cap and have them only use it for eMail and browsing sites that contain mostly text. However, I think that things are going to have to change in the future. With all the high bandwidth content being offered online, they are going to have to accept that some people are going to be using a lot of traffic. And they should start charging what they think is fair and stop complaining that people are using their allotted bandwidth.
But as one of your sibling posters mentioned, It's a recognized disability in Sweden. Even with all this evidence against it, it seems as though you can still claim that there is something wrong with you, even if it is completely undetectable. I remember hearing about this on my local news, and they talked about this like it was a real problem, and didn't even mention that there was no studies supporting it, or lots of studies that said there was no effects. It's the same problem with lots of other disabilities you see people with. People will claim their back hurts, so they can sit around at home and collect a cheque instead of working. Even though they have no problem doing all the gardening, and every one of their neighbours knows they don't have back problems, it's really hard to prove that someone isn't feeling pain. People are just looking for a free ride and will get it any way they can.
Here's the problem though. The reason they aren't including the codecs is because they are proprietary, and would require royalty payments. If they just have some script that automatically downloads and installs a script at the click of 1 button just by trying to open the file, then I don't see how this really gets around any royalty issues. What's the difference between including it in the base installation, and installing it automatically when the user clicks on a file?
I see lots of complaints of this. People who are extra sensitive to electronics and such. I would like to submit these people to a double blind study so that we can prove (or disprove) the effects are real, and not people who just have something else wrong with them that makes them feel more tired, or have headaches, or unable to concentrate, or whatever other symptoms they have. It seems to me like there's a lot of anecdotal evidence, but that there isn't any real studies being done.
That's the same frequency as many cordless phones. How many people spend hours with one of those things right up against the side of their head. Why isn't anybody complaining about those. As far as I remember from my physics classes electromagnetic waves lose power as a square of the distance. And since my cordless phone and wifi network have similar range, they must use the waves of the same strength. So, I must say that if we're going to be worried about wifi, that we should all throw out our cordless phones right now.