Yeah, I thought of that too. In the book, Microsoft gave them away for free, thinking they were unhackable, and hoping to make their money back selling games. People found out how to hack them (surprise, surprise) and were able to run whatever they wanted to on them. This is why this concept of giving away the hardware for free is almost always a bad idea. If they really could build unhackable hardware, then I could see a business case for this, but making the hardware free makes the payoff for hacking it way too high.
t's called multiplying all your dollar/euro/pound amounts by 100 and using int (or long for big B2B transactions over 10 million dollars or so) to count cents.
.
Which works fine until you run into Quebec and it's 9.975% sales tax rate. Or like you said, it's probably a good idea to always use long because $10 million isn't that big of a number.
Of course there's a money data type in Java
Looking around I don't see any reference to a standard Money data type in Java. Some people have created their own implementations using BigDecimal underneath, some of which require calling functions just to add numbers, but I don't see anything that comes standard with Java. Please point me to the documentation if I'm wrong.
That's not half as bad as some other languages that I see. For the longest time Java didn't have built in functionality for making an HTTP request. Working with dates in Java is a huge mess. Most other languages have very little support for decimal data types, which is essential when making applications that deal with money. Lack of unicode support is rampant. Not being able to change the desktop background without reverting to Windows API (at least it's still possible) is the least of my concerns when choosing a programming language.
As somebody who uses.Net for web development, I am actually very disappointed in the fully open source alternatives. Lack of Unicode support (very important on the web), lack of consistency in the language, The fact that they are interpreted languages (compiling the code catches huge classes of bugs that you don't even have to think about leaving your mind free to worry about other things). All of these are huge problem with all or most of the open source alternatives.
At a price of $350, it's hardly expensive for a watch. I'm sure that requiring the appointment is much more related to getting the thing set up with your iPhone to make sure the whole thing goes seamlessly I could seriously see quite a few people buying one and being disappointed when they couldn't get it to pair properly with their phone, or they don't even own an iPhone, and just expected it to work on it's own. I think they just want to ensure that people get a good experience with the watch. And letting random people buy it off the shelf is probably a sure way to lead to a lot of people who have no idea what the product is, and just giving it bad reviews.
Which is why I think that car races will eventually be much more interesting when we have computers driving them. No more worrying about injuries or deaths, or how many g-forces you can pull before someone gets hurt. No holds barred robot racing. Although I think it would eventually (d)evolve into something like pod-racing with something dragging along the ground just so you can pretend you aren't flying. I think there has to be some rules. but as long as you disallow jet engines or require the cars to be propelled through the wheels, you could have a pretty interesting race. Maybe we could just move to remote control in the meantime until computers are smart enough to control cars in a race situation.
Living In Ottawa (right on the border of Quebec) has given me a lot of insight into this. A lot of people try to move across the river because houses are cheaper and the have cheap child care. The reality is that most end up moving back a short time later. The high taxes pretty much eliminate any savings you get. The cheap child care options have very limited number of spots. Even if you're on the waiting list from the time you get pregnant, there's a good chance you'll still be on the waiting list after you're ready to go back to work when the kid is 1 year old.
So thousands of people could lose their jobs and livelihood over not hooking up a broadband line to some guy's house? While I'm sure they would comply before things got this far, I don't think it's in anybody's best interest for it to be possible for things to be escalated to this level. It's easy enough to say just shut the company down, but if we did this to every company who misbehaved in some way, it would be quite difficult on the people who worked for those companies who were low level enough that they couldn't fix the problems if they wanted to.
I guess it depends on what the fine is for not complying. For your above scenario to make sense, the fine itself would have to be more than the cost of installing the line. Otherwise, they would just pay the fine and forget about it. Also, there would need to be timelines for how long they can take to get the service working. If you have to live in the house a year without good internet before they get the service up and running then the law isn't very helpful. Also, what happens if you move in in December and they can't install the lines until March when the ground has thawed? Also, there's no law saying how much they are allowed to charge you, and they often don't charge the same fees for everybody. Once they've installed your lines, you're basically a slave to paying that provider's rates. If they want to jack up the rate 6 months down the road to recoup costs, there isn't much you can do about it, other than try to get some other provider to put in lines as well.
Why would you drive from Moscow to Vladivostok? Wouldn't it make much more sense to fly to Japan or South Korea and then take another place to Vladivostok? Or even fly directly between the two cities? Nobody drives between Los Angeles and Anchorage, except as a road trip just to say they did it. There is absolutely no point in building a road like this.
Stop using Keurig. I had one, and while I really liked the ease with which I could make a coffee, I decided it was too expensive for the quality of coffee produced. Also, I'm not a big fan of the amount of waste it produces. I got an Aeropress and I'm very happy with my coffee now. It's cheap, tastes good, and produces no garbage. I can use any coffee I want. Clean up is a little more time consuming than with Keurig, but it doesn't really take that much effort.
I think that this kind of stuff will take longer than most people think, simply because of the amount of push-back you get when even trying to streamline things a little bit. Nobody is interested in changing their process to make things more efficient because it means they might be out of a job in six months. Make things 20% computerized, and 1 in 5 employees will be out of a job. If you took the same people and guaranteed them that they would have a decent paycheck for life, and that they would only have to come in 4 days a week for the same pay because the computer was doing a big chunk of their work, they would work very hard to make sure the computer could easily replace them. But the current system doesn't incentivize people to help in the process of automating things.
I think that we should make schools integrate subjects more. This would get rid of a lot of problems as to the reasons why we have courses like analyzing English literature. Reading and writing are very important, and so we require that students take English every year. By the time they get to highschool, the only thing left to teach is analyzing literature. Why not do away with English class after the students have gotten to the point that they can write a good paper and require that students write more papers for other classes like science. There's probably a lot of other room to combine courses. Math and science should be tied together more to make the math more interesting for students. Solving derivatives and integrals is a lot more interesting when you're trying to solve actual real world science problems using the math.
It doesn't have to be that way. I'm from Ontario, and from the time kids start high school (grade 9), they get to pick university pass (Equivalent to US university or 3-4 year college with degree), college ( Equivalent to US 2-3 year community college or trade school), or just high school diploma. Based on the path they choose, they get vastly different level of courses starting in grade 9. When I was in school, university path included a whole extra year to get kids ready (they've since done away with this). Just because they group certain classes together and try to convince people to take them, does not mean that they have to make the courses easy enough for everybody. I'm not sure how things work in the US highschools, but there is no excuse for teaching the same material to all the students. People should just accept the fact that not everybody has the same potential, and should not be in the same class.
Where it's been possible to test, closed source code has more bugs than open source code.
I think that you're always going to find this to be the case. For the simple fact that open source programmers are better programmers. Open source programmers either do it by choice in their free time, or are paid to do it by companies who feel that it's worth it to invest back into the community.
The Venn diagram for companies that employ bad programmers and companies that want to contribute back to the community looks like a pair of glasses. Or, to put it another way, the Venn diagram for companies that employ good programmers and the companies that want to give back to the community looks much like a donut.
That isn't to say that close source software can't be good. Microsoft's been doing a lot to improve their software in recent years. Many people don't agree with their UI changes (Windows 8 is terrible if you don't have a touch screen, and I can't stand the ribbon UI), but I don't think there's been any huge problems with stability in recent years. They've even been releasing quite a bit of stuff as open source, and are even in the process of open sourcing the.Net runtime. I think they're making some really good decisions in the past few years.
Basically, nordic may have been the wrong word, but basically any country that doesn't have nice sunny weather year round. Many parts of the US would fall into this definition (not just Alaska). Actually I would say that the really far north wouldn't have as many problems as more moderately cold areas. The sensors are much more likely to get covered in salt, snow, and slush when the temperature is hovering around freezing than in the far north where it's often too cold to snow anyway, and the snow is so cold that it's not different from any other fine dust in the air. Warmer snow has a tendency to clump together and build up on everything, much like mud.
The first, the driver did not scrape his windows from ice and could not see any of the drivers around him
I see this being a huge problem in nordic countries when it comes to self driving cars as well. Perhaps the self driving car will refuse to operate if the sensors are covered in ice. This would be safer, but would lead to dissatisfaction from a lot of owners as they would have to carefully remove ice from the sensors hoping not to damage them in the process. Then you'd be driving down the road and get covered in spray (salt, dirt, water) from other vehicles and the sensors would become inoperational again. The driver would either have to take over, making the expensive self driving car useless, or pull over to the side of the road and clean the sensor before going on their way. I'd like to see how self driving cars handle snow, salty/dirty/muddy roads, and even a heavy rain. Could the sensors still actually discern what's going on, or do they require hot, dry, sunny, California type weather.
This could be quite promising if incorporated into movies and video games. I watch almost all my movies and play most of my video games at home with headphones, partially so I don't annoy those around me and so I can watch movies while others sleep, but also because I can get much better sound quality out of headphones for a fraction of the price of comparable speakers. If they can get 3D audio working out of simple headphones so I can get full surround sound out of a decent pair of headphones, then I would really like this technology. I've always thought it would make much more sense to just buy 4 sets of headphones for your movie room rather than spend thousands of dollars on a surround sound system that really only gives the correct effect for a certain position in the room.
You see a lot of this kind of stuff with people using the Surface Pro. Chrome has some behaviours (bugs) that cause it to drastically increase the power usage causing the battery to drain quite quickly. A lot of people have switched back to IE, and found that the browser is quite good. The Metro/Modern version is basically the only browser that is optimized for touch screen, making it great for the Surface. Also, the desktop version is actually quite good and most people have no complaints. The biggest downfall is that IE doesn't have great adblocking, but it seems that adblock combined with Chrome is sure fire way to have a short battery life.
I agree with the part about already owning a second car which runs on gas.Electric cars are quite expensive, and most of the people I know who have the money to spend on an electric car already have 2 cars. It would do the environment a lot of help if at least one of those cars was switched to electric. Even if you're single or only own one car for other reasons, it still might make sense to go electric if you really care about the environment. As long as you aren't the kind of person who goes on long trips every month, then it probably doesn't matter much if you have to rent a car a couple times a year when you go out of town. Many people I know never go more than 100 miles from the city. And when they do, it's on a plane. So there really isn't much justification for owning a car that uses gas for a lot of people. For many people it's really just a matter of price. A lot of people only buy cars used, which there aren't very many of in the electric market.
There are solutions other than traditional batteries. Flywheel technology, molten salt batteries, pumped water, etc. All these can help to reduce the strain on our electricity system.
Also, once that technology is mature, it will make things so much easier to manage. We lose a lot of power just in transmission. One estimate states that about 6% of the power generated is lost in transmission. By decentralizing, and not shipping power over long distances, we can cut into that number quite a bit. Put battery backups in houses so that there's no so much fluctuation in demand. The main reason we still use fuels like coal and gas is because they can be ramped up quickly to meet varying demands. If you can smooth out the power demand with batteries,either industrial sized for the grid, or home sized, then you can eventually go to using only nuclear and renewable sources.
I think the solution to all this is to move to a system where everybody has a big battery or capacitor bank in their house. That way we can get rid of the need to ramp up the power. The power draw will be basically constant, and we will be able to make do with a much smaller capacity on the grid. It's not cost effective to do this yet, but as battery prices come down, it will become cheaper, and eventually make sense to have something like this in your house. Combine that with a couple solar panels on your roof, and you've cut down the strain on the power grid by a very large amount.
You can get pretty cheap and pretty small computers, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to put both a film copy and a digital copy into the time capsule. Put a Raspberry Pi or something similar in there win an OS the boots up and auto plays the movie on an SD Card. If it doesn't work, you haven't lost much. If it turns out that they still have HDMI in 50 to 100 years when they open it, they will be able to play the video instantly. Some people say that SD cards degrade after a few years, even without writing to them. There's probably better storage solutions. But I still think that computers are cheap enough that you should look for a solution so that the video can be shown right away. Maybe even an entire laptop with an archival quality CD in the drive that boots and plays the video. Take out the battery and hope that they can still hook it up to a power source.
I'm not so sure about this. People are different. They would probably ask for different things. Some people may think an office is necessary. Others would be just as happy if you provided them with noise cancelling headphones. There's plenty of things that should be open to negotiation. Better computers/equipment, bigger offices, working hours, more vacation time. They probably shouldn't be trying to keep salaries secret anyway, because employees will talk. If there is a huge disparity between different employees, it will get out. And the company should be prepared for this. There's many companies with an open salary system, so everybody knows how much everybody else makes. And these companies aren't falling apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I thought of that too. In the book, Microsoft gave them away for free, thinking they were unhackable, and hoping to make their money back selling games. People found out how to hack them (surprise, surprise) and were able to run whatever they wanted to on them. This is why this concept of giving away the hardware for free is almost always a bad idea. If they really could build unhackable hardware, then I could see a business case for this, but making the hardware free makes the payoff for hacking it way too high.
. Which works fine until you run into Quebec and it's 9.975% sales tax rate. Or like you said, it's probably a good idea to always use long because $10 million isn't that big of a number.
Looking around I don't see any reference to a standard Money data type in Java. Some people have created their own implementations using BigDecimal underneath, some of which require calling functions just to add numbers, but I don't see anything that comes standard with Java. Please point me to the documentation if I'm wrong.
That's not half as bad as some other languages that I see. For the longest time Java didn't have built in functionality for making an HTTP request. Working with dates in Java is a huge mess. Most other languages have very little support for decimal data types, which is essential when making applications that deal with money. Lack of unicode support is rampant. Not being able to change the desktop background without reverting to Windows API (at least it's still possible) is the least of my concerns when choosing a programming language.
As somebody who uses .Net for web development, I am actually very disappointed in the fully open source alternatives. Lack of Unicode support (very important on the web), lack of consistency in the language, The fact that they are interpreted languages (compiling the code catches huge classes of bugs that you don't even have to think about leaving your mind free to worry about other things). All of these are huge problem with all or most of the open source alternatives.
At a price of $350, it's hardly expensive for a watch. I'm sure that requiring the appointment is much more related to getting the thing set up with your iPhone to make sure the whole thing goes seamlessly I could seriously see quite a few people buying one and being disappointed when they couldn't get it to pair properly with their phone, or they don't even own an iPhone, and just expected it to work on it's own. I think they just want to ensure that people get a good experience with the watch. And letting random people buy it off the shelf is probably a sure way to lead to a lot of people who have no idea what the product is, and just giving it bad reviews.
Which is why I think that car races will eventually be much more interesting when we have computers driving them. No more worrying about injuries or deaths, or how many g-forces you can pull before someone gets hurt. No holds barred robot racing. Although I think it would eventually (d)evolve into something like pod-racing with something dragging along the ground just so you can pretend you aren't flying. I think there has to be some rules. but as long as you disallow jet engines or require the cars to be propelled through the wheels, you could have a pretty interesting race. Maybe we could just move to remote control in the meantime until computers are smart enough to control cars in a race situation.
Living In Ottawa (right on the border of Quebec) has given me a lot of insight into this. A lot of people try to move across the river because houses are cheaper and the have cheap child care. The reality is that most end up moving back a short time later. The high taxes pretty much eliminate any savings you get. The cheap child care options have very limited number of spots. Even if you're on the waiting list from the time you get pregnant, there's a good chance you'll still be on the waiting list after you're ready to go back to work when the kid is 1 year old.
So thousands of people could lose their jobs and livelihood over not hooking up a broadband line to some guy's house? While I'm sure they would comply before things got this far, I don't think it's in anybody's best interest for it to be possible for things to be escalated to this level. It's easy enough to say just shut the company down, but if we did this to every company who misbehaved in some way, it would be quite difficult on the people who worked for those companies who were low level enough that they couldn't fix the problems if they wanted to.
I guess it depends on what the fine is for not complying. For your above scenario to make sense, the fine itself would have to be more than the cost of installing the line. Otherwise, they would just pay the fine and forget about it. Also, there would need to be timelines for how long they can take to get the service working. If you have to live in the house a year without good internet before they get the service up and running then the law isn't very helpful. Also, what happens if you move in in December and they can't install the lines until March when the ground has thawed? Also, there's no law saying how much they are allowed to charge you, and they often don't charge the same fees for everybody. Once they've installed your lines, you're basically a slave to paying that provider's rates. If they want to jack up the rate 6 months down the road to recoup costs, there isn't much you can do about it, other than try to get some other provider to put in lines as well.
Why would you drive from Moscow to Vladivostok? Wouldn't it make much more sense to fly to Japan or South Korea and then take another place to Vladivostok? Or even fly directly between the two cities? Nobody drives between Los Angeles and Anchorage, except as a road trip just to say they did it. There is absolutely no point in building a road like this.
Stop using Keurig. I had one, and while I really liked the ease with which I could make a coffee, I decided it was too expensive for the quality of coffee produced. Also, I'm not a big fan of the amount of waste it produces. I got an Aeropress and I'm very happy with my coffee now. It's cheap, tastes good, and produces no garbage. I can use any coffee I want. Clean up is a little more time consuming than with Keurig, but it doesn't really take that much effort.
I think that this kind of stuff will take longer than most people think, simply because of the amount of push-back you get when even trying to streamline things a little bit. Nobody is interested in changing their process to make things more efficient because it means they might be out of a job in six months. Make things 20% computerized, and 1 in 5 employees will be out of a job. If you took the same people and guaranteed them that they would have a decent paycheck for life, and that they would only have to come in 4 days a week for the same pay because the computer was doing a big chunk of their work, they would work very hard to make sure the computer could easily replace them. But the current system doesn't incentivize people to help in the process of automating things.
I think that we should make schools integrate subjects more. This would get rid of a lot of problems as to the reasons why we have courses like analyzing English literature. Reading and writing are very important, and so we require that students take English every year. By the time they get to highschool, the only thing left to teach is analyzing literature. Why not do away with English class after the students have gotten to the point that they can write a good paper and require that students write more papers for other classes like science. There's probably a lot of other room to combine courses. Math and science should be tied together more to make the math more interesting for students. Solving derivatives and integrals is a lot more interesting when you're trying to solve actual real world science problems using the math.
It doesn't have to be that way. I'm from Ontario, and from the time kids start high school (grade 9), they get to pick university pass (Equivalent to US university or 3-4 year college with degree), college ( Equivalent to US 2-3 year community college or trade school), or just high school diploma. Based on the path they choose, they get vastly different level of courses starting in grade 9. When I was in school, university path included a whole extra year to get kids ready (they've since done away with this). Just because they group certain classes together and try to convince people to take them, does not mean that they have to make the courses easy enough for everybody. I'm not sure how things work in the US highschools, but there is no excuse for teaching the same material to all the students. People should just accept the fact that not everybody has the same potential, and should not be in the same class.
I think that you're always going to find this to be the case. For the simple fact that open source programmers are better programmers. Open source programmers either do it by choice in their free time, or are paid to do it by companies who feel that it's worth it to invest back into the community.
.Net runtime. I think they're making some really good decisions in the past few years.
The Venn diagram for companies that employ bad programmers and companies that want to contribute back to the community looks like a pair of glasses. Or, to put it another way, the Venn diagram for companies that employ good programmers and the companies that want to give back to the community looks much like a donut.
That isn't to say that close source software can't be good. Microsoft's been doing a lot to improve their software in recent years. Many people don't agree with their UI changes (Windows 8 is terrible if you don't have a touch screen, and I can't stand the ribbon UI), but I don't think there's been any huge problems with stability in recent years. They've even been releasing quite a bit of stuff as open source, and are even in the process of open sourcing the
Basically, nordic may have been the wrong word, but basically any country that doesn't have nice sunny weather year round. Many parts of the US would fall into this definition (not just Alaska). Actually I would say that the really far north wouldn't have as many problems as more moderately cold areas. The sensors are much more likely to get covered in salt, snow, and slush when the temperature is hovering around freezing than in the far north where it's often too cold to snow anyway, and the snow is so cold that it's not different from any other fine dust in the air. Warmer snow has a tendency to clump together and build up on everything, much like mud.
I see this being a huge problem in nordic countries when it comes to self driving cars as well. Perhaps the self driving car will refuse to operate if the sensors are covered in ice. This would be safer, but would lead to dissatisfaction from a lot of owners as they would have to carefully remove ice from the sensors hoping not to damage them in the process. Then you'd be driving down the road and get covered in spray (salt, dirt, water) from other vehicles and the sensors would become inoperational again. The driver would either have to take over, making the expensive self driving car useless, or pull over to the side of the road and clean the sensor before going on their way. I'd like to see how self driving cars handle snow, salty/dirty/muddy roads, and even a heavy rain. Could the sensors still actually discern what's going on, or do they require hot, dry, sunny, California type weather.
This could be quite promising if incorporated into movies and video games. I watch almost all my movies and play most of my video games at home with headphones, partially so I don't annoy those around me and so I can watch movies while others sleep, but also because I can get much better sound quality out of headphones for a fraction of the price of comparable speakers. If they can get 3D audio working out of simple headphones so I can get full surround sound out of a decent pair of headphones, then I would really like this technology. I've always thought it would make much more sense to just buy 4 sets of headphones for your movie room rather than spend thousands of dollars on a surround sound system that really only gives the correct effect for a certain position in the room.
You see a lot of this kind of stuff with people using the Surface Pro. Chrome has some behaviours (bugs) that cause it to drastically increase the power usage causing the battery to drain quite quickly. A lot of people have switched back to IE, and found that the browser is quite good. The Metro/Modern version is basically the only browser that is optimized for touch screen, making it great for the Surface. Also, the desktop version is actually quite good and most people have no complaints. The biggest downfall is that IE doesn't have great adblocking, but it seems that adblock combined with Chrome is sure fire way to have a short battery life.
I agree with the part about already owning a second car which runs on gas.Electric cars are quite expensive, and most of the people I know who have the money to spend on an electric car already have 2 cars. It would do the environment a lot of help if at least one of those cars was switched to electric. Even if you're single or only own one car for other reasons, it still might make sense to go electric if you really care about the environment. As long as you aren't the kind of person who goes on long trips every month, then it probably doesn't matter much if you have to rent a car a couple times a year when you go out of town. Many people I know never go more than 100 miles from the city. And when they do, it's on a plane. So there really isn't much justification for owning a car that uses gas for a lot of people. For many people it's really just a matter of price. A lot of people only buy cars used, which there aren't very many of in the electric market.
There are solutions other than traditional batteries. Flywheel technology, molten salt batteries, pumped water, etc. All these can help to reduce the strain on our electricity system.
Also, once that technology is mature, it will make things so much easier to manage. We lose a lot of power just in transmission. One estimate states that about 6% of the power generated is lost in transmission. By decentralizing, and not shipping power over long distances, we can cut into that number quite a bit. Put battery backups in houses so that there's no so much fluctuation in demand. The main reason we still use fuels like coal and gas is because they can be ramped up quickly to meet varying demands. If you can smooth out the power demand with batteries,either industrial sized for the grid, or home sized, then you can eventually go to using only nuclear and renewable sources.
I think the solution to all this is to move to a system where everybody has a big battery or capacitor bank in their house. That way we can get rid of the need to ramp up the power. The power draw will be basically constant, and we will be able to make do with a much smaller capacity on the grid. It's not cost effective to do this yet, but as battery prices come down, it will become cheaper, and eventually make sense to have something like this in your house. Combine that with a couple solar panels on your roof, and you've cut down the strain on the power grid by a very large amount.
You can get pretty cheap and pretty small computers, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to put both a film copy and a digital copy into the time capsule. Put a Raspberry Pi or something similar in there win an OS the boots up and auto plays the movie on an SD Card. If it doesn't work, you haven't lost much. If it turns out that they still have HDMI in 50 to 100 years when they open it, they will be able to play the video instantly. Some people say that SD cards degrade after a few years, even without writing to them. There's probably better storage solutions. But I still think that computers are cheap enough that you should look for a solution so that the video can be shown right away. Maybe even an entire laptop with an archival quality CD in the drive that boots and plays the video. Take out the battery and hope that they can still hook it up to a power source.
I'm not so sure about this. People are different. They would probably ask for different things. Some people may think an office is necessary. Others would be just as happy if you provided them with noise cancelling headphones. There's plenty of things that should be open to negotiation. Better computers/equipment, bigger offices, working hours, more vacation time. They probably shouldn't be trying to keep salaries secret anyway, because employees will talk. If there is a huge disparity between different employees, it will get out. And the company should be prepared for this. There's many companies with an open salary system, so everybody knows how much everybody else makes. And these companies aren't falling apart.