I graduated from software engineering, so my experience with Electrical engineering is a little limited. However, from the few basic courses that I took in this field, and the courses I saw others in the course taking, I don't know if any of them would give them the practical knowledge to design a well working circuit breaker. Most of the course that I took dealt with logical circuit engineering, and didn't really touch a lot on how many of the things work. As far as I'm concerned, all those NAND chips were just magic black chips.
I think that in many senses, unions have outgrown their usefullness. In times (or places) where there are no laws governing hours of work, minimum rates of pay, or safety of working conditions, unions can serve a good purpose. However, once they achieve those goals, they usually continue fighting for more and more. Eventually, they start asking for too much, or taking measures that affect the business in a very negative way, such as multi-week, or multi-month strikes. The NHL lost an entire hockey season due to a strike. And almost all the players are millionaires. Many times, employees don't even want to go on strike, but have to because the majority rules. Even if they are strongly against it, then end up getting pushed into it.
There definitely is a lower entry point for php. Most hosting companies offer php and mysql support, for something around $4 per month. You won't find a lot of places that host Java, and even some that do make it a little difficults. Plus Java has a few shortcomings that make it harder to use on a shared system. The fact that there are times when you have to reboot the webserver to load new code is a big one. PHP is much better suited to small 1 person development environments, whereas Java is better suited to enterprise multideveloper situations.
I'd really like to see an improved "history" tool for web browsers. They just list every site you've visited, in linear order, sorted by domain. Its so useless, that I've turned off the history on all my web browsers. I never look at it. It's just too hard to find what you are looking for. A better UI, would show the websites you visited in a tree format, showing the sites you visited, and the method at which you got to them. It's much easier for people to look at their history, and remember that they searched in google, clicked on one of the results, and then followed some other link to the important website. They could even keep track of how long you were at the site, to try to gauge how useful a site was, and how likely it was that you'd want to visit it later. You could even mark a site as useful, and it would show up highlighted in your history when you come back to it later.
The funny thing is, is that the mainframe paradigm is coming back. All the web services offered by Google make this pretty apparent. If Google releases as word processor, that works on the web, then there isn't a lot left that isn't available to web users. Games on the web may never be as graphically intense, but for most of the productivity applications have been duplicated on the web. Its such a better model, to be able to access your data from anywhere, and not have to worry about accessing that data when a computer doesn't have the right software. Imagine not having to worry if your friend had the correct version of MS word, or even any word processor at all, to be able to view your documents. He could just go to the web, and open it is seconds. PCs were kind of a good idea when we didn't have the networks to back up the idea of everyone having a terminal in their house. But now we have the networks, and it is possible to do everything on a thin client.
Seriously, there's been a lot of stuff coming out that lacks some serious marketing. If people don't know your product exists, they're less likely to buy it. And you have tell people about your product. You can't just assume they will know. I know that the Quake franchise is legendary, but you can't expect a product to sell itself, no matter how good it is. This is why apple sells so many iPods. They make you want it. You hardly ever see ads for sony music players, yet there are a ton of them, it's a major part of their business. Yet nobody ever thinks of Sony when they think of portable music. Just because they invented the walkman, doesn't mean they never have to advertise another product ever again.
I don't think that its the fault of id, or anyone else to do with Quake 3, that you didn't have proper video card drivers. I think your beef is with your video card manufacturer.
Most of the problems with internet banking deal with phishing emails that tell people to go to some random site, and type in their credentials. If you got someone to type in their card number + password + SecurID token, this could then be instantly forwarded to the bank's website, and could log in to the website. This would not only break the security, but provide an automated means of checking the accuracy of the information. Once you get a session at the bank website, you can use it for quite a while. It doesn't really provide that much more security, for those that are willing to be ignorant about giving out personal information.
So, you want to buy a video iPod + new dock/remote system, so you can effectively watch TV. Why not just watch TV on a TV, and use a DVD player for the movies. Why would you buy a video iPod, if you aren't actually going to watch videos on the thing?
News flash. Proper grammar isn't something you use to impress people. It's something you use to communicate your message effectively. I hate when I receive an email, or even an IM, from someone with terrible grammar. Why people can't take the extra 7 seconds to use proper grammar is beyond me. If they had taken the extra 7 seconds, I wouldn't have to take 30 seconds trying to figure out what they meant.
But you don't have to spend $999 on a laptop. You can spend $499 on this dell laptop and not have to worry about what media formats it plays. Also, it has tons more features that the ipod doesn't have. Mind you I think this whole argument of comparing ipods to laptops is kind of useless. They are completely different devices, meant for completely different things. I really don't get those people who carry around laptops. There are very few times when a laptop would provide better results than a good desktop + a good PDA.
I've been thinking of picking up a palm lifedrive (http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/li fedrive/) for my portable multimedia needs. I love how well the Palm works as a PDA, plus the fact that there are some good syncing applications in Linux. My only question is, what media formats can I play on this thing with third party software. This thing would rock if you could load a stripped down version of linux on it.
I think it would be a very good idea to be able to play a handheld on a full size tv. With the size of the Nintendo Revo, it's not hard to imagine the next gen of systems after that, could be small enough to provide a portable gaming system that you could hook up to a tv when you have one around. It would be nice not to have to have 2 systems just to have a portable and a tv console. Maybe they could even make it dumb down the graphics a bit when you are playing on the portable unit, since no one notices when you shrink down the graphics.
It's getting too late. I need to get to bed, since I obviously can't read. although I should point everyone towards this site which points out some battles that cause many more deaths than normandy.
Over 425,000 Allied and German troops were killed, wounded or went missing during the Battle of Normandy. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties
although casualties can mean injured and dead, I suspect in this case it means dead, as the first number, 425,000, is that total number of troops that are said to have died, on both sides.
I'm not sure why everyone here thinks wikipedia is the definitive source of everything. I think it is a pretty good reference, and I'm glad that we have it. But there are a lot of facts that they don't have correct.
Are roll bars and proper 4 point safety harnesses the answer to problems with cars rolling over. I know it helps in NASCAR. I've seen cars roll over multiple times, and drivers walk away. The question is, if they can mandate 4 point safety harnesses, and special seating for babies, why can't they mandate safer seat belts for adults? If they put as much technology into the seating for the driver as they did for those babies, then i'm sure deaths would be reduced, as would the seriousness of most of the injuries.
However, if you look at this map of possible routes for a northwest passage, they go right through canadian territory. Based on the three miles rule, the middle of lake superior would be international waters. It might be hard to get there without passing through canadian/american waters. And try passing off on your local game warden that you caught those fish in international waters. you'd have to navigate a pretty specific route to ensure that you didn't come within 3 km of any piece of canadian land while going through the northwest passage.
But what would happen, billions of years in the future, once all the ice melts, and all the land erodes to a point where it's pretty much all flat, and therefore water does cover the entire surface? I wonder how long it would take for this to happen, or if it could ever happen, because land would be recreated by shifting techtonic plates, and volcanos and such.
Look at the recent flood in America.. now think of that flood was in one of the African slums where they can hardly eat.
Kind of like that tsunami that hit indonesia a little while back. Tons of devastation, killed over 100,000 people. Wikipedia reports only 1200 deaths from hurricane katrina. Only 2000 US soldiers have died in Iraq. 200,000 Allied soldiers died during the battle of normandy. Americans don't even remember what real devastation is, and some have never ever experienced it. At least not first hand. They hear about it on the news, but it's hard to relate to pictures on a tv screen. Maybe this is why so many people forget how vulnerable we are. Because in the last 50 years, there has been very little in terms of real devastation.
There probably are a few businesses using lotus sametime. The thing is, you could probably program an internal messaging system in a couple months, if you really spent the time specing it out, and doing the development properly. You could probably throw together a cheap one in a weekend. I'm not saying that corporations should go ahead and use the public systems, however, a good middle ground should exist. IM systems aren't that complicated, and shouldn't cost that much money.
you're all right, I've never heard of any of the solutions you've mentioned, nor have I ever seen, or heard of them being used, anywhere that I know of. Judging by the cost of lotus sametime (http://tinyurl.com/e4sxg), I can see why many businesses would not opt for this kind of service. Even the microsoft offering seems to be a little cheaper (http://tinyurl.com/48ajv), but still quite high for many businesses, especially when compared to the alternative, of using free services. A simple IM program isn't that hard to program, why do the corporate solutions cost so much?
I graduated from software engineering, so my experience with Electrical engineering is a little limited. However, from the few basic courses that I took in this field, and the courses I saw others in the course taking, I don't know if any of them would give them the practical knowledge to design a well working circuit breaker. Most of the course that I took dealt with logical circuit engineering, and didn't really touch a lot on how many of the things work. As far as I'm concerned, all those NAND chips were just magic black chips.
The patent also explicitly states "non-hierarchical". And XML is definitely hierarchical in just about every way.
I think that in many senses, unions have outgrown their usefullness. In times (or places) where there are no laws governing hours of work, minimum rates of pay, or safety of working conditions, unions can serve a good purpose. However, once they achieve those goals, they usually continue fighting for more and more. Eventually, they start asking for too much, or taking measures that affect the business in a very negative way, such as multi-week, or multi-month strikes. The NHL lost an entire hockey season due to a strike. And almost all the players are millionaires. Many times, employees don't even want to go on strike, but have to because the majority rules. Even if they are strongly against it, then end up getting pushed into it.
There definitely is a lower entry point for php. Most hosting companies offer php and mysql support, for something around $4 per month. You won't find a lot of places that host Java, and even some that do make it a little difficults. Plus Java has a few shortcomings that make it harder to use on a shared system. The fact that there are times when you have to reboot the webserver to load new code is a big one. PHP is much better suited to small 1 person development environments, whereas Java is better suited to enterprise multideveloper situations.
I'd really like to see an improved "history" tool for web browsers. They just list every site you've visited, in linear order, sorted by domain. Its so useless, that I've turned off the history on all my web browsers. I never look at it. It's just too hard to find what you are looking for. A better UI, would show the websites you visited in a tree format, showing the sites you visited, and the method at which you got to them. It's much easier for people to look at their history, and remember that they searched in google, clicked on one of the results, and then followed some other link to the important website. They could even keep track of how long you were at the site, to try to gauge how useful a site was, and how likely it was that you'd want to visit it later. You could even mark a site as useful, and it would show up highlighted in your history when you come back to it later.
The funny thing is, is that the mainframe paradigm is coming back. All the web services offered by Google make this pretty apparent. If Google releases as word processor, that works on the web, then there isn't a lot left that isn't available to web users. Games on the web may never be as graphically intense, but for most of the productivity applications have been duplicated on the web. Its such a better model, to be able to access your data from anywhere, and not have to worry about accessing that data when a computer doesn't have the right software. Imagine not having to worry if your friend had the correct version of MS word, or even any word processor at all, to be able to view your documents. He could just go to the web, and open it is seconds. PCs were kind of a good idea when we didn't have the networks to back up the idea of everyone having a terminal in their house. But now we have the networks, and it is possible to do everything on a thin client.
Seriously, there's been a lot of stuff coming out that lacks some serious marketing. If people don't know your product exists, they're less likely to buy it. And you have tell people about your product. You can't just assume they will know. I know that the Quake franchise is legendary, but you can't expect a product to sell itself, no matter how good it is. This is why apple sells so many iPods. They make you want it. You hardly ever see ads for sony music players, yet there are a ton of them, it's a major part of their business. Yet nobody ever thinks of Sony when they think of portable music. Just because they invented the walkman, doesn't mean they never have to advertise another product ever again.
I don't think that its the fault of id, or anyone else to do with Quake 3, that you didn't have proper video card drivers. I think your beef is with your video card manufacturer.
Most of the problems with internet banking deal with phishing emails that tell people to go to some random site, and type in their credentials. If you got someone to type in their card number + password + SecurID token, this could then be instantly forwarded to the bank's website, and could log in to the website. This would not only break the security, but provide an automated means of checking the accuracy of the information. Once you get a session at the bank website, you can use it for quite a while. It doesn't really provide that much more security, for those that are willing to be ignorant about giving out personal information.
So, you want to buy a video iPod + new dock/remote system, so you can effectively watch TV. Why not just watch TV on a TV, and use a DVD player for the movies. Why would you buy a video iPod, if you aren't actually going to watch videos on the thing?
News flash. Proper grammar isn't something you use to impress people. It's something you use to communicate your message effectively. I hate when I receive an email, or even an IM, from someone with terrible grammar. Why people can't take the extra 7 seconds to use proper grammar is beyond me. If they had taken the extra 7 seconds, I wouldn't have to take 30 seconds trying to figure out what they meant.
But you don't have to spend $999 on a laptop. You can spend $499 on this dell laptop and not have to worry about what media formats it plays. Also, it has tons more features that the ipod doesn't have. Mind you I think this whole argument of comparing ipods to laptops is kind of useless. They are completely different devices, meant for completely different things. I really don't get those people who carry around laptops. There are very few times when a laptop would provide better results than a good desktop + a good PDA.
I've been thinking of picking up a palm lifedrive (http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/li fedrive/) for my portable multimedia needs. I love how well the Palm works as a PDA, plus the fact that there are some good syncing applications in Linux. My only question is, what media formats can I play on this thing with third party software. This thing would rock if you could load a stripped down version of linux on it.
I think it would be a very good idea to be able to play a handheld on a full size tv. With the size of the Nintendo Revo, it's not hard to imagine the next gen of systems after that, could be small enough to provide a portable gaming system that you could hook up to a tv when you have one around. It would be nice not to have to have 2 systems just to have a portable and a tv console. Maybe they could even make it dumb down the graphics a bit when you are playing on the portable unit, since no one notices when you shrink down the graphics.
It would be impossible to outlaw oxygen, because it is impossible for people to live without it.
It's getting too late. I need to get to bed, since I obviously can't read. although I should point everyone towards this site which points out some battles that cause many more deaths than normandy.
The D-Day Museum site states this:
Over 425,000 Allied and German troops were killed, wounded or went missing during the Battle of Normandy. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties
although casualties can mean injured and dead, I suspect in this case it means dead, as the first number, 425,000, is that total number of troops that are said to have died, on both sides.
I'm not sure why everyone here thinks wikipedia is the definitive source of everything. I think it is a pretty good reference, and I'm glad that we have it. But there are a lot of facts that they don't have correct.
I really don't get the whole scare with GMO. We have been genetically modifiying all of our farm stuff for thousands of years. Mind you, we didn't know about DNA, but through selective breeding, we managed to change a lot of stuff to the point where it's completely unrecognizable from the original species that we planted. One good example is Maize, aka corn. Originally, too small to even bother cultivating, now through domestication has reach a size quite good for eating. We are now able to modify things much faster, through genetic engineering, but that doesn't all of a sudden make genetically modified things bad. Basically anything that comes from a farm is genetically modified. Wild animals and plants for the most part have not be genetically guided by humans, but most stuff on a farm has been.
Are roll bars and proper 4 point safety harnesses the answer to problems with cars rolling over. I know it helps in NASCAR. I've seen cars roll over multiple times, and drivers walk away. The question is, if they can mandate 4 point safety harnesses, and special seating for babies, why can't they mandate safer seat belts for adults? If they put as much technology into the seating for the driver as they did for those babies, then i'm sure deaths would be reduced, as would the seriousness of most of the injuries.
However, if you look at this map of possible routes for a northwest passage, they go right through canadian territory. Based on the three miles rule, the middle of lake superior would be international waters. It might be hard to get there without passing through canadian/american waters. And try passing off on your local game warden that you caught those fish in international waters. you'd have to navigate a pretty specific route to ensure that you didn't come within 3 km of any piece of canadian land while going through the northwest passage.
But what would happen, billions of years in the future, once all the ice melts, and all the land erodes to a point where it's pretty much all flat, and therefore water does cover the entire surface? I wonder how long it would take for this to happen, or if it could ever happen, because land would be recreated by shifting techtonic plates, and volcanos and such.
Look at the recent flood in America.. now think of that flood was in one of the African slums where they can hardly eat.
Kind of like that tsunami that hit indonesia a little while back. Tons of devastation, killed over 100,000 people. Wikipedia reports only 1200 deaths from hurricane katrina. Only 2000 US soldiers have died in Iraq. 200,000 Allied soldiers died during the battle of normandy. Americans don't even remember what real devastation is, and some have never ever experienced it. At least not first hand. They hear about it on the news, but it's hard to relate to pictures on a tv screen. Maybe this is why so many people forget how vulnerable we are. Because in the last 50 years, there has been very little in terms of real devastation.
There's one drug they'll never be able to outlaw.
There probably are a few businesses using lotus sametime. The thing is, you could probably program an internal messaging system in a couple months, if you really spent the time specing it out, and doing the development properly. You could probably throw together a cheap one in a weekend. I'm not saying that corporations should go ahead and use the public systems, however, a good middle ground should exist. IM systems aren't that complicated, and shouldn't cost that much money.
you're all right, I've never heard of any of the solutions you've mentioned, nor have I ever seen, or heard of them being used, anywhere that I know of. Judging by the cost of lotus sametime (http://tinyurl.com/e4sxg), I can see why many businesses would not opt for this kind of service. Even the microsoft offering seems to be a little cheaper (http://tinyurl.com/48ajv), but still quite high for many businesses, especially when compared to the alternative, of using free services. A simple IM program isn't that hard to program, why do the corporate solutions cost so much?