This makes a lot of sense. If we wanted to maximize safety, we wouldn't all be driving around in vehicles that weigh a couple thousand pounds. That's a lot of energy to get rid of in a short time in the event of an accident. Cars make sense for long trips or when you have a lot of stuff to carry, but going back and forth to work could be done in much smaller and lighter vehicles. You could easily build an enclosed recumbent bike with a small engine that would get both amazing gas mileage and be safe if all the other vehicles on the road were similarly sized.
When I think about it, I don't really need a voice plan anymore. The only thing I use my phone for is to send text messages and look up information on websites. I find that my phone is much more useful as a mobile internet appliance than it is as a phone. The few times I do make a phone call, something like Skype could take up the slack if it was possible to get a phone without an actual voice plan. I guess you could just get a data only plan, but where I live, getting a data only plan is the same price or more expensive, most likely because they assume you'll hook up a laptop to it and use a larger amount of data than the typical phone user would.
This is similar to the reason that I think the iPad is what most users really want/need. Techies complain about the walled garden, and how that limits what they can do with the hardware. But that's exactly what end users want. They want to be able to install and use software without thinking about all the bad consequences that could come of it.
Imagine going to a store and buying a toaster. Some toasters would be cheap, but would sometimes catch on fire and burn your house down. Some toasters would be cheap but listen in and record all the conversations going on in your kitchen. Some toasters would be more expensive and actually just toast the bread, without any ill effects. Sure it's the customer's choice which one they buy, and you can tell them to read reviews and be careful, but that's really not a good situation to put the customer in. The customer should have reasonable expectations that the product is safe and isn't trying to be malicious. But when installing software, it's very hard to verify that an unknown program is actually safe or not.
I'm not the parent poster, but if they can't find and resolve bugs like "can't find function in help system by typing in function name" then they aren't doing enough QA on their own. I can understand reporting weird errors that only happen in obscure situations, but glaringly obvious bugs are not something the end users should have to deal with. I user OpenOffice at home, but I understand why very few would want to use it in a business setting. I've tried both OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and both crash quite often on many different computers. I can't remember the last time I had Office crash on my work computer.
I am the exact same way. I think it annoyed other students that I was able to do so well without taking any notes. The downside of this method is that I often fell asleep in class if I was too tired and it was a particularly boring lecture.
I have an acquaintance who just bought a horse. Based on a conversation I had with him on the subject, I don't think that the price of using live animals for work will ever be cheaper than using machines. Even if petrochemicals became very expensive, they'd just move to other fuel sources for the tractors. Maintenance and purchase price isn't something that's likely to go really high. Don't forget there's plenty of maintenance costs on livestock as well. Vet bills, feeding, shelter, it all adds up.
FTFY. Based on current scientific knowledge DNA just won't last long enough. Whether or not something is possible is completely irrelevant to whether or not we should. Assuming we can clone dinosaurs, what reasons are there for not doing it?
As far as your second point goes, I suppose that we shouldn't worry about elephants or rhinos going extinct, because we have plenty of other mammals around. Also, we may not have all the DNA yet, but some day we might, if we find enough specimens.
I don't think that anybody uses beasts of burden anymore for farming. I guess in some places they do, but not in the industrialized nations. A tractor makes way more economical sense than an elephant for plowing your field. And even the people who are into organic food and free range farms wouldn't like it because they'd see it as cruelty to animals.
Do you have any examples of species that shouldn't be brought back? Why not bring them back just for the sake of science or even just curiosity? Imagine going to zoo and seeing animals that were once extinct. Dinosaurs weren't wiped out by man, but it sure would be nice to be able to definitively answering some questions about them by actually making a living specimen out of their DNA.
Yeah, I think there needs to be a happy medium ground somewhere. Paying $1,000,000 for a house isn't my idea of a good time, but neither is travelling 300 miles every time you want to do some shopping. The point is, there's no reason for everything in be in one place. There are plenty of cities with a reasonable cost of living, that don't required that you forgo a modern lifestyle.
Cheap labor seems to be the thing that stands out the most. I would think that labor is only cheap in Montana because land is cheap, and therefore people can live for less money. When even a modest house is , you don't have to wonder why they have to pay people so much to work there. Even if you pay the workers the same amount, you can attract a lot of talent because they'll be able to live that much more comfortably.
People used to eat a lot of things that most people won't even touch any more. People, In the US, not so long ago, used to eat cow tongue because it was cheap and nutritious. People used to eat pork hocks, but those seem to be hard to come by as well. Same goes for thinks like oxtail. People are becoming more and more picky about what they eat. To think that you could get a large number of people to move to eating insects or worms is ludicrous.
$50!?! Seriously I'm surprised that not everyone does it for that price. I'm pretty sure you don't get paid in Canada. It's always referred to as "donating" blood. Apparently you can give blood every 56 days. I think that many people would welcome an extra $300 a year.
Apparently you can give blood every 56 days. How often are transfusions needed, and would be able to store enough of your young blood to have a noticeable impact in old age. I wonder if this would work with storing your own blood when you're young, freezing it, and then transfusing it when you are older. If not, perhaps an organization could be developed such that people could donate into the system, for immediate use, and they'd be able to take out an equivalent amount of blood later when they needed it. Kind of like a pension plan or social security for blood. Any excess blood that wasn't needed because people paying in died in an accident and didn't need it could be used for the emergency blood transfusions. Could be a decent way of getting the current blood supply up.
But does a system like that require security patches? If its just for ordering parts then just stick the box behind a firewall and only allow access to the one site it needs to access. They shouldn't need to be browning reddit at work, and if they do, they should do it on a separate computer or on their phone so they don't go messing with the actual work system.
Here's the problem as I see it. The only reason to do this in the cloud is because you can't afford a fast enough computer to run the games at home. And game that requires fast rendering of high quality graphics is going to be somewhat fast paced. Nobody cares about graphics in turn based strategy games. So, in order to decrease controller lag, the server will have to be close to your physical location, preferably in the same city, or at least in about a 500 mile radius. Everybody who is using the service in the same area will be playing at the same time because most people work the same hours. Also, most hardcore gamers that would care about graphics (aka, not filthy casuals who just play Farmville) would want to play a couple hours a day. So there's very little time sharing that could be done. So you're basically going to beating for a very large share of the computing resources, so much so, that you may as well just buy the machine.
Yeah the iPad is going to win in the weight category, but only because it's so incapable of actually doing anything. 2 lbs is still lighter than most laptops/ultrabooks on the market. For $1000 you can get a Surface Pro that can replace a $600 desktop, $600 laptop, and $200 tablet, which is a net savings, plus you don't have to worry about how to sync between devices because you have 1 device that covers it all.
The iPad sure couldn't replace a desktop, but the Surface Pro is getting pretty close. You can run 4 monitors off the thing, and plug in a USB keyboard and mouse. You could also add a USB hard disk for extra storage. It could pretty much replace most people's desktop machines, an still act a very capable tablet when you want to bring it with you. It's a little on the pricey side right now, but if you don't need quite as much power, you can do similar stuff with Transformer T100, which has less power, and can only output to a single monitor, but can still run all your Windows programs. Once we're able to get enough power in a small enough form factor (I'd say we're already there), why do we need to have bulky desktop machines?
This is why I got the Surface 2 (not pro). It has a real file system. I can mount network drives. I can go to the command prompt (or powershell). Sure it's locked down as far as what apps you can run, but you can compile things yourself using the free version of Visual Studio. Personally I think it's a lot less locked down than Android or iPad. And the hardware is quite expandable. It has USB3, so you can plug in all kinds of external peripherals. It's not as open as a Linux tablet would be, but I don't think I've seen anything like that out in the wild that actually worked well. I think the only thing more open is the Surface Pro, but that's a little outside my price range.
Which is why hard drives are a much better solution than tapes. With tapes, most people write them, put them on a shelf, and hope that the next time they need them they actually work. Every time you read them, you degrade them, so actually checking if they work once in a while could be detrimental. Contrast that with hard disks. Use RAID on the main machine to increase uptime. Then backup everything to a completely seperate RAID array. Disks are a lot better at holding up to continuous use, so you can check frequently for errors in the data, and fix it before it becomes a problem. I don't think cost per gigabyte should actually be a big part of the equation. Everybody always mentions the price of the tape drive, but when talking about hard drives, they fail to account for the cost of a box that can handle 20-40 drives and act as a real backup solution.
There's always Windows Phone. I haven't heard much bad about it other than the people who hate it just because it's from Microsoft. I suppose there are less apps, but as long as it can do what you need it to do, what does it matter how many apps there are?
Exactly. Maybe some people think it's a good feature, because the only use they have for a firearm is for target practice. If you don't need your gun for self defense, then it's a minor problem when the battery runs out and you have to replace it.
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This makes a lot of sense. If we wanted to maximize safety, we wouldn't all be driving around in vehicles that weigh a couple thousand pounds. That's a lot of energy to get rid of in a short time in the event of an accident. Cars make sense for long trips or when you have a lot of stuff to carry, but going back and forth to work could be done in much smaller and lighter vehicles. You could easily build an enclosed recumbent bike with a small engine that would get both amazing gas mileage and be safe if all the other vehicles on the road were similarly sized.
When I think about it, I don't really need a voice plan anymore. The only thing I use my phone for is to send text messages and look up information on websites. I find that my phone is much more useful as a mobile internet appliance than it is as a phone. The few times I do make a phone call, something like Skype could take up the slack if it was possible to get a phone without an actual voice plan. I guess you could just get a data only plan, but where I live, getting a data only plan is the same price or more expensive, most likely because they assume you'll hook up a laptop to it and use a larger amount of data than the typical phone user would.
This is similar to the reason that I think the iPad is what most users really want/need. Techies complain about the walled garden, and how that limits what they can do with the hardware. But that's exactly what end users want. They want to be able to install and use software without thinking about all the bad consequences that could come of it.
Imagine going to a store and buying a toaster. Some toasters would be cheap, but would sometimes catch on fire and burn your house down. Some toasters would be cheap but listen in and record all the conversations going on in your kitchen. Some toasters would be more expensive and actually just toast the bread, without any ill effects. Sure it's the customer's choice which one they buy, and you can tell them to read reviews and be careful, but that's really not a good situation to put the customer in. The customer should have reasonable expectations that the product is safe and isn't trying to be malicious. But when installing software, it's very hard to verify that an unknown program is actually safe or not.
I'm not the parent poster, but if they can't find and resolve bugs like "can't find function in help system by typing in function name" then they aren't doing enough QA on their own. I can understand reporting weird errors that only happen in obscure situations, but glaringly obvious bugs are not something the end users should have to deal with. I user OpenOffice at home, but I understand why very few would want to use it in a business setting. I've tried both OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and both crash quite often on many different computers. I can't remember the last time I had Office crash on my work computer.
I am the exact same way. I think it annoyed other students that I was able to do so well without taking any notes. The downside of this method is that I often fell asleep in class if I was too tired and it was a particularly boring lecture.
I have an acquaintance who just bought a horse. Based on a conversation I had with him on the subject, I don't think that the price of using live animals for work will ever be cheaper than using machines. Even if petrochemicals became very expensive, they'd just move to other fuel sources for the tractors. Maintenance and purchase price isn't something that's likely to go really high. Don't forget there's plenty of maintenance costs on livestock as well. Vet bills, feeding, shelter, it all adds up.
FTFY. Based on current scientific knowledge DNA just won't last long enough. Whether or not something is possible is completely irrelevant to whether or not we should. Assuming we can clone dinosaurs, what reasons are there for not doing it?
As far as your second point goes, I suppose that we shouldn't worry about elephants or rhinos going extinct, because we have plenty of other mammals around. Also, we may not have all the DNA yet, but some day we might, if we find enough specimens.
I don't think that anybody uses beasts of burden anymore for farming. I guess in some places they do, but not in the industrialized nations. A tractor makes way more economical sense than an elephant for plowing your field. And even the people who are into organic food and free range farms wouldn't like it because they'd see it as cruelty to animals.
Do you have any examples of species that shouldn't be brought back? Why not bring them back just for the sake of science or even just curiosity? Imagine going to zoo and seeing animals that were once extinct. Dinosaurs weren't wiped out by man, but it sure would be nice to be able to definitively answering some questions about them by actually making a living specimen out of their DNA.
Yeah, I think there needs to be a happy medium ground somewhere. Paying $1,000,000 for a house isn't my idea of a good time, but neither is travelling 300 miles every time you want to do some shopping. The point is, there's no reason for everything in be in one place. There are plenty of cities with a reasonable cost of living, that don't required that you forgo a modern lifestyle.
Missing link and words
When even a modest house is $1,000,000 in San Francisco, you don't have to wonder.....
Cheap labor seems to be the thing that stands out the most. I would think that labor is only cheap in Montana because land is cheap, and therefore people can live for less money. When even a modest house is , you don't have to wonder why they have to pay people so much to work there. Even if you pay the workers the same amount, you can attract a lot of talent because they'll be able to live that much more comfortably.
People used to eat a lot of things that most people won't even touch any more. People, In the US, not so long ago, used to eat cow tongue because it was cheap and nutritious. People used to eat pork hocks, but those seem to be hard to come by as well. Same goes for thinks like oxtail. People are becoming more and more picky about what they eat. To think that you could get a large number of people to move to eating insects or worms is ludicrous.
$50!?! Seriously I'm surprised that not everyone does it for that price. I'm pretty sure you don't get paid in Canada. It's always referred to as "donating" blood. Apparently you can give blood every 56 days. I think that many people would welcome an extra $300 a year.
Apparently you can give blood every 56 days. How often are transfusions needed, and would be able to store enough of your young blood to have a noticeable impact in old age. I wonder if this would work with storing your own blood when you're young, freezing it, and then transfusing it when you are older. If not, perhaps an organization could be developed such that people could donate into the system, for immediate use, and they'd be able to take out an equivalent amount of blood later when they needed it. Kind of like a pension plan or social security for blood. Any excess blood that wasn't needed because people paying in died in an accident and didn't need it could be used for the emergency blood transfusions. Could be a decent way of getting the current blood supply up.
NTFS actually supports compressed folders. The contents are compressed transparently, so applications can work with the files easily.
But does a system like that require security patches? If its just for ordering parts then just stick the box behind a firewall and only allow access to the one site it needs to access. They shouldn't need to be browning reddit at work, and if they do, they should do it on a separate computer or on their phone so they don't go messing with the actual work system.
Here's the problem as I see it. The only reason to do this in the cloud is because you can't afford a fast enough computer to run the games at home. And game that requires fast rendering of high quality graphics is going to be somewhat fast paced. Nobody cares about graphics in turn based strategy games. So, in order to decrease controller lag, the server will have to be close to your physical location, preferably in the same city, or at least in about a 500 mile radius. Everybody who is using the service in the same area will be playing at the same time because most people work the same hours. Also, most hardcore gamers that would care about graphics (aka, not filthy casuals who just play Farmville) would want to play a couple hours a day. So there's very little time sharing that could be done. So you're basically going to beating for a very large share of the computing resources, so much so, that you may as well just buy the machine.
Yeah the iPad is going to win in the weight category, but only because it's so incapable of actually doing anything. 2 lbs is still lighter than most laptops/ultrabooks on the market. For $1000 you can get a Surface Pro that can replace a $600 desktop, $600 laptop, and $200 tablet, which is a net savings, plus you don't have to worry about how to sync between devices because you have 1 device that covers it all.
The iPad sure couldn't replace a desktop, but the Surface Pro is getting pretty close. You can run 4 monitors off the thing, and plug in a USB keyboard and mouse. You could also add a USB hard disk for extra storage. It could pretty much replace most people's desktop machines, an still act a very capable tablet when you want to bring it with you. It's a little on the pricey side right now, but if you don't need quite as much power, you can do similar stuff with Transformer T100, which has less power, and can only output to a single monitor, but can still run all your Windows programs. Once we're able to get enough power in a small enough form factor (I'd say we're already there), why do we need to have bulky desktop machines?
This is why I got the Surface 2 (not pro). It has a real file system. I can mount network drives. I can go to the command prompt (or powershell). Sure it's locked down as far as what apps you can run, but you can compile things yourself using the free version of Visual Studio. Personally I think it's a lot less locked down than Android or iPad. And the hardware is quite expandable. It has USB3, so you can plug in all kinds of external peripherals. It's not as open as a Linux tablet would be, but I don't think I've seen anything like that out in the wild that actually worked well. I think the only thing more open is the Surface Pro, but that's a little outside my price range.
Which is why hard drives are a much better solution than tapes. With tapes, most people write them, put them on a shelf, and hope that the next time they need them they actually work. Every time you read them, you degrade them, so actually checking if they work once in a while could be detrimental. Contrast that with hard disks. Use RAID on the main machine to increase uptime. Then backup everything to a completely seperate RAID array. Disks are a lot better at holding up to continuous use, so you can check frequently for errors in the data, and fix it before it becomes a problem. I don't think cost per gigabyte should actually be a big part of the equation. Everybody always mentions the price of the tape drive, but when talking about hard drives, they fail to account for the cost of a box that can handle 20-40 drives and act as a real backup solution.
There's always Windows Phone. I haven't heard much bad about it other than the people who hate it just because it's from Microsoft. I suppose there are less apps, but as long as it can do what you need it to do, what does it matter how many apps there are?
Exactly. Maybe some people think it's a good feature, because the only use they have for a firearm is for target practice. If you don't need your gun for self defense, then it's a minor problem when the battery runs out and you have to replace it.