If your kid knows your credit card number and uses it then you are screwed anyway. It doesn't require a gambling site for you to lose all your money. He could spend all your money on E-Bay junk. Try getting your money back from those people.
But you forgot the one problem with bandwidth. There's nothing with better bandwidth than a truck stacked to the brim with DVDs. Simply put, it's still cheaper (for everyone involved) to go down to the store and buy the disc yourself. Most discs I buy are currently are around $12. Which is still a couple dollars more expensive than ITunes, but I get a CD case, and disc, and some liner notes that are already printed. Plus with iTunes you have to have a good connection so it doesn't take forever to get your music. If we start to download tons of movies over our internet connections, then watch ISP prices skyrocket. Right now it's cheap because the majority of users aren't downloading 4 gigs a day (or even a week). However, if there was a reputable way to download DVDs over the internet, that made it easy for users to find what they wanted, then I'm sure that lots of people would be using much more bandwidth.
Pizza stores sometimes have this. There's usually "No Delivery charge", however, they also have "Walk in specials" where if you go and pick it up yourself, you save some money. If there's not distribution (delivery) charge, then the stuff downloaded off bittorrent should be much cheaper than what you can get the same product for at the movie store.
Now all we need is to get the ISPs to stop blocking Bittorrent. That's the only thing I run that actually makes it worth getting high speed, and to get it to work, I not only have to change the port it runs on, I have to change it to a specific port that for some reason they don't check. I think that Bittorrent's biggest adversary will be ISPs who insist on blocking it, or make it a pain to configure in order to cut down on the users' "unlimited" bandwidth.
I used to read PC Gamer when I was in high school. Each issue was at least half an inch thick. Now they are a lot smaller, somewhere around 1/4 inch thick. Also, the demos that they include have really started to suck. They used to be quite large, usually the full game without all the maps. Now they usually include cutscenes, or playable demos with only 1 or 2 maps. At least that's the way it was when I stopped buying it. Can't say if the demos have improved, but last time I looked at a copy, the magazine was still pretty small, and still cost just as much as it originally did.
Well, windows 1.0 came out in 1985, so it actually took them 15 years to get it right. If you only include windows 3.1, which is where most people started using windows, then we'll say 1992. So it took them 8 years. Quite a long time to wait for an operating system that doesn't crash if you leve it running more than a week.
It really comes down to how you treat you stuff. Most of my stuff lasts me years before I have to get a new one. This includes mp3 players, phones, and computers. I also know people who seem to go through cell phones every 6 months. I often wonder what these people do with their stuff. I know people who have owned ipods for years and not had a single problem. Everyone knows a guy who spent $500 on an ipod, only to have it stop working after 6 months. But I'm pretty sure it would have happened no matter which player these guys bought.
So, it'll weigh 6 lbs. and burn a whole in your pocket. It will suck so much power that your batteries will only last 2 hours. Also, it will crash every 3 hours. I realize windows XP has the crashing thing fixed, but that took them like what? 10 years?
The other thing is that often the full consoles require a second TV in the home, and even with a second TV, it's not the best. I know there's a lot of time's I would like to be playing my GC, but my significant other is hogging the good TV. I could go through the trouble of moving my nintendo to the other TV, but it's sometimes a pain to do that. With the XBox or PS2 it would be an even bigger problem because of their size. With a handheld, you can just pick it up and turn it on.
But how good will the ODFOpenXML converters be? Will they be as good as the Doc-ODF coverters we currently have? The Doc-ODF converters really aren't that good. They suffice such, that you can read the document, but not to preserve all the formatting.
This doesn't mean that someone with Office 97 will be able to convert their doc files to ODF. What it means is that they will be able to write their doc files to MS Open XML. How they will get those open XML files to ODF is another story.
Another good question is will we have to buy Office-07 to support ODF? It seems to me like the plugin will only work with Office-07. What about all the users of Office 97 onwards? Will they be stuck with not being able to read ODF documents, or not being able to convert their.doc files to ODF?
And this isn't even really that cheap. You can get a Dell with the same specs for a couple hundred dollars less. Not to mention that running a Windows PC is almost a requirement at many universities. That CD that came with your stats book that your professor requires you to run probably only works on windows, as well as the free VRML disc that came with your eletronics text. I'm a linux fanboi myself, and even I realize that sometimes you have to use windows, no matter how much you fight it. The war still goes on, but not every battle can be won.
I like MS word as a word processor. It is probably the best word processor out there. Well, Koffice and OpenOffice would fill my needs just fine, when I don't feel like spending $300 for an office suite, but if someone else is buying, then my choice is office. My only problem with office is the.doc format. Not only being proprietary, but a completely mangled binary format that changes with each release means that it can't be read by other word processors. Not even other versions of itself. If Microsoft switched to ODF, I'm sure that everyone would still use it, because it's good, and it's what they know. A couple people may switch. Probably at about the rate people are switching to firefox. I guess it could eat into MSs market share eventually, but they may just have to find a better way to make money then selling a word processor for $300.
And that sums up the Number 1 problem of all time with computers. People don't want to learn. X that. People refuse to learn. It's like as soon as you say "computer" their brain turns off. Some people may say I'm a bit biased, because I'm a big computer geek. But that's not what it is. I've seen many people who aren't big geeks be able to use simple programs like Word, or even Excel. It's a little disappointing to see this kind of attitude of not wanting to learn new things when you're at a universite. You're supposed to learn new stuff at university. Learn everything you can. Sure, you're an arts major, but that doesn't mean that you can't learn how to use a computer. If you're willing to give even just a little bit of effort then you can learn. But alas, people don't want to learn. Learning is hard.
Well, it may not be identity theft, but more like identity vandalism. Or an identity joy-ride. They borrow your identity for a while, and once they are sufficiently done destroying it, they stop using it. You still have your identity, but it is royally screwed. You have months of phone calls with banks ahead of you, trying to get your identity back to its original state.
Why only a couple of years? Small time drug dealers (an offense with far less of a victim) get many times that penality. When the takings are so lucrative, the chances of being caught low, and the penalities light, its no wonder this is such a fast growing crime. Why perform an armed bank robccbery (average take, about $4,000 per the FBI) and get 20 years if you get caught when credit card fraud ($10k per theft) only will get you 2.
First of all, they haven't started a war on identity theft yet, so until they do, drugs is the trump card. There is nothing worse than drugs, because there is a war against it. Well, there's terrorism, but there's a war against that too. Really, depending on the level of you drug dealing, it can be just as bad as terrorism in terms of repercussions. And second of all, being armed is also a trump card. You have the right to bear arms, but you'd better not use those arms to commit a crime. Anything armed automatically quadruples your sentence. If you can manage to rob a bank unarmed, then you'll probably only get 2 years.
The problem is, is that many people don't have a gut instinct about this kind of situation. There's 2 kinds of gut instincts that people can get. 1 is built in by evolution. After millions of years, the human body is wired to react certain ways to certain stimuli. This is stuff like being scared when you are approached by a tiger. The second kind is that built from prior experiences in your lifetime. If you grow up with no exposure to computers, a web site that asks for all this information may very well seem like a valid site. Why not, you get letters in the mail offering you credit cards, where they ask your DOB, SSN, Mother's Maiden Name, Other Credit Card Numbers, and all in the same application. Why wouldn't a web site be able to ask for the same information.
Yes, but everything offers temptation. Even church offers temptation for some people. Church is the ultimate temptation. Do what we say, and you'll go to heaven when you die, and live in happiness for eternity. If someone goes to church everyday, do we say they are addicted, and send them to rehab? All things have the power to do evil. Doing something that hurts others is wrong. Doing something that detracts from your own well being is bad. But saying that a tool is "the devil" because it can be used for evil is just stupid. The computer has helped tons more people then it has caused harm to. Are we supposed to outlaw cameras because they can be use for spying, or child porn?
Yes, my current session is running at 38 Megs. I've seen it get up to 75, but i'm not really checking it all the time, so it may go up to 100 at certain points. That's why I'm convinced its either 1 extension, or a combination of certain extensions that causes the memory usage problems. Usually it tops out around 75 MB, and doesn't get much higher. I see a lot of people complaining about the 700 MB of memory usage. I would really like to know the exact set of extensions they are using, and under which circumstances this happens.
It's because the memory issues don't actually exist with Firefox. First there's 2 kinds of memory issues. 1 is the problem with the feature that has it store the pages in memory so that the history feature works better. This isn't a bug, and isn't a memory leak. The second is users complaining that Firefox takes up 700+ MB of RAM. I don't know what kind of funky extension these people are running, but I've never seen that happen. I've had firefox running for days at a time without seeing anywhere over 100 MB. I rarely ever see it go over 75 MB. Then again, I haven't kept it open for months at a time. Maybe if I did, then I may see problems. Then again, its a web browser. You can turn it off once in a while. Get one of those session saving extensions if you don't want to lose all the tabs you have open. They have more important things to fix, like trying to make sure it's CSS/Other standards compatible, and ensuring that there are no security holes.
And even their 7.50 (really it's 9.50, if you don't pay upfront) shared hosting is a rip-off. Only 1 Gig of space, and 50 Gig of transfer. With my current provider I get 20 Gigs of space and 1 TB of transfer for $7.95.
I use Dreamhost, and they don't use Cpanel, they use their own homegrown app. It kind of got to me at first when I switched to them, but the short story is, is that it doesn't matter that much. I don't spend that much time configuring my settings that it makes that much difference. I wouldn't choose a hosting providers based on the control panel, and I wouldn't leave one on the sole fact that their control panel sucked. For maybe the 1 hour a month that I may spend on configuration, it's not going to make that much of a difference.
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If your kid knows your credit card number and uses it then you are screwed anyway. It doesn't require a gambling site for you to lose all your money. He could spend all your money on E-Bay junk. Try getting your money back from those people.
But you forgot the one problem with bandwidth. There's nothing with better bandwidth than a truck stacked to the brim with DVDs. Simply put, it's still cheaper (for everyone involved) to go down to the store and buy the disc yourself. Most discs I buy are currently are around $12. Which is still a couple dollars more expensive than ITunes, but I get a CD case, and disc, and some liner notes that are already printed. Plus with iTunes you have to have a good connection so it doesn't take forever to get your music. If we start to download tons of movies over our internet connections, then watch ISP prices skyrocket. Right now it's cheap because the majority of users aren't downloading 4 gigs a day (or even a week). However, if there was a reputable way to download DVDs over the internet, that made it easy for users to find what they wanted, then I'm sure that lots of people would be using much more bandwidth.
Pizza stores sometimes have this. There's usually "No Delivery charge", however, they also have "Walk in specials" where if you go and pick it up yourself, you save some money. If there's not distribution (delivery) charge, then the stuff downloaded off bittorrent should be much cheaper than what you can get the same product for at the movie store.
Now all we need is to get the ISPs to stop blocking Bittorrent. That's the only thing I run that actually makes it worth getting high speed, and to get it to work, I not only have to change the port it runs on, I have to change it to a specific port that for some reason they don't check. I think that Bittorrent's biggest adversary will be ISPs who insist on blocking it, or make it a pain to configure in order to cut down on the users' "unlimited" bandwidth.
I used to read PC Gamer when I was in high school. Each issue was at least half an inch thick. Now they are a lot smaller, somewhere around 1/4 inch thick. Also, the demos that they include have really started to suck. They used to be quite large, usually the full game without all the maps. Now they usually include cutscenes, or playable demos with only 1 or 2 maps. At least that's the way it was when I stopped buying it. Can't say if the demos have improved, but last time I looked at a copy, the magazine was still pretty small, and still cost just as much as it originally did.
Well, windows 1.0 came out in 1985, so it actually took them 15 years to get it right. If you only include windows 3.1, which is where most people started using windows, then we'll say 1992. So it took them 8 years. Quite a long time to wait for an operating system that doesn't crash if you leve it running more than a week.
It really depends on which dialect of English you are speaking. Think about how Canadians pronounce lieutenant.
It really comes down to how you treat you stuff. Most of my stuff lasts me years before I have to get a new one. This includes mp3 players, phones, and computers. I also know people who seem to go through cell phones every 6 months. I often wonder what these people do with their stuff. I know people who have owned ipods for years and not had a single problem. Everyone knows a guy who spent $500 on an ipod, only to have it stop working after 6 months. But I'm pretty sure it would have happened no matter which player these guys bought.
So, it'll weigh 6 lbs. and burn a whole in your pocket. It will suck so much power that your batteries will only last 2 hours. Also, it will crash every 3 hours. I realize windows XP has the crashing thing fixed, but that took them like what? 10 years?
The other thing is that often the full consoles require a second TV in the home, and even with a second TV, it's not the best. I know there's a lot of time's I would like to be playing my GC, but my significant other is hogging the good TV. I could go through the trouble of moving my nintendo to the other TV, but it's sometimes a pain to do that. With the XBox or PS2 it would be an even bigger problem because of their size. With a handheld, you can just pick it up and turn it on.
But how good will the ODFOpenXML converters be? Will they be as good as the Doc-ODF coverters we currently have? The Doc-ODF converters really aren't that good. They suffice such, that you can read the document, but not to preserve all the formatting.
This doesn't mean that someone with Office 97 will be able to convert their doc files to ODF. What it means is that they will be able to write their doc files to MS Open XML. How they will get those open XML files to ODF is another story.
Another good question is will we have to buy Office-07 to support ODF? It seems to me like the plugin will only work with Office-07. What about all the users of Office 97 onwards? Will they be stuck with not being able to read ODF documents, or not being able to convert their .doc files to ODF?
Which really sucks, since the cars idle at 7000 RPM.
And this isn't even really that cheap. You can get a Dell with the same specs for a couple hundred dollars less. Not to mention that running a Windows PC is almost a requirement at many universities. That CD that came with your stats book that your professor requires you to run probably only works on windows, as well as the free VRML disc that came with your eletronics text. I'm a linux fanboi myself, and even I realize that sometimes you have to use windows, no matter how much you fight it. The war still goes on, but not every battle can be won.
I like MS word as a word processor. It is probably the best word processor out there. Well, Koffice and OpenOffice would fill my needs just fine, when I don't feel like spending $300 for an office suite, but if someone else is buying, then my choice is office. My only problem with office is the .doc format. Not only being proprietary, but a completely mangled binary format that changes with each release means that it can't be read by other word processors. Not even other versions of itself. If Microsoft switched to ODF, I'm sure that everyone would still use it, because it's good, and it's what they know. A couple people may switch. Probably at about the rate people are switching to firefox. I guess it could eat into MSs market share eventually, but they may just have to find a better way to make money then selling a word processor for $300.
And that sums up the Number 1 problem of all time with computers. People don't want to learn. X that. People refuse to learn. It's like as soon as you say "computer" their brain turns off. Some people may say I'm a bit biased, because I'm a big computer geek. But that's not what it is. I've seen many people who aren't big geeks be able to use simple programs like Word, or even Excel. It's a little disappointing to see this kind of attitude of not wanting to learn new things when you're at a universite. You're supposed to learn new stuff at university. Learn everything you can. Sure, you're an arts major, but that doesn't mean that you can't learn how to use a computer. If you're willing to give even just a little bit of effort then you can learn. But alas, people don't want to learn. Learning is hard.
Well, it may not be identity theft, but more like identity vandalism. Or an identity joy-ride. They borrow your identity for a while, and once they are sufficiently done destroying it, they stop using it. You still have your identity, but it is royally screwed. You have months of phone calls with banks ahead of you, trying to get your identity back to its original state.
Why only a couple of years? Small time drug dealers (an offense with far less of a victim) get many times that penality. When the takings are so lucrative, the chances of being caught low, and the penalities light, its no wonder this is such a fast growing crime. Why perform an armed bank robccbery (average take, about $4,000 per the FBI) and get 20 years if you get caught when credit card fraud ($10k per theft) only will get you 2.
First of all, they haven't started a war on identity theft yet, so until they do, drugs is the trump card. There is nothing worse than drugs, because there is a war against it. Well, there's terrorism, but there's a war against that too. Really, depending on the level of you drug dealing, it can be just as bad as terrorism in terms of repercussions. And second of all, being armed is also a trump card. You have the right to bear arms, but you'd better not use those arms to commit a crime. Anything armed automatically quadruples your sentence. If you can manage to rob a bank unarmed, then you'll probably only get 2 years.
The problem is, is that many people don't have a gut instinct about this kind of situation. There's 2 kinds of gut instincts that people can get. 1 is built in by evolution. After millions of years, the human body is wired to react certain ways to certain stimuli. This is stuff like being scared when you are approached by a tiger. The second kind is that built from prior experiences in your lifetime. If you grow up with no exposure to computers, a web site that asks for all this information may very well seem like a valid site. Why not, you get letters in the mail offering you credit cards, where they ask your DOB, SSN, Mother's Maiden Name, Other Credit Card Numbers, and all in the same application. Why wouldn't a web site be able to ask for the same information.
Yes, but everything offers temptation. Even church offers temptation for some people. Church is the ultimate temptation. Do what we say, and you'll go to heaven when you die, and live in happiness for eternity. If someone goes to church everyday, do we say they are addicted, and send them to rehab? All things have the power to do evil. Doing something that hurts others is wrong. Doing something that detracts from your own well being is bad. But saying that a tool is "the devil" because it can be used for evil is just stupid. The computer has helped tons more people then it has caused harm to. Are we supposed to outlaw cameras because they can be use for spying, or child porn?
Yes, my current session is running at 38 Megs. I've seen it get up to 75, but i'm not really checking it all the time, so it may go up to 100 at certain points. That's why I'm convinced its either 1 extension, or a combination of certain extensions that causes the memory usage problems. Usually it tops out around 75 MB, and doesn't get much higher. I see a lot of people complaining about the 700 MB of memory usage. I would really like to know the exact set of extensions they are using, and under which circumstances this happens.
It's because the memory issues don't actually exist with Firefox. First there's 2 kinds of memory issues. 1 is the problem with the feature that has it store the pages in memory so that the history feature works better. This isn't a bug, and isn't a memory leak. The second is users complaining that Firefox takes up 700+ MB of RAM. I don't know what kind of funky extension these people are running, but I've never seen that happen. I've had firefox running for days at a time without seeing anywhere over 100 MB. I rarely ever see it go over 75 MB. Then again, I haven't kept it open for months at a time. Maybe if I did, then I may see problems. Then again, its a web browser. You can turn it off once in a while. Get one of those session saving extensions if you don't want to lose all the tabs you have open. They have more important things to fix, like trying to make sure it's CSS/Other standards compatible, and ensuring that there are no security holes.
And even their 7.50 (really it's 9.50, if you don't pay upfront) shared hosting is a rip-off. Only 1 Gig of space, and 50 Gig of transfer. With my current provider I get 20 Gigs of space and 1 TB of transfer for $7.95.
I use Dreamhost, and they don't use Cpanel, they use their own homegrown app. It kind of got to me at first when I switched to them, but the short story is, is that it doesn't matter that much. I don't spend that much time configuring my settings that it makes that much difference. I wouldn't choose a hosting providers based on the control panel, and I wouldn't leave one on the sole fact that their control panel sucked. For maybe the 1 hour a month that I may spend on configuration, it's not going to make that much of a difference.