This is so true, in so many aspects. So often, people underestimate the importance of good data. You can have the perfect system, but if you don't have the data to put into the system, then the system is useless. Garbage in == Garbage out.
Why do people want to run their servers on such bleeding edge OSes as Fedora and Gentoo? Unless there is something available for these platforms which isn't available on another more well supported distro (which I doubt) then why run something that is more likely to contain bugs, simply because it hasn't had the time to undergo testing?
MS word is notorious for looking different on different computers, even using the same version. Its a fact that two identical computers with identical versions of MS word, will render a document differently if they have different printers. Why is this? I can't understand the logic behind having the printer determining how a document looks. Why not just ignore the printer? The first problem is that word processors are overcomplicated and try to take too importance on exactly how the document is rendered. The other problem is that people expect entirely too much from their word processor. It evolved from a point where the word processor file was just a flat text file with maybe a couple tags for making text appear a certian way, to a system where you can insert a movie into a document (you can't print the movie). The word processor tries to be the be-all-and-end-all of computer applications, and hence fails miserably
Actually, 1 channel is enough for anyone, provided that 1 channel is always showing exactly what you want to see. Everything on demand is the way of the future. No point in broadcasting everything out to everybody when people aren't watching 98% of the stuff that's on.
Well, there is the AppleTV, which is a good set top box if you want to download all your shows from iTunes. Still I think a better design would be a set top box that had access to all the major online media, and also had a TV Tuner (or 2) to tape shows off the cable. There still isn't enough content available online to make buying a dedicated for watching iTunes tv shows and youtube. There has to be something else that the box offers. I think a good SageTV/MythTV box with a big hard drive and a couple tuners could do really well to open up the world to what computers can do to enhance television.
How do you get a surface that is white, but is all completely non-reflective? Doesn't the fact that you see it as white means it reflects white light (or all colours if you want to get technical). A surface that is completely non-reflective would be black, although just about every surface i've seen will reflect some light.
But do you really want to be switching providers every 3 months? I don't even think we have number portability yet in Canada. Not to mention that you need a new phone every 3 years because they wear out, so you might as well get the provider to pay for it. You still pay the same amount for your service. Sure you can leave anytime you want, but generally the prices aren't that much better on the other side, so it's not really worth the hassle.
This is exactly the way it works. If you buy a phone, you don't have to sign a contract but you still pay the same amount for service. So unless you're planning on switching companies in the next 2 years, then you might as well get them to pitch in some money to get you a new phone. This is why nobody buys the phone. Because you don't get a cheaper rate. You get the option to cancel at anytime, but if you're planning on cancelling your service then why are you signing up in the first place?
Exactly. Who cares if they are selling virtual goods as long as they aren't misrepresenting them. There's bigger problems on eBay, they shouldn't be going after people who aren't trying to scam others.
As long as they are not misrepresenting what they are selling, then I don't see a problem. If I want to pay $100 for someone else to play the first 20 hours of World of Warcraft, so I don't have to play all those low levels, then I should be able to. At the same time, if I get bored with my character, there's no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to sell my character so that somebody else can use it. Who care's if it's not a tangible item. iTunes sells thousands of intangible items everyday, as does every software company that lets you download the product.
Nobody is foring anybody to upgrade to Vista after all.
Unless you count the fact that in 6 months it's going to be very hard to find a computer which comes with Windows XP on it. And if you want to run new versions of other programs, it may be a requirement that you have XP. There's already a lot of programs that refuse to run on windows 2000, which is only a little older than XP. I don't think that it will be all that uncommon in 1 year to find a lot of programs that only run in Vista, especially with games and directX 10.
Couldn't something like this be built into open source browsers like Firefox, without using active X? The reason they used activeX is because that was the only way of changing the functionality of IE. But if the browser was open source, they could just add the functionality right into the browser. Then users of all operating systems could do all this e-commerce stuff.
They got rid of it because they realized they have a monopoly on internet access and flights, so there's no point in giving away the internet. It's not like people are going to go to a different airport if the other one has free internet. You go to the airport that your plane flies out of. and usually there's only 1 major airport in each city.
I think in a discussion before it was that you couldn't destroy money for fraudulent purposes. So bleaching $1 bill and printing a $20 on it would constitute this crime, although printing your own money is already illegal. In the same way, they don't want you cutting the edges off your coints and minting new coins. This used to happen a long time ago, I haven't heard of anybody doing it recently.
No, it means you pay 1.95. Because that's closer to 1.96. If you buy something that's 1.98, then you pay $2. 0.98,0.99, 1.01, 1.02 round to 1.00, and.97, and.96 rounds to.95, and 1.03, and 1.04 rounds to 1.05. So over the long run it all evens out just fine.
Is that really all the disk space you get? An HD-DVD movie can be 25 GB. The one they posted on Pirate bay last week was 19 GB I think. That's only 8 movies on 160 GB. Or maybe they just over compress everything they record. You'd be much better off getting a TV tuner and a 500 GB disk, and recording everything in standard definition at 12 Mb/S
Like the guy below you pointed out, how many people who have HD-DVRs actually have an HD TV? It's a valid question. There's probably quite a few people who opted for the HD-DVR because it gets better quality than the standard DVR, even with a regular TV. Maybe they got the HD receiver because all the stuff in standard res is overcompressed crap with tons of artifacts. Then again, maybe the HD stuff is too. I don't have HD tv, but the standard digital cable is often worse than the analog signal that runs beside it because of over compression.
I'm canadian and i got by with a basic scientific calculator until I was in university. In high school I never needed much more, even though we had 5 years of high school, with lots of time for caculus, algegra, and finite math courses. When I got to university, they told us we had to the the TI-86. It is a great calculator, and was very useful for courses that we were allowed to use it for. A lot of courses didn't let us use anything above a TI-30 because they didn't want us programming the textbook into the calculator. Which I know people who did for many courses. I think the only thing we actually needed the calculator for was to run some reimann sums program that the professor gave us. I don't know why they were testing us on our ability to run a program, but thank god I didn't sell that calculator after first year, because it helped out a lot later on in my university career.
We recorded, and still do record lots of stuff with the VCR. But we don't keep any of it. The tapes are too bulky and too expensive to bother. But if you have a SageTV box, with a 300 GB HD and a DVD burner, it becomes a lot easier to keep the material you are recording.
Here is why HDTV is too expensive. First you have to buy the TV. Then you have to buy the BluRay or HDDVD. Then you have to buy movies for HDDVD/BluRay, Then you have to subscribe to even more expensive cable/satellite services. With DVD you could buy the player and a couple movies, and see results. Not so with this HD stuff. If you buy the TV, but stick with the old content you won't see any difference. If you get the new player, you can't see and difference unless you get a new TV.
I don't believe that people can't learn to use the keyboard if the GUI isn't there. I remember learning wordPerfect 5.1 back in highschool, and everything could be done via the keyboard. There was a strip of paper that sat above the keyboard outlining which combination of shift, ctrl, alt, and F# key did which action. Every student I know had most of that memorized. I'm not just talking about the computer geeks either. This is just the way the software worked, and people learned to use it. I guess it would be kind of annoying to new users, or people who only used a program once every couple of weeks. However, those people would have a hard time anyway. Even with a GUI.
So, basically, the UK is getting ripped off, because the Americans are only paying $USD 0.99, and the Canadians are getting an even better deal at $US 0.84
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This is so true, in so many aspects. So often, people underestimate the importance of good data. You can have the perfect system, but if you don't have the data to put into the system, then the system is useless. Garbage in == Garbage out.
$4 Canadian can still buy you 4 iTunes songs.
MS word is notorious for looking different on different computers, even using the same version. Its a fact that two identical computers with identical versions of MS word, will render a document differently if they have different printers. Why is this? I can't understand the logic behind having the printer determining how a document looks. Why not just ignore the printer? The first problem is that word processors are overcomplicated and try to take too importance on exactly how the document is rendered. The other problem is that people expect entirely too much from their word processor. It evolved from a point where the word processor file was just a flat text file with maybe a couple tags for making text appear a certian way, to a system where you can insert a movie into a document (you can't print the movie). The word processor tries to be the be-all-and-end-all of computer applications, and hence fails miserably
Actually, 1 channel is enough for anyone, provided that 1 channel is always showing exactly what you want to see. Everything on demand is the way of the future. No point in broadcasting everything out to everybody when people aren't watching 98% of the stuff that's on.
Well, there is the AppleTV, which is a good set top box if you want to download all your shows from iTunes. Still I think a better design would be a set top box that had access to all the major online media, and also had a TV Tuner (or 2) to tape shows off the cable. There still isn't enough content available online to make buying a dedicated for watching iTunes tv shows and youtube. There has to be something else that the box offers. I think a good SageTV/MythTV box with a big hard drive and a couple tuners could do really well to open up the world to what computers can do to enhance television.
Ever buy anything at a store that has logos on their bags? They don't make those bags all pretty just for the fun of it. It's a form of advertisement.
How do you get a surface that is white, but is all completely non-reflective? Doesn't the fact that you see it as white means it reflects white light (or all colours if you want to get technical). A surface that is completely non-reflective would be black, although just about every surface i've seen will reflect some light.
But do you really want to be switching providers every 3 months? I don't even think we have number portability yet in Canada. Not to mention that you need a new phone every 3 years because they wear out, so you might as well get the provider to pay for it. You still pay the same amount for your service. Sure you can leave anytime you want, but generally the prices aren't that much better on the other side, so it's not really worth the hassle.
This is exactly the way it works. If you buy a phone, you don't have to sign a contract but you still pay the same amount for service. So unless you're planning on switching companies in the next 2 years, then you might as well get them to pitch in some money to get you a new phone. This is why nobody buys the phone. Because you don't get a cheaper rate. You get the option to cancel at anytime, but if you're planning on cancelling your service then why are you signing up in the first place?
Exactly. Who cares if they are selling virtual goods as long as they aren't misrepresenting them. There's bigger problems on eBay, they shouldn't be going after people who aren't trying to scam others.
As long as they are not misrepresenting what they are selling, then I don't see a problem. If I want to pay $100 for someone else to play the first 20 hours of World of Warcraft, so I don't have to play all those low levels, then I should be able to. At the same time, if I get bored with my character, there's no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to sell my character so that somebody else can use it. Who care's if it's not a tangible item. iTunes sells thousands of intangible items everyday, as does every software company that lets you download the product.
Couldn't something like this be built into open source browsers like Firefox, without using active X? The reason they used activeX is because that was the only way of changing the functionality of IE. But if the browser was open source, they could just add the functionality right into the browser. Then users of all operating systems could do all this e-commerce stuff.
They got rid of it because they realized they have a monopoly on internet access and flights, so there's no point in giving away the internet. It's not like people are going to go to a different airport if the other one has free internet. You go to the airport that your plane flies out of. and usually there's only 1 major airport in each city.
I think in a discussion before it was that you couldn't destroy money for fraudulent purposes. So bleaching $1 bill and printing a $20 on it would constitute this crime, although printing your own money is already illegal. In the same way, they don't want you cutting the edges off your coints and minting new coins. This used to happen a long time ago, I haven't heard of anybody doing it recently.
No, it means you pay 1.95. Because that's closer to 1.96. If you buy something that's 1.98, then you pay $2. 0.98,0.99, 1.01, 1.02 round to 1.00, and .97, and .96 rounds to .95, and 1.03, and 1.04 rounds to 1.05. So over the long run it all evens out just fine.
Is that really all the disk space you get? An HD-DVD movie can be 25 GB. The one they posted on Pirate bay last week was 19 GB I think. That's only 8 movies on 160 GB. Or maybe they just over compress everything they record. You'd be much better off getting a TV tuner and a 500 GB disk, and recording everything in standard definition at 12 Mb/S
Like the guy below you pointed out, how many people who have HD-DVRs actually have an HD TV? It's a valid question. There's probably quite a few people who opted for the HD-DVR because it gets better quality than the standard DVR, even with a regular TV. Maybe they got the HD receiver because all the stuff in standard res is overcompressed crap with tons of artifacts. Then again, maybe the HD stuff is too. I don't have HD tv, but the standard digital cable is often worse than the analog signal that runs beside it because of over compression.
I'm canadian and i got by with a basic scientific calculator until I was in university. In high school I never needed much more, even though we had 5 years of high school, with lots of time for caculus, algegra, and finite math courses. When I got to university, they told us we had to the the TI-86. It is a great calculator, and was very useful for courses that we were allowed to use it for. A lot of courses didn't let us use anything above a TI-30 because they didn't want us programming the textbook into the calculator. Which I know people who did for many courses. I think the only thing we actually needed the calculator for was to run some reimann sums program that the professor gave us. I don't know why they were testing us on our ability to run a program, but thank god I didn't sell that calculator after first year, because it helped out a lot later on in my university career.
We recorded, and still do record lots of stuff with the VCR. But we don't keep any of it. The tapes are too bulky and too expensive to bother. But if you have a SageTV box, with a 300 GB HD and a DVD burner, it becomes a lot easier to keep the material you are recording.
Here is why HDTV is too expensive. First you have to buy the TV. Then you have to buy the BluRay or HDDVD. Then you have to buy movies for HDDVD/BluRay, Then you have to subscribe to even more expensive cable/satellite services. With DVD you could buy the player and a couple movies, and see results. Not so with this HD stuff. If you buy the TV, but stick with the old content you won't see any difference. If you get the new player, you can't see and difference unless you get a new TV.
I don't believe that people can't learn to use the keyboard if the GUI isn't there. I remember learning wordPerfect 5.1 back in highschool, and everything could be done via the keyboard. There was a strip of paper that sat above the keyboard outlining which combination of shift, ctrl, alt, and F# key did which action. Every student I know had most of that memorized. I'm not just talking about the computer geeks either. This is just the way the software worked, and people learned to use it. I guess it would be kind of annoying to new users, or people who only used a program once every couple of weeks. However, those people would have a hard time anyway. Even with a GUI.
So, basically, the UK is getting ripped off, because the Americans are only paying $USD 0.99, and the Canadians are getting an even better deal at $US 0.84