I would say that Ruby is being used because it's seen as hip and cool. If they really wanted people to be able to get jobs, they would be teaching ASP.net, Java, or even old school ASP. There's tons of jobs maintaining old code in these languages. Ruby doesn't even come close to having a big market share.
Well, Netflix has produced a few of their own show. I particularly like House of Cards. Microsoft has their own video rental/purchase service, XBox Video. I see no reason why they shouldn't be producing their own content. If they can make money by selling or renting content, then more power to them.
To add to this, if the car is good enough to drive itself 99.9% of the time, how well will the driver be able to drive when the car fails and they have to take over. All systems I've seen require the user to be paying attention in case something goes wrong with the computer. When the computer is good enough that you haven't had to do any driving in the past 3 months, how much are you really going to be paying attention when something goes wrong?
Most kids in my highschool were quite proficient with the Wordperfect 5.1. There was no GUI and we all learned the keyboard shortcuts fast enough. The problem that I see, is that if you give people a way to do things without using the keyboard shortcuts, then they will never learn. Most people I know who aren't programmers don't even understand basic shortcuts like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V let alone more complicated stuff.
I really don't understand how the bottled water industry has become so big. Obviously there is a need for stores to sell bottled water, as we can't always have water on us, but I think it's gotten a little out of hand. When I'm going out for the day, or doing some kind of exercise, I almost always bring a reusable water bottle with me. If I'm not exercising and only going out for a few hours, I can get by without drinking anything until I return home. My main reason for all this is simply the price difference. I can't believe that people would rather spend $1 on a bottle of water then fill it up from their own tap for less than a penny.
Except that the Nest thermostat is anything but free. Sure, the cloud services to let you control your thermostat from outside your house are free, but the hardware itself is quite expensive. I wonder if there's any open source alternatives that would allow you to remotely control your thermostat, while not requiring some cloud provider. Your phone could directly connect to the thermostat when you open a hole in your router. Perhaps a little too difficult for most home users, but certainly something that many geeks would like
It's the same deal with photo printers. It's much easier and cheaper to go down to Walmart or Costco when you need to print out your photos and get them to use their professional quality machines to do the job. I think that 3D printers will end up in the same sport. You'll go down to Walmart, and get them to print out an item for you. You'll only need it maybe 5 times a year, so there's no point in owning your own 3D printer. There's already services where you can send a 3D file and somebody will print it out and ship it to you.
Yeah, there are more than a few apps out there to support alternative video formats. Out of the box it works with h264 along with others which will be enough for most people. I was more commenting on the ability to read files off a network share. On iOS (and Android I think, not familiar with the newest versions), each app has to add their own functionality if they want to read from a Network folder. However, on Windows (RT and regular), the functionality is baked into the operating system, and apps don't have to do anything special to be able to read from network folders. So if someone comes along and makes an app that can read MKV files, then it will be able to play them off the network, without any extra work required. On iPad, you find some apps that are really good at playing all kind of formats, but don't let you read off a network drive. You'll find some apps that read off network drives, but don't really handle all the video formats as well. Finding the right app to play videos is quite tiresome.
From looking at the "art" it looks to have little artistic value. Warhol didn't have any particular skills in computer art, and the software was quite limited in what you could do at that time. It's nothing that anybody else messing around with the same program couldn't have produced. Just because Warhol is a notable artist, does not mean that every piece of art he produced is worthy of our attention. Some people are great authors, but that doesn't mean their shopping lists or twitter posts, are literary works to be cherished.
I agree that there probably isn't a whole lot of time left for the ARM Windows tablets, but I actually think they have some advantages. The thing I like about the Surface 2, as opposed to something like the Asus Transformer (Windows 8 full version) is that it doesn't run legacy Windows. It can only run apps from the App store, and Windows has a good sandbox limiting what these apps can do. I no longer have to click through a million checkboxes every time I install a new program. It's not really a full replacement for a laptop, but does well as a tablet.
There are much better tablets out there for your money. The iPad doesn't have a (Micro)SD card slot, so they only way to get more storage is to pay $100 at each increment. by the time you get to 128 GB, you're paying $800, which is pretty close to the price of a Surface Pro, which already comes with 128 GB, and let's you use MicroSD cards, USB Sticks, or even a USB hard drive for additional storage. Plus you don't have to buy apps for the Surface Pro just to play videos from a network share. At lot of stuff that comes standard on Windows requires additional apps on the iPad.
If you don't upgrade the storage and just go with the 16 GB version, you'll spend $500 and run out of space pretty fast. There's Android tablets that are just as capable, cost less, and have expandable storage. If you don't need a big screen, there's plenty of quality 7 inch tablets for around $200
Personally, I bought the Surface 2 (not pro) last Christmas, and I like it a lot more than my wife's iPad. The expandable storage, plus again, not having to buy apps for things that should be standard, like playing videos from a network share, make it a good choice. I also like the UI a lot better than iPad or Android, and like the fact that I can open a command prompt or run a powershell script if I want to. The lack of apps is probably the only downfall, but I find that I'm still able to do everything I want to do on a tablet. There are many games I can't play, but there's enough games to keep me entertained.
Also, if Amazon is hosting the content, how could they throttle Netflix without throttling the rest of Amazon? Unless they are looking in the packets, they probably can't tell what belongs to Netflix, and what doesn't. So they should just encrypt the data, even with something that isn't resource intensive to prevent the ISPs from peeking at what's in the packets. It doesn't even have to be very secure. Just encrypted/encoded enough to stop the equipment from scanning the packets to find out what's inside.
You have to wonder what would have been different if the N64 went with discs. They may have been able to hold onto the Final Fantasy series instead of losing it to Sony. Then again, I really loved the N64 simply because it had some great games, and had no loading times. Whereas the original playstation had atrocious load times.
That has long been what many people wanted. Games that act like things in real life. Instead, we get things that look like real life, with high quality graphics, but think still don't act like real life. I'd rather have a game that didn't look as nice, but had things that reacted much more as they do in the real world. Breakable windows have been done, but doors and walls are usually completely solid, which, I guess, is usually why they don't put windows on them.
Personally, I really liked the way Metroid was done on the GameCube. The levels just went on and on forever, and you rarely had to wait for loading. When you did have to wait, you were in an elevator, and even then the loading times were relatively quick. That's something I really miss about the old cartridge systems. Everything was so instantaneous. I think that Nintendo is the only game make left who makes it a priority to have very low loading times.
However, for most people Netflix is not something you get instead of cable. It's something you get in addition to cable. If the extra $1 or $2 brings us stuff that just aired last night, and live sports, then it will be a replacement for cable.
Personally, I'd still keep the service, even if it cost $2 more. But they better start to get more content if they are going to raise prices.
That's all equipment. Sure equipment will wear out, but you don't have to pay every time you want to go out riding. Not to mention, those items you mentioned are minimal. The most expensive being the cassette or the tires. But tires tend to last quite a while. If you get a bike with an 8 speed drive train, cassettes and chains are cheap enough that you can easily replace them every year or two. Buying CO2 is ridiculous. You can pump up your tires using free air in the atmosphere around us.
Yeah, but freezing your eggs doesn't freeze the rest of your aging. As somebody with 3 kids, I'm glad that I had kids young, because I would not have the energy to deal with kids when I was 50 or 60. There's people who are having babies when they are 45. I would not want a teenager in the house when I'm 60. I guess everybody is entitled to their own way of doing things, but it takes a lot of energy to raise kids. Also, I'd like to point out that kids cost exactly as much to raise as you want them to. Sure you could buy $200 shoes for your kid, but they definitely don't need any of that stuff. My kids get plenty of enjoyment from going out for a walk in the woods, which is free, and don't need to go to amusement parks all the time to be entertained.
Most likely they wanted to release it a couple months early for iOS anyway, and found a way to convince Apple to give them free advertizing for something they were going to do anyway.
Cycling "can be" more expensive than golf, but it doesn't have to be. A $1000 bike will do fine for anybody who isn't riding competitively. You can spend less and get a better bike if you buy used. And after you've bought the equipment, it's free. There is no cost to go out for a ride, and you don't even have to schedule it. You can go out on your own time for an hour or two. Leave from your house, and end up at your house. Contrast that with golfing where you either have to buy a membership every year, or pay every time you want to play. And you have to find a few people to play with, and work in in around everyone's schedule. Sure there are those people who pay way too much for a bike, and show up for group rides, and can be a little dangerous, but if you find the right group, it's pretty easy to avoid people like this.
I don't know about calling it a sport still. For me, it falls into the same categorization as bowling, darts, and billiards. That isn't to say that golf, along with those other sports don't require a huge amount of skill, but I would hesitate to lump them into the same category as soccer, basketball, hockey, cycling, running, and other more physically exerting sports. This same kind of thing comes up when equating Starcraft with real sports, calling it an e-sport. Sure there are certain physical characteristics one must possess, but that doesn't mean it should be lumped into the same category.
Also, in the PGA, they are not allowed golf carts. There was, as far as I'm aware, only a single golfer allowed to use a golf cart, because he had a physical disability. So, although golf carts may be used by amateurs and weekend warriors, that doesn't really mean it's part of the game. Just as there are oversized clubs that once can use that aren't tournament legal. If players want to make up their own rules amongst themselves, nobody is going to stop them. In recreational golf, it's not uncommon for players to take a mulligan, or stop counting when they get more than a double bogey.
If anything people aren't leaving because the game is too hard, but because the game is just too expensive. People have found other things to spend their money on. I've heard that cycling is turning into the new golf. Sure you can spend tons of money on the equipment, just like golf, but it's free once you own the equipment. People see very little value in paying for country club memberships as many of the people who now have money are don't care about the whole socialization aspect of it.
Exactly. I know people who rent in the same neighbourhood I live in, in exactly the same model of house. Their rent is actually higher than my mortgage payments. The only difference is that I had to save up for a down payment. Not only that, but rent payments keep increasing, while mortgage payments (assuming constant interest rate) actually stay the same, so they go down relative to inflation.
Exactly. Perl had the fewest vulnerabilities. But only the most experienced coders would even attempt to do a site in Perl, so you kind of end up with exactly what you expect. The popular languages all ended up with the same number of vulnerabilities. It's actually quite surprising the PHP had slightly fewer vulnerabilities than.Net and Java.
What would be really secure would be a language that actively tried to stop you from doing stupid things like requiring that database queries be parameterized. Don't provide any APIs for running database queries without parameters. Sure you could still construct queries that didn't actually use the parameters, but it would at least get you off to a good start by forcing you to pass them into the function. You could even parse the SQL and throw an error if a value was used where a parameter should be. You could also force checking for a token when submitting forms to ensure CSRF is not being done.
It may be cliche, but how secure a language is depends on who is using it. PHP is very accessible, and used by a lot of newbies, so "in the field" there turns out to be a lot of vulnerabilities found. However, by following some relatively simple guidelines, code can be made pretty secure. Most of the problems in PHP code are either due to SQL injection, which can easily be avoided by using parameterized queries, or from turning on options that are known to be insecure, like register_globals. C on the other hand would only be used by a small number of highly trained individuals, at least for web applications, so it's less likely to experience problems in the wild, but due to buffer overflows and other memory management problems, it's much easier to shoot yourself in the foot without realizing it.
Yes, but the most efficient way for humans to do something isn't the most efficient way for a computer/robot to do something. Think about something like drawing a color picture. You could do this by mimmicking a human, having a robot that picks up pens of various colors, and draws lines on a stationary page, and indeed these do exist. But you could also use something like a laser printer that feeds the page through and prints across the entire page at once. Sure some inefficiencies could be figured out by getting people to do a task, but you may not get the most optimum result until to look at methods that are impossible for people. With manufacturing, you want to get to the end product with the least amount of cost. Sometimes, an end product with the exact same function as the original human made part may be really cheap to produce with a machine, but may be impossible for a human to assemble.
That's not going to stop them from doing it. In the next couple of years, a phone with a 4K display could be a real possibility. It won't be 4K^2, because the screens aren't square, but it will have the same effective resolution. They have to upgrade something to keep people paying high prices for devices. As technology improves, the same old stuff gets cheaper, and this creates lower profits for manufacturers as the barrier to entry gets lower. This is why you can now buy a laptop for under $300, and won't need to be updated before it dies. Contrast that to 15 years ago when I bought my first desktop machine, which cost close to $2000, and even then had to spend money on upgrades within a couple years.
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I would say that Ruby is being used because it's seen as hip and cool. If they really wanted people to be able to get jobs, they would be teaching ASP.net, Java, or even old school ASP. There's tons of jobs maintaining old code in these languages. Ruby doesn't even come close to having a big market share.
Well, Netflix has produced a few of their own show. I particularly like House of Cards. Microsoft has their own video rental/purchase service, XBox Video. I see no reason why they shouldn't be producing their own content. If they can make money by selling or renting content, then more power to them.
To add to this, if the car is good enough to drive itself 99.9% of the time, how well will the driver be able to drive when the car fails and they have to take over. All systems I've seen require the user to be paying attention in case something goes wrong with the computer. When the computer is good enough that you haven't had to do any driving in the past 3 months, how much are you really going to be paying attention when something goes wrong?
Most kids in my highschool were quite proficient with the Wordperfect 5.1. There was no GUI and we all learned the keyboard shortcuts fast enough. The problem that I see, is that if you give people a way to do things without using the keyboard shortcuts, then they will never learn. Most people I know who aren't programmers don't even understand basic shortcuts like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V let alone more complicated stuff.
I really don't understand how the bottled water industry has become so big. Obviously there is a need for stores to sell bottled water, as we can't always have water on us, but I think it's gotten a little out of hand. When I'm going out for the day, or doing some kind of exercise, I almost always bring a reusable water bottle with me. If I'm not exercising and only going out for a few hours, I can get by without drinking anything until I return home. My main reason for all this is simply the price difference. I can't believe that people would rather spend $1 on a bottle of water then fill it up from their own tap for less than a penny.
Except that the Nest thermostat is anything but free. Sure, the cloud services to let you control your thermostat from outside your house are free, but the hardware itself is quite expensive. I wonder if there's any open source alternatives that would allow you to remotely control your thermostat, while not requiring some cloud provider. Your phone could directly connect to the thermostat when you open a hole in your router. Perhaps a little too difficult for most home users, but certainly something that many geeks would like
It's the same deal with photo printers. It's much easier and cheaper to go down to Walmart or Costco when you need to print out your photos and get them to use their professional quality machines to do the job. I think that 3D printers will end up in the same sport. You'll go down to Walmart, and get them to print out an item for you. You'll only need it maybe 5 times a year, so there's no point in owning your own 3D printer. There's already services where you can send a 3D file and somebody will print it out and ship it to you.
Yeah, there are more than a few apps out there to support alternative video formats. Out of the box it works with h264 along with others which will be enough for most people. I was more commenting on the ability to read files off a network share. On iOS (and Android I think, not familiar with the newest versions), each app has to add their own functionality if they want to read from a Network folder. However, on Windows (RT and regular), the functionality is baked into the operating system, and apps don't have to do anything special to be able to read from network folders. So if someone comes along and makes an app that can read MKV files, then it will be able to play them off the network, without any extra work required. On iPad, you find some apps that are really good at playing all kind of formats, but don't let you read off a network drive. You'll find some apps that read off network drives, but don't really handle all the video formats as well. Finding the right app to play videos is quite tiresome.
From looking at the "art" it looks to have little artistic value. Warhol didn't have any particular skills in computer art, and the software was quite limited in what you could do at that time. It's nothing that anybody else messing around with the same program couldn't have produced. Just because Warhol is a notable artist, does not mean that every piece of art he produced is worthy of our attention. Some people are great authors, but that doesn't mean their shopping lists or twitter posts, are literary works to be cherished.
I agree that there probably isn't a whole lot of time left for the ARM Windows tablets, but I actually think they have some advantages. The thing I like about the Surface 2, as opposed to something like the Asus Transformer (Windows 8 full version) is that it doesn't run legacy Windows. It can only run apps from the App store, and Windows has a good sandbox limiting what these apps can do. I no longer have to click through a million checkboxes every time I install a new program. It's not really a full replacement for a laptop, but does well as a tablet.
There are much better tablets out there for your money. The iPad doesn't have a (Micro)SD card slot, so they only way to get more storage is to pay $100 at each increment. by the time you get to 128 GB, you're paying $800, which is pretty close to the price of a Surface Pro, which already comes with 128 GB, and let's you use MicroSD cards, USB Sticks, or even a USB hard drive for additional storage. Plus you don't have to buy apps for the Surface Pro just to play videos from a network share. At lot of stuff that comes standard on Windows requires additional apps on the iPad.
If you don't upgrade the storage and just go with the 16 GB version, you'll spend $500 and run out of space pretty fast. There's Android tablets that are just as capable, cost less, and have expandable storage. If you don't need a big screen, there's plenty of quality 7 inch tablets for around $200
Personally, I bought the Surface 2 (not pro) last Christmas, and I like it a lot more than my wife's iPad. The expandable storage, plus again, not having to buy apps for things that should be standard, like playing videos from a network share, make it a good choice. I also like the UI a lot better than iPad or Android, and like the fact that I can open a command prompt or run a powershell script if I want to. The lack of apps is probably the only downfall, but I find that I'm still able to do everything I want to do on a tablet. There are many games I can't play, but there's enough games to keep me entertained.
Also, if Amazon is hosting the content, how could they throttle Netflix without throttling the rest of Amazon? Unless they are looking in the packets, they probably can't tell what belongs to Netflix, and what doesn't. So they should just encrypt the data, even with something that isn't resource intensive to prevent the ISPs from peeking at what's in the packets. It doesn't even have to be very secure. Just encrypted/encoded enough to stop the equipment from scanning the packets to find out what's inside.
You have to wonder what would have been different if the N64 went with discs. They may have been able to hold onto the Final Fantasy series instead of losing it to Sony. Then again, I really loved the N64 simply because it had some great games, and had no loading times. Whereas the original playstation had atrocious load times.
That has long been what many people wanted. Games that act like things in real life. Instead, we get things that look like real life, with high quality graphics, but think still don't act like real life. I'd rather have a game that didn't look as nice, but had things that reacted much more as they do in the real world. Breakable windows have been done, but doors and walls are usually completely solid, which, I guess, is usually why they don't put windows on them.
Personally, I really liked the way Metroid was done on the GameCube. The levels just went on and on forever, and you rarely had to wait for loading. When you did have to wait, you were in an elevator, and even then the loading times were relatively quick. That's something I really miss about the old cartridge systems. Everything was so instantaneous. I think that Nintendo is the only game make left who makes it a priority to have very low loading times.
However, for most people Netflix is not something you get instead of cable. It's something you get in addition to cable. If the extra $1 or $2 brings us stuff that just aired last night, and live sports, then it will be a replacement for cable.
Personally, I'd still keep the service, even if it cost $2 more. But they better start to get more content if they are going to raise prices.
That's all equipment. Sure equipment will wear out, but you don't have to pay every time you want to go out riding. Not to mention, those items you mentioned are minimal. The most expensive being the cassette or the tires. But tires tend to last quite a while. If you get a bike with an 8 speed drive train, cassettes and chains are cheap enough that you can easily replace them every year or two. Buying CO2 is ridiculous. You can pump up your tires using free air in the atmosphere around us.
Yeah, but freezing your eggs doesn't freeze the rest of your aging. As somebody with 3 kids, I'm glad that I had kids young, because I would not have the energy to deal with kids when I was 50 or 60. There's people who are having babies when they are 45. I would not want a teenager in the house when I'm 60. I guess everybody is entitled to their own way of doing things, but it takes a lot of energy to raise kids. Also, I'd like to point out that kids cost exactly as much to raise as you want them to. Sure you could buy $200 shoes for your kid, but they definitely don't need any of that stuff. My kids get plenty of enjoyment from going out for a walk in the woods, which is free, and don't need to go to amusement parks all the time to be entertained.
Most likely they wanted to release it a couple months early for iOS anyway, and found a way to convince Apple to give them free advertizing for something they were going to do anyway.
Cycling "can be" more expensive than golf, but it doesn't have to be. A $1000 bike will do fine for anybody who isn't riding competitively. You can spend less and get a better bike if you buy used. And after you've bought the equipment, it's free. There is no cost to go out for a ride, and you don't even have to schedule it. You can go out on your own time for an hour or two. Leave from your house, and end up at your house. Contrast that with golfing where you either have to buy a membership every year, or pay every time you want to play. And you have to find a few people to play with, and work in in around everyone's schedule. Sure there are those people who pay way too much for a bike, and show up for group rides, and can be a little dangerous, but if you find the right group, it's pretty easy to avoid people like this.
I don't know about calling it a sport still. For me, it falls into the same categorization as bowling, darts, and billiards. That isn't to say that golf, along with those other sports don't require a huge amount of skill, but I would hesitate to lump them into the same category as soccer, basketball, hockey, cycling, running, and other more physically exerting sports. This same kind of thing comes up when equating Starcraft with real sports, calling it an e-sport. Sure there are certain physical characteristics one must possess, but that doesn't mean it should be lumped into the same category.
Also, in the PGA, they are not allowed golf carts. There was, as far as I'm aware, only a single golfer allowed to use a golf cart, because he had a physical disability. So, although golf carts may be used by amateurs and weekend warriors, that doesn't really mean it's part of the game. Just as there are oversized clubs that once can use that aren't tournament legal. If players want to make up their own rules amongst themselves, nobody is going to stop them. In recreational golf, it's not uncommon for players to take a mulligan, or stop counting when they get more than a double bogey.
If anything people aren't leaving because the game is too hard, but because the game is just too expensive. People have found other things to spend their money on. I've heard that cycling is turning into the new golf. Sure you can spend tons of money on the equipment, just like golf, but it's free once you own the equipment. People see very little value in paying for country club memberships as many of the people who now have money are don't care about the whole socialization aspect of it.
Exactly. I know people who rent in the same neighbourhood I live in, in exactly the same model of house. Their rent is actually higher than my mortgage payments. The only difference is that I had to save up for a down payment. Not only that, but rent payments keep increasing, while mortgage payments (assuming constant interest rate) actually stay the same, so they go down relative to inflation.
Exactly. Perl had the fewest vulnerabilities. But only the most experienced coders would even attempt to do a site in Perl, so you kind of end up with exactly what you expect. The popular languages all ended up with the same number of vulnerabilities. It's actually quite surprising the PHP had slightly fewer vulnerabilities than .Net and Java.
What would be really secure would be a language that actively tried to stop you from doing stupid things like requiring that database queries be parameterized. Don't provide any APIs for running database queries without parameters. Sure you could still construct queries that didn't actually use the parameters, but it would at least get you off to a good start by forcing you to pass them into the function. You could even parse the SQL and throw an error if a value was used where a parameter should be. You could also force checking for a token when submitting forms to ensure CSRF is not being done.
It may be cliche, but how secure a language is depends on who is using it. PHP is very accessible, and used by a lot of newbies, so "in the field" there turns out to be a lot of vulnerabilities found. However, by following some relatively simple guidelines, code can be made pretty secure. Most of the problems in PHP code are either due to SQL injection, which can easily be avoided by using parameterized queries, or from turning on options that are known to be insecure, like register_globals. C on the other hand would only be used by a small number of highly trained individuals, at least for web applications, so it's less likely to experience problems in the wild, but due to buffer overflows and other memory management problems, it's much easier to shoot yourself in the foot without realizing it.
Yes, but the most efficient way for humans to do something isn't the most efficient way for a computer/robot to do something. Think about something like drawing a color picture. You could do this by mimmicking a human, having a robot that picks up pens of various colors, and draws lines on a stationary page, and indeed these do exist. But you could also use something like a laser printer that feeds the page through and prints across the entire page at once. Sure some inefficiencies could be figured out by getting people to do a task, but you may not get the most optimum result until to look at methods that are impossible for people. With manufacturing, you want to get to the end product with the least amount of cost. Sometimes, an end product with the exact same function as the original human made part may be really cheap to produce with a machine, but may be impossible for a human to assemble.
That's not going to stop them from doing it. In the next couple of years, a phone with a 4K display could be a real possibility. It won't be 4K^2, because the screens aren't square, but it will have the same effective resolution. They have to upgrade something to keep people paying high prices for devices. As technology improves, the same old stuff gets cheaper, and this creates lower profits for manufacturers as the barrier to entry gets lower. This is why you can now buy a laptop for under $300, and won't need to be updated before it dies. Contrast that to 15 years ago when I bought my first desktop machine, which cost close to $2000, and even then had to spend money on upgrades within a couple years.