Where did I say I ran Windows? Regardless of the operating system used, the point is that I end up installing stuff I only use once, or just accumulate files I no longer need(downloaded files and such), log files grow. All this adds up.It's often easier to just start from scratch. It's amazing how much stuff sits on your drive that you never use at all.
Or maybe just making it cheaper/easier for themselves to do so. Because of bitcoin, we now have custom ASIC computers which can do calculations at amazing speeds. Sure the NSA could already ask someone to make machines if they needed to, but it would be much more convenient for them if the machines were commercially available.
I also wouldn't want to charge my parents for computer repair, but I also wouldn't feel obliged to help if they also didn't make an effort to not having computer problems in the first place. If they didn't take the advice you gave them about how to make things break less often then they shouldn't be entitled to any services. If you were a mechanic and they called you up every couple of months to fix the brakes because they "ride the brake", wouldn't it be reasonable to expect them to at least change their driving habits if they expect you to service their car for them?
I guess I'm just lucky. When my mother in law last asked for computer help, it was because Avast or AVG (can't recall which) was too annoying, and the free license ran out. So I dropped that completely and got MS security Essentials. There was basically nothing installed on her computer that didn't come with it. I guess it helps that the only thing she does is Facebook.
They'll complain for the first month, but it won't take them that long to catch on. You could also just say you refuse to help them if they refuse to take advice which would make your ability to help them that much easier. Seems to me they are being a little unreasonable. They are asking for free computer repair service, and won't even change their habits to make it easier on the person doing the repairs. Ask for $50 every time they want you to fix it (Anybody else would charge more), and they'll probably think pretty fast about switching to a new type of device.
This is so true. Even as somebody who knows how to keep his computer clean of viruses and malware, I still follow these recommendations. Keep the important data backed up, and format the machine every 6-12 months. Keeps things running smoothly.
That or just get them an iPad or Surface 2, and be done with it. They can probably get all their stuff done on either of these devices. Surface 2 even has MS Office, and they've really up their game on the hardware this time around. Found that most reviews found almost nothing negative to say about the Surface except for the fact that there's fewer apps. But the Windows market is growing quickly.
5 million gallons may sound like a lot, but it's not event that big. 5 million gallons, equates to about 19000 cubic meters. which is a 27 meter cube of water. Or a pool the size of an american football field, at 4 meters deep. I wouldn't be hard to contain the water if the basin was built properly.
Exactly. The current levels are.18 parts per TRILLION, as compared to 400 parts per MILLION for CO2. Convert the CO2 concentration to the same units and you're comparing 0.18 for the new one to 400,000,000 for carbon dioxide. So, even if it does have an effect of 7000 times, that still only makes it comparable to 1260 vs. 400,000,000.
I think you are right, with a little clarification. Your view never tilted up and down. All your shots basically covered a vertical plane. Any enemy in line with that vertical plane is hit by your shots. Just went back and tried the game on DOSBox. It is indeed how the game is. Also, I forgot, you could push tab and see the map, and run around in the game while only viewing the map.
If it was viable, someone would have done it long ago. Look how much flack the Wall Street Journal got when they tried to implement a paywall. I could think of a very good way to implement it without incurring huge transaction fees. Let's say you are a payment processor, like PayPal, and there's a bunch of sites who want to set up paywalls, like newspapers, and a bunch of customers who want to visit the sites, like you and me. Now, you just have to have all the customers maintain some small balance on PayPal, like $5. There's a small transaction fee for getting the money into the account. The more money you keep in the account, the smaller (percentage) the transaction fee is. When you go to a site with a paywall, they redirect you to PayPal so that you can authorize the transaction, and then they redirect you back to the paywalled site with a key that the paywalled site can use to do a backend verification of the payment. Using browser extensions, this could probably be accomplished by a single click, or even seamlessly, assuming the customer set up rules for which sites they want to verify automatically. The paywalled site only gets the money once they have accrued enough visitors to make it worth the transaction fee to pull the money out, maybe even as infrequent once a month payments. So the middle man makes money on the transaction fees, plus they make interest on all the money they are holding on to.
The big problem here, is that now PayPal (or in the case of this article, JP Morgan) has a record of every page you payed to view. At the best case, they have a record of exactly how much money you spent at each site. So they would know if you read 1000 pages at The Enquirer (are they online?), or if you spent most of your time on Popular Mechanics. They could probably just wave the transaction fee completely, and make all the money they need off the interest from the balances of the site operators and site visitors, selling demographic data on who's paying for which site, and (I know, the irony) displaying ads on the payment verification page.
The big problem is that nobody wants to take the plunge and be the first website to force users to pay. Unless you have some really specialized content, there's a thousand other websites that have the same or very similar content available for free. People aren't willing to pay yet. I guess things could change in the future, but the site operators would have to offer a pretty good experience to convince people to pay actual cash. Even if it was just fractions of cent. Look at this site we're on right now. They'd have to stop posting dupes, actually editing the submissions and checking for correctness, and maybe even start accepting unicode characters if they wanted people to pay.
I think it was. I made a few levels and put them on my Tripod page, so it's possible you could have played it. I also remember making a roughly spherical room which had the walls looking like a checkerboard or soccer ball. Another level (or part of the same) required you to shoot down a long narrow shaft to hit the reactor, like destroying the death start in the battle of Yavin. I don't have copies of the levels anymore, but I went back using DOSBox a couple years ago, and verified that you could indeed do this, so it's not just my nostalgic childhood memory playing tricks on me.
Most people don't realize how far we've come until you go back and play those games. If I recall correctly, in Doom, there was no jumping, and you couldn't aim up and down. The only way to move vertically was going up small steps, which your character automatically walked up. The levels were all 2 dimensional. It didn't support rooms above other rooms.
Other games like Descent, were more 3D, but as someone who designed levels in his spare time for the game, there's some weird stuff you can do in that game because the 3D engine was flawed, most likely to make it run fast enough. You could build a room with a floating cube in the middle. Put a door on one side of that cube. When you go through the door, you could enter a room bigger than the encompassing cube.
Yeah, but start billing somebody every time they look at your page and you can guarantee that people won't be coming to your site very often, or the number of page views will go down quite a bit. The way I usually browse news sites (like Slashdot for instance), is that I scroll down the page and open 5-10 articles in new tabs. Then I read some of them, post comments in others, and close some I'm not interested in (or don't have time for). With advertising they're still getting paid even for the pages I didn't read. If I had to pay for every page I opened, I would be opening a lot less pages. It's like people saying Spotify doesn't give enough for each time a person listens to a track. Try to change the model so that you have to pay a fee for each song, rather than a flat fee for all you can listen to, and the amount of revenue you bring in will be a lot less. Sure artists will get more for each play, but they'll be getting a lot less plays. People certainly won't be leaving it on all day while they may not even be in the room.
Why would you limit your people to doing boring, repetitive tasks when they are capable of so much more?
I would say that in a lot of cases, the people are not capable of so much more. If they were capable of more, they would be going those other jobs already, because they pay more, and are more interesting. Most people don't have the skills, any many people would be completely unable to grasp the skills, even if you gave them the opportunity, either because they have absolutely no drive, or because they actually lack cognition skills.
On the other hand, who will do all the required jobs, if you are free to pursue all your own endeavors while having a high (by today's standards) standard of living. Personally I like my job, but I would give it up in a second if I could have the same standard of living while being allowed to stay at home, look after my kids, and pursue my hobbies. There will be jobs that required humans for some time to come (like programming the robots, and other computer systems), who will be willing to do those jobs if there is a system in place that guarantees a high standard of living for all? Will those few who do choose to work be treated like royalty, and paid like the CEOs of today, because most people wouldn't work if they didn't have to.
I thought the exact same thing. Seems like there's some kind of contradiction. Even if they were both moving at the speed of light, toward each other it would still take many centuries for them to collide.
Kind of have to agree on this one. Look at the history of war. Look at how many fewer deaths we've had from war after WWII. It's much smaller than what we had before WWII. For instance, Number of deaths in Vietnam vary depending on who you ask, but the number is for sure less than 1 million. Compare that to WWII, where 50-80 million people died.WWI was around 37 million. Why such a sudden decline all of a sudden? hard to say it was all because of the bomb, but it's definitely a deterrent. Maybe we are just better at stopping conflicts before they get out of hand.
In my area, they've made it mandatory for building owners to clean the graffiti, or they get a fine. Unless of course it's on electrical/phone utility boxes, bus shelters, or other common targets. Graffiti seems to stick around on these things, and the local utility company never has to clean them. Small business owners end up being the ones getting fined.
What I see from this is that the sample is flawed. We can't infer from this data that internet users create bad passwords. What we can infer, if the passwords show a trend of being poor passwords, is that internet users who have a keylogger installed create bad passwords. If you already have a keylogger on your system, you are probably quite lax about security.
There isn't that much demand. Assuming everybody in the US buys 20 albums a year, that's a total of 6 billion albums sold. If you need to sell 1,000,000 albums to be a star, that leaves room for about 6000 musicians. In reality, the number of albums sold will be much less than 20 per person, actual numbers I've found show that it maxed out around 5 albums per person, so there's at most room for 1500 musicians all selling 1 million albums. And in reality, you're going to get some artists selling 20 million albums, and which takes up the sales for about 20 other artists.
Exactly. If you let people get away with it, they will just plug into the same outlet every day. Over an entire year, the amount would add up. It's like saying why ticket somebody for double parking? A single occurrence probably doesn't cause much problems, but if everybody did it, the streets would be completely jammed, and people would be blocked in all the time.
That's because the writer effectively owns the song, while the artists only owns the single performance of the song which was recorded. It's completely legal for the writer of the song to allow Band A to play a song and sell copies (with a percentage going to the writer), and allow Band B to record the same song and also sell copies (again with a percentage going to the writer). Unless the writer signed some kind of exclusivity agreement with the first band, he's perfectly within his rights to let another artist record the song and reap more royalties. The 10th most money-making song of all time is "The Christmas Song" AKA "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire", made so much money because of the sheer number of artists who have included it on their Christmas albums, and the sheer number of radio plays it gets every December.
To me, there's quite a difference between a "desktop" and a "workstation". What you describe, is basically the realm of workstations. The difference is that you can't run SolidWorks or AutoCad on Tablet. But you also can't get any useful work done on them using a $400 eMachine either. For the foreseeable future there will be a need for workstations. But I can see the desktop market declining quite rapidly. I personally haven't bought a new desktop in 8 years. And my current desktop does the things I need it to do just fine. My next computer purchase will be a tablet, as I find that almost everything I use my laptop for I can do on a tablet, and the laptop still works for the 5% of the stuff that I need it for. At work, sure I have a big tower case with a bunch of monitors and plenty of horsepower. But there's almost no reason for stuff like this in my house. It takes up a lot of space, and uses a lot of electricity, and I only use it a couple hours a month.
I think the real issue with doing music, or writing, or basketball (any sport) for a living is that there is a very small job market when you think about it. Sure everybody listens to music, but everyone tends to listen to the same 20 musicians. Same with basketball, there's only 30 teams, and 15 players per team, that's about 450 players. There's an extremely small number of people who make money in any of these professions, and the rest of the people make little to no money A "programmer" who can't even program fizz-buzz can easily make a decent salary but the equivalent of a musician or athlete with that level of talent is basically worthless. So sure, there's a lot of programmers (millions) who are making a lot of money, but that's because there's an actual demand for that many programmers. There isn't a demand for a million musicians, a million basketball players, or a million writers. There's a demand for millions of shelf stockers, but there's 10's of millions of people who are capable of doing the job. With programming, the demand for people outnumbers the number of people qualified to do the job. So of course they're going to get paid a lot.
Not only that, but $0.0084 per play isn't all that bad. Let's say I buy a CD, and it costs me $15, and it has 15 tracks. It's a CD I like, so over the life of the CD I listen to it in it's entirety 100 times. That comes out to 1500 song plays. They're basically getting $0.01 cents per time I've heard each song. I wonder what the average plays per song ratio is on iTunes purchases? Do people buy a song and then only listen to it 5 times ever? Which gives the artist 20-25 cents a listen. Many people I know have hundreds if not thousands of listens on the same song. That works out to $0.001 cents per listen. Are the artists getting scammed by people who like to listen to a few songs over and over versus the people who like to have tons of different music and only listen to each song a few times? Sounds to me like the artists are making quite a decent amount, and the only problem is that some artists can't get enough people to listen to their music. But who's fault is that?
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Where did I say I ran Windows? Regardless of the operating system used, the point is that I end up installing stuff I only use once, or just accumulate files I no longer need(downloaded files and such), log files grow. All this adds up.It's often easier to just start from scratch. It's amazing how much stuff sits on your drive that you never use at all.
Or maybe just making it cheaper/easier for themselves to do so. Because of bitcoin, we now have custom ASIC computers which can do calculations at amazing speeds. Sure the NSA could already ask someone to make machines if they needed to, but it would be much more convenient for them if the machines were commercially available.
I also wouldn't want to charge my parents for computer repair, but I also wouldn't feel obliged to help if they also didn't make an effort to not having computer problems in the first place. If they didn't take the advice you gave them about how to make things break less often then they shouldn't be entitled to any services. If you were a mechanic and they called you up every couple of months to fix the brakes because they "ride the brake", wouldn't it be reasonable to expect them to at least change their driving habits if they expect you to service their car for them?
I guess I'm just lucky. When my mother in law last asked for computer help, it was because Avast or AVG (can't recall which) was too annoying, and the free license ran out. So I dropped that completely and got MS security Essentials. There was basically nothing installed on her computer that didn't come with it. I guess it helps that the only thing she does is Facebook.
They'll complain for the first month, but it won't take them that long to catch on. You could also just say you refuse to help them if they refuse to take advice which would make your ability to help them that much easier. Seems to me they are being a little unreasonable. They are asking for free computer repair service, and won't even change their habits to make it easier on the person doing the repairs. Ask for $50 every time they want you to fix it (Anybody else would charge more), and they'll probably think pretty fast about switching to a new type of device.
This is so true. Even as somebody who knows how to keep his computer clean of viruses and malware, I still follow these recommendations. Keep the important data backed up, and format the machine every 6-12 months. Keeps things running smoothly.
That or just get them an iPad or Surface 2, and be done with it. They can probably get all their stuff done on either of these devices. Surface 2 even has MS Office, and they've really up their game on the hardware this time around. Found that most reviews found almost nothing negative to say about the Surface except for the fact that there's fewer apps. But the Windows market is growing quickly.
5 million gallons may sound like a lot, but it's not event that big. 5 million gallons, equates to about 19000 cubic meters. which is a 27 meter cube of water. Or a pool the size of an american football field, at 4 meters deep. I wouldn't be hard to contain the water if the basin was built properly.
Exactly. The current levels are .18 parts per TRILLION, as compared to 400 parts per MILLION for CO2. Convert the CO2 concentration to the same units and you're comparing 0.18 for the new one to 400,000,000 for carbon dioxide. So, even if it does have an effect of 7000 times, that still only makes it comparable to 1260 vs. 400,000,000.
I think you are right, with a little clarification. Your view never tilted up and down. All your shots basically covered a vertical plane. Any enemy in line with that vertical plane is hit by your shots. Just went back and tried the game on DOSBox. It is indeed how the game is. Also, I forgot, you could push tab and see the map, and run around in the game while only viewing the map.
If it was viable, someone would have done it long ago. Look how much flack the Wall Street Journal got when they tried to implement a paywall. I could think of a very good way to implement it without incurring huge transaction fees. Let's say you are a payment processor, like PayPal, and there's a bunch of sites who want to set up paywalls, like newspapers, and a bunch of customers who want to visit the sites, like you and me. Now, you just have to have all the customers maintain some small balance on PayPal, like $5. There's a small transaction fee for getting the money into the account. The more money you keep in the account, the smaller (percentage) the transaction fee is. When you go to a site with a paywall, they redirect you to PayPal so that you can authorize the transaction, and then they redirect you back to the paywalled site with a key that the paywalled site can use to do a backend verification of the payment. Using browser extensions, this could probably be accomplished by a single click, or even seamlessly, assuming the customer set up rules for which sites they want to verify automatically. The paywalled site only gets the money once they have accrued enough visitors to make it worth the transaction fee to pull the money out, maybe even as infrequent once a month payments. So the middle man makes money on the transaction fees, plus they make interest on all the money they are holding on to.
The big problem here, is that now PayPal (or in the case of this article, JP Morgan) has a record of every page you payed to view. At the best case, they have a record of exactly how much money you spent at each site. So they would know if you read 1000 pages at The Enquirer (are they online?), or if you spent most of your time on Popular Mechanics. They could probably just wave the transaction fee completely, and make all the money they need off the interest from the balances of the site operators and site visitors, selling demographic data on who's paying for which site, and (I know, the irony) displaying ads on the payment verification page.
The big problem is that nobody wants to take the plunge and be the first website to force users to pay. Unless you have some really specialized content, there's a thousand other websites that have the same or very similar content available for free. People aren't willing to pay yet. I guess things could change in the future, but the site operators would have to offer a pretty good experience to convince people to pay actual cash. Even if it was just fractions of cent. Look at this site we're on right now. They'd have to stop posting dupes, actually editing the submissions and checking for correctness, and maybe even start accepting unicode characters if they wanted people to pay.
I think it was. I made a few levels and put them on my Tripod page, so it's possible you could have played it. I also remember making a roughly spherical room which had the walls looking like a checkerboard or soccer ball. Another level (or part of the same) required you to shoot down a long narrow shaft to hit the reactor, like destroying the death start in the battle of Yavin. I don't have copies of the levels anymore, but I went back using DOSBox a couple years ago, and verified that you could indeed do this, so it's not just my nostalgic childhood memory playing tricks on me.
Most people don't realize how far we've come until you go back and play those games. If I recall correctly, in Doom, there was no jumping, and you couldn't aim up and down. The only way to move vertically was going up small steps, which your character automatically walked up. The levels were all 2 dimensional. It didn't support rooms above other rooms.
Other games like Descent, were more 3D, but as someone who designed levels in his spare time for the game, there's some weird stuff you can do in that game because the 3D engine was flawed, most likely to make it run fast enough. You could build a room with a floating cube in the middle. Put a door on one side of that cube. When you go through the door, you could enter a room bigger than the encompassing cube.
Yeah, but start billing somebody every time they look at your page and you can guarantee that people won't be coming to your site very often, or the number of page views will go down quite a bit. The way I usually browse news sites (like Slashdot for instance), is that I scroll down the page and open 5-10 articles in new tabs. Then I read some of them, post comments in others, and close some I'm not interested in (or don't have time for). With advertising they're still getting paid even for the pages I didn't read. If I had to pay for every page I opened, I would be opening a lot less pages. It's like people saying Spotify doesn't give enough for each time a person listens to a track. Try to change the model so that you have to pay a fee for each song, rather than a flat fee for all you can listen to, and the amount of revenue you bring in will be a lot less. Sure artists will get more for each play, but they'll be getting a lot less plays. People certainly won't be leaving it on all day while they may not even be in the room.
I would say that in a lot of cases, the people are not capable of so much more. If they were capable of more, they would be going those other jobs already, because they pay more, and are more interesting. Most people don't have the skills, any many people would be completely unable to grasp the skills, even if you gave them the opportunity, either because they have absolutely no drive, or because they actually lack cognition skills.
On the other hand, who will do all the required jobs, if you are free to pursue all your own endeavors while having a high (by today's standards) standard of living. Personally I like my job, but I would give it up in a second if I could have the same standard of living while being allowed to stay at home, look after my kids, and pursue my hobbies. There will be jobs that required humans for some time to come (like programming the robots, and other computer systems), who will be willing to do those jobs if there is a system in place that guarantees a high standard of living for all? Will those few who do choose to work be treated like royalty, and paid like the CEOs of today, because most people wouldn't work if they didn't have to.
I thought the exact same thing. Seems like there's some kind of contradiction. Even if they were both moving at the speed of light, toward each other it would still take many centuries for them to collide.
Kind of have to agree on this one. Look at the history of war. Look at how many fewer deaths we've had from war after WWII. It's much smaller than what we had before WWII. For instance, Number of deaths in Vietnam vary depending on who you ask, but the number is for sure less than 1 million. Compare that to WWII, where 50-80 million people died.WWI was around 37 million. Why such a sudden decline all of a sudden? hard to say it was all because of the bomb, but it's definitely a deterrent. Maybe we are just better at stopping conflicts before they get out of hand.
In my area, they've made it mandatory for building owners to clean the graffiti, or they get a fine. Unless of course it's on electrical/phone utility boxes, bus shelters, or other common targets. Graffiti seems to stick around on these things, and the local utility company never has to clean them. Small business owners end up being the ones getting fined.
What I see from this is that the sample is flawed. We can't infer from this data that internet users create bad passwords. What we can infer, if the passwords show a trend of being poor passwords, is that internet users who have a keylogger installed create bad passwords. If you already have a keylogger on your system, you are probably quite lax about security.
There isn't that much demand. Assuming everybody in the US buys 20 albums a year, that's a total of 6 billion albums sold. If you need to sell 1,000,000 albums to be a star, that leaves room for about 6000 musicians. In reality, the number of albums sold will be much less than 20 per person, actual numbers I've found show that it maxed out around 5 albums per person, so there's at most room for 1500 musicians all selling 1 million albums. And in reality, you're going to get some artists selling 20 million albums, and which takes up the sales for about 20 other artists.
Exactly. If you let people get away with it, they will just plug into the same outlet every day. Over an entire year, the amount would add up. It's like saying why ticket somebody for double parking? A single occurrence probably doesn't cause much problems, but if everybody did it, the streets would be completely jammed, and people would be blocked in all the time.
That's because the writer effectively owns the song, while the artists only owns the single performance of the song which was recorded. It's completely legal for the writer of the song to allow Band A to play a song and sell copies (with a percentage going to the writer), and allow Band B to record the same song and also sell copies (again with a percentage going to the writer). Unless the writer signed some kind of exclusivity agreement with the first band, he's perfectly within his rights to let another artist record the song and reap more royalties. The 10th most money-making song of all time is "The Christmas Song" AKA "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire", made so much money because of the sheer number of artists who have included it on their Christmas albums, and the sheer number of radio plays it gets every December.
To me, there's quite a difference between a "desktop" and a "workstation". What you describe, is basically the realm of workstations. The difference is that you can't run SolidWorks or AutoCad on Tablet. But you also can't get any useful work done on them using a $400 eMachine either. For the foreseeable future there will be a need for workstations. But I can see the desktop market declining quite rapidly. I personally haven't bought a new desktop in 8 years. And my current desktop does the things I need it to do just fine. My next computer purchase will be a tablet, as I find that almost everything I use my laptop for I can do on a tablet, and the laptop still works for the 5% of the stuff that I need it for. At work, sure I have a big tower case with a bunch of monitors and plenty of horsepower. But there's almost no reason for stuff like this in my house. It takes up a lot of space, and uses a lot of electricity, and I only use it a couple hours a month.
I think the real issue with doing music, or writing, or basketball (any sport) for a living is that there is a very small job market when you think about it. Sure everybody listens to music, but everyone tends to listen to the same 20 musicians. Same with basketball, there's only 30 teams, and 15 players per team, that's about 450 players. There's an extremely small number of people who make money in any of these professions, and the rest of the people make little to no money A "programmer" who can't even program fizz-buzz can easily make a decent salary but the equivalent of a musician or athlete with that level of talent is basically worthless. So sure, there's a lot of programmers (millions) who are making a lot of money, but that's because there's an actual demand for that many programmers. There isn't a demand for a million musicians, a million basketball players, or a million writers. There's a demand for millions of shelf stockers, but there's 10's of millions of people who are capable of doing the job. With programming, the demand for people outnumbers the number of people qualified to do the job. So of course they're going to get paid a lot.
Not only that, but $0.0084 per play isn't all that bad. Let's say I buy a CD, and it costs me $15, and it has 15 tracks. It's a CD I like, so over the life of the CD I listen to it in it's entirety 100 times. That comes out to 1500 song plays. They're basically getting $0.01 cents per time I've heard each song. I wonder what the average plays per song ratio is on iTunes purchases? Do people buy a song and then only listen to it 5 times ever? Which gives the artist 20-25 cents a listen. Many people I know have hundreds if not thousands of listens on the same song. That works out to $0.001 cents per listen. Are the artists getting scammed by people who like to listen to a few songs over and over versus the people who like to have tons of different music and only listen to each song a few times? Sounds to me like the artists are making quite a decent amount, and the only problem is that some artists can't get enough people to listen to their music. But who's fault is that?