Exactly. It makes very little sense for a business to post profits. Personally, I'd rather have a business hire more workers than pay money to the government (workers pay taxes anyway). Even if they aren't hiring people directly, they're usually using the money to create some kind of economic activity which will mean more jobs in some other company. If they post profits, it just means money is sitting in the bank doing nothing, while some of it is going to the government. If the government was smart, they'd tax revenues, and companies would have to figure out how to work the amount of taxes paid into their cost structure. Too bad human citizens can't just pay taxes on profits. I'd love to only pay taxes on money left in my account at the end of the year, regardless of what I chose to spend it on.
While I don't think that Amazon is the be all and end all of books, big stores like Amazon and Chapters/Indigo (here in Canada) have sure done a lot to bring reading back to the masses. Maybe in a large city there's plenty of market for lots of small independant book stores, but it doesn't work everywhere. I don't even think the small town I grew up in had a real book store. And it had somewhere around 12000-30000 people depending on how the mines were doing. At best we had the popular mass market paperbacks at the pharmacy or news stand. Even in the city, it's nice to go to one store and be able to browse thousands of books from all kinds of genres. The ability to order basically any book you want and have it at your front door in well under a week has helped immensely. They have also helped bring down prices quite a bit. With a bunch of independant book stores, nobody had the clout to push publishers for lower prices, so the price on the cover was basically the price you paid. No it's not uncommon to see hardcover books for less than half their cover price. The price of a paperback hasn't risen that much, even though many items have gone up in price. Looking at old books from the thrift store, I find it kind of interesting that prices have only gone up by a couple of bucks in the past 20 years.
SAP, IBM, and Microsoft most likely charge their customers a lot more than these guys did. Just because they "serve" 50,000 companies, doesn't mean those companies were paying them anything. Also, the customers of SAP, IBM, and Microsoft are probably most likely larger companies. Perhaps all the companies they were serving were really small mom and pop businesses, and they weren't paying anything, or were only paying $5 a month.
I'm also not sure if I'd enjoy playing Mario Kart on a touch screen. Sure you could possibly do steering with the gyro sensors, but I don't like that either. I even play MarioKart Wii with the thumbstick because I find it more precise. Even if that was good, there's too many buttons needed for Mario Kart (gas, brake, weapon, hop, look back, probably forgetting something) that playing on a touch screen would be pretty frustrating.
I agree with this. Nintendo needs to maintain very tight control of their core franchises. They possibly could have gone the route of developing their own games for Android/IOS, but I think I know why they stayed away. It's really hard to offer a consistent good product, especially on Android, with so many different devices to target, and while certain games work well, the fact that there's only a touch screen for input really limits what you can do with it . I've tried using emulators, and playing Mario type games using a touch screen is extremely frustrating.
Personally, All I really want as far as playing with different OSes is the ability to switch the primary boot device to an SD Card. I don't care if I can't mess around with the on-board storage, but there should be a switch, or some other easily accessible method (similarly to the PC BIOS menus) that I can just boot off a different device. You're right, there needs to be a way to fix things regardless of if the OS is broken. That way people can boot whichever OS they want, and they don't have to worry about messing up the hardwired ROM on the system. Also, it gives people a way to overwrite what's in the onboard ROM, in the case where it does get trashed, either by the user messing with it, or by an official upgrade that went bad.
Personally, I think we would all be better off if someone just focused on developing a standard controller, like the Steam controller, or just tell everyone to use a dual shock (which i hate) or the XBox controller and we just stuck with stock Android for playing games. There's already tons of Android TV sticks and boxes that are perfectly capable of playing games. Ouya didn't need to invent another system box, they already had tons of those. And the controller is really nothing special.
I find that unless you go long distances most of the time riding the bus is actually waiting for the bus. For me, it takes me 5 minutes to walk to the bus. I have to wait on average 5-10 minutes for the bus. You can't plan to arrive 2 minutes before it get's there, because half the time it will be early, and then you have to wait 15-30 minutes for the next one. Then I take a 5 minute bus ride, get off, and wait for the next bus. That's another 5-10 minutes. Take another 10 minute bus ride, and I'm at work. So 5 minutes of walking, 10-20 minutes of waiting for the bus, and 15 minutes of being on the actual bus. 30-40 minute trip and half of it is spent waiting for the bus to get where I am. And people wonder why I ride a bike. Spend less time riding than I do waiting for the bus.
This is why I cycle commute. Only marginally slower than a car (sometimes faster when there's heavy traffic) and way faster than the bus. The longest cycle commute I ever did was 25 km, but that was only for 3 month. It took me 1 hour 15 minutes tops. However, due to traffic, the same trip in a car took about 1 hour. Driving would have only saved me 15 minutes each way. And the standard deviation on bike is much smaller. Pretty much the same trip time every day. In a car, traffic could be really bad, and it could take an hour and a half, or 45 minutes, you never really know until you reach the destination. Now I'm only 7 km from work and cycling is great. 15-20 minutes and I'm at work. A car would take at least 10, so I'm really not using any appreciable time.
The problem is, that kind of autonomous car isn't here yet. There is no autonomous car that doesn't require a person to be sitting in the driver's seat ready to take over in case something goes wrong. That's why I think this whole thing is stupid. If I have to be sitting in the driver's seat, paying attention to the road, I might as well be driving. Because if the car is doing most of the driving, it's more likely that I won't be paying attention when something bad happens. Until the cars are good enough that they don't require a steering wheel, gas pedal, or brake, I don't see much point in them.
I guess it depends on what the trading volume was. Maybe they were losing 48 million a minute, but shutting everything down would have caused them to hold on to stuff longer than they should have. They possibly could have been losing more than 48 million a minute just by doing absolutely nothing, by not being able to sell stuff that was dropping. Personally, I wonder why it took them 45 minutes though. It should have been a simple script to revert everything back to the previous software version. It's always smart keep the previous binaries around so you can do a quick revert without even doing a build in the case where there's some unforeseen problem with the code.
I'm not sure if the originals had such good actors either. But anyway, I find that bad acting usually bothers me too. I see it all the time on Indie projects. I'm not sure if it's actually bad acting, or just that they are pressed for time and/or money, and not willing to redo the shot 15 times to get it right. We used to make movies all the time in highschool, and I found this was one of the biggest problems. People would completely botch their lines, but we'd use the scene anyway, because we were all just trying to have fun, and nobody wanted to spend 2 hours doing a 10 minute scene.
Drivers are probably about the biggest problem that Linux has right now. It's the main reason I'm not using it on my laptop. Last I tried, about 6 months ago (2 year old laptop), I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software. Battery life was about half of what it was on windows. Also, because there was no accelerated graphics, I couldn't play any games. Well, that and Netflix. I don't understand why I can run Netflix on Android, but I can't run it on Linux. Personally, I don't even want to run in a browser. I'd actually rather run it as a separate application. And they can make it closed source for all I care.
My brother could beat most of the Nintendo games we owned using his feet on the NES Advantage. He was perfectly capable of using his hands, but got bored with the games we owned and eventually moved onto using his feet. There was some advantages offered by using the NES Advantage like the turbo fire, but I still think the was pretty impressive to beat games using just your feet. Took some serious dedication.
Glad you're getting better service then the people I know. I live in Ottawa, so my experiences and those of people I know may be different than yours. If I knew people with experiences like yours in my area, I'd be more likely to switch.
For TekSavvy, with Cable, they have to send an email to Rogers when something needs fixing. Then there's a full day for them to respond to that email. Sometimes it gets fixed with that first email, but sometimes it doesn't. The only communication channel between the two is email. I know a guy who was without internet for 2 weeks, because there was a problem with the lines. They kept insisting the lines were fine, but they weren't as was proven by the fact that the problem promptly disappeared after they finally replaced the lines.
The problem as I see is is that the lines are owned by Bell (or Rogers in the case of cable). There are many independent ISPs, but they all run through the infrastructure of Bell or Rogers. If your internet connection doesn't work, apart from basic trouble shooting (reset modem, check settings), the independent ISPs have to ask Rogers/Bell to fix the problem for them. You can guess how fast Bell/Rogers will do this. I've been toying with the idea of going with TekSavvy (a popular indie ISP), but all the people I know who have switched (not many, but still quite a few people), have had multi-day outages because they were unable to have the problem fixed directly by their ISP. Until this type of problem is fixed, they're Indie ISPs can't offer a reasonable level of service.
If it was at least linear, I could deal with it. Buy why does upgrading from 16 GB to 32 GB (an additional 16 GB) cost $100, while upgrading from 64 GB to 128 GB (an additional 64 GB) also cost $100? $100 for 64 GB extra is almost reasonable, assuming they are using quality NAND storage chips like you find on hard drives, and not the kind of stuff you find in SD cards. But $100 for 16 GB of storage is just robbery.
I guess that's the big question. My gas company charges 14 cents per cubic meter (1000 litres), so if each cow produced 250 litres a day, you'd get about 3.5 cents per day for each head of cattle. Probably not enough to even pay for the food. Especially considering that's the price to the consumer. You're not going to get anywhere close to 14 cents per cubic meter for bulk methane. However, if you're already raising the cattle for milk or meat, it could be a good way to add an extra source of income. Although at the price you could get, you probably wouldn't even end up breaking even on the collection system.
It's really a shame that both diseases share the same name. Although the symptoms are the same (lack of insulin) the two are caused by completely different things. I suppose it's too late now, but they really should change the name of one to avoid confusion to the public at large.
This doesn't surprise me at all. Especially when they mention "computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators". These aren't fields that even require a STEM degree in the first place. I'm sure if you just looked at programmers, you'd probably see a much higher percentage with a STEM degree. If I had a stem degree, and was working as a computer support specialist, I'd probably wonder what the purpose of my degree really was. Also, if you have a degree in chemistry, you technically have a STEM degree, but you're probably no more prepared for a career in IT than somebody with a business or fine arts degree
Personally, I've always hated the fact that they even refer to certain jobs as being in the IT sector. It's so large and all encompassing, that it basically fits anybody from a minimum wage support person to a hardware engineer designing cutting edge processors, or people writing financial systems on wall street.
On one hand, I see where this could be a good idea. On the other hand, I kind of like dumb displays. Stuff like displays and speakers should really just display/play the signal sent to them. They should be as simple as possible, because they are expensive, and this allows them to last for longer and be cheaper. If TVs were smart, I would probably have to upgrade my TV every time they came up with a new video encoding standard. Luckily, TVs just understand a raw signal, and I can much more easily upgrade my computer to interpret the encoded videos than I can upgrade my TV.
The only advantage I see is that you see the image as soon as possible after it's done rendering. If your graphics card is done rendering the scene, but you monitor just refreshed 1 ms before that, you're going to have to wait another.016 seconds (assuming 60 hz) to see that frame, because that's the next time the screen refreshes. If you can make the refresh of the monitor exactly match the rate at which frames are produced, there's minimal lag between the frame being rendered, and the frame being shown to the person playing the game.
That's OK, we can't really feel temperature anyway. We really only feel the ability of objects to change the temperature of our skin. A piece of metal will feel colder than the air around it, even if it's the same temperature as the air itself.
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Exactly. It makes very little sense for a business to post profits. Personally, I'd rather have a business hire more workers than pay money to the government (workers pay taxes anyway). Even if they aren't hiring people directly, they're usually using the money to create some kind of economic activity which will mean more jobs in some other company. If they post profits, it just means money is sitting in the bank doing nothing, while some of it is going to the government. If the government was smart, they'd tax revenues, and companies would have to figure out how to work the amount of taxes paid into their cost structure. Too bad human citizens can't just pay taxes on profits. I'd love to only pay taxes on money left in my account at the end of the year, regardless of what I chose to spend it on.
While I don't think that Amazon is the be all and end all of books, big stores like Amazon and Chapters/Indigo (here in Canada) have sure done a lot to bring reading back to the masses. Maybe in a large city there's plenty of market for lots of small independant book stores, but it doesn't work everywhere. I don't even think the small town I grew up in had a real book store. And it had somewhere around 12000-30000 people depending on how the mines were doing. At best we had the popular mass market paperbacks at the pharmacy or news stand. Even in the city, it's nice to go to one store and be able to browse thousands of books from all kinds of genres. The ability to order basically any book you want and have it at your front door in well under a week has helped immensely. They have also helped bring down prices quite a bit. With a bunch of independant book stores, nobody had the clout to push publishers for lower prices, so the price on the cover was basically the price you paid. No it's not uncommon to see hardcover books for less than half their cover price. The price of a paperback hasn't risen that much, even though many items have gone up in price. Looking at old books from the thrift store, I find it kind of interesting that prices have only gone up by a couple of bucks in the past 20 years.
SAP, IBM, and Microsoft most likely charge their customers a lot more than these guys did. Just because they "serve" 50,000 companies, doesn't mean those companies were paying them anything. Also, the customers of SAP, IBM, and Microsoft are probably most likely larger companies. Perhaps all the companies they were serving were really small mom and pop businesses, and they weren't paying anything, or were only paying $5 a month.
I'm also not sure if I'd enjoy playing Mario Kart on a touch screen. Sure you could possibly do steering with the gyro sensors, but I don't like that either. I even play MarioKart Wii with the thumbstick because I find it more precise. Even if that was good, there's too many buttons needed for Mario Kart (gas, brake, weapon, hop, look back, probably forgetting something) that playing on a touch screen would be pretty frustrating.
I agree with this. Nintendo needs to maintain very tight control of their core franchises. They possibly could have gone the route of developing their own games for Android/IOS, but I think I know why they stayed away. It's really hard to offer a consistent good product, especially on Android, with so many different devices to target, and while certain games work well, the fact that there's only a touch screen for input really limits what you can do with it . I've tried using emulators, and playing Mario type games using a touch screen is extremely frustrating.
Personally, All I really want as far as playing with different OSes is the ability to switch the primary boot device to an SD Card. I don't care if I can't mess around with the on-board storage, but there should be a switch, or some other easily accessible method (similarly to the PC BIOS menus) that I can just boot off a different device. You're right, there needs to be a way to fix things regardless of if the OS is broken. That way people can boot whichever OS they want, and they don't have to worry about messing up the hardwired ROM on the system. Also, it gives people a way to overwrite what's in the onboard ROM, in the case where it does get trashed, either by the user messing with it, or by an official upgrade that went bad.
Personally, I think we would all be better off if someone just focused on developing a standard controller, like the Steam controller, or just tell everyone to use a dual shock (which i hate) or the XBox controller and we just stuck with stock Android for playing games. There's already tons of Android TV sticks and boxes that are perfectly capable of playing games. Ouya didn't need to invent another system box, they already had tons of those. And the controller is really nothing special.
I find that unless you go long distances most of the time riding the bus is actually waiting for the bus. For me, it takes me 5 minutes to walk to the bus. I have to wait on average 5-10 minutes for the bus. You can't plan to arrive 2 minutes before it get's there, because half the time it will be early, and then you have to wait 15-30 minutes for the next one. Then I take a 5 minute bus ride, get off, and wait for the next bus. That's another 5-10 minutes. Take another 10 minute bus ride, and I'm at work. So 5 minutes of walking, 10-20 minutes of waiting for the bus, and 15 minutes of being on the actual bus. 30-40 minute trip and half of it is spent waiting for the bus to get where I am. And people wonder why I ride a bike. Spend less time riding than I do waiting for the bus.
This is why I cycle commute. Only marginally slower than a car (sometimes faster when there's heavy traffic) and way faster than the bus. The longest cycle commute I ever did was 25 km, but that was only for 3 month. It took me 1 hour 15 minutes tops. However, due to traffic, the same trip in a car took about 1 hour. Driving would have only saved me 15 minutes each way. And the standard deviation on bike is much smaller. Pretty much the same trip time every day. In a car, traffic could be really bad, and it could take an hour and a half, or 45 minutes, you never really know until you reach the destination. Now I'm only 7 km from work and cycling is great. 15-20 minutes and I'm at work. A car would take at least 10, so I'm really not using any appreciable time.
The problem is, that kind of autonomous car isn't here yet. There is no autonomous car that doesn't require a person to be sitting in the driver's seat ready to take over in case something goes wrong. That's why I think this whole thing is stupid. If I have to be sitting in the driver's seat, paying attention to the road, I might as well be driving. Because if the car is doing most of the driving, it's more likely that I won't be paying attention when something bad happens. Until the cars are good enough that they don't require a steering wheel, gas pedal, or brake, I don't see much point in them.
It's it supposed to be mysql_real_escape_string? I can't remember since I've been using parameterized queries for so long.
I guess it depends on what the trading volume was. Maybe they were losing 48 million a minute, but shutting everything down would have caused them to hold on to stuff longer than they should have. They possibly could have been losing more than 48 million a minute just by doing absolutely nothing, by not being able to sell stuff that was dropping. Personally, I wonder why it took them 45 minutes though. It should have been a simple script to revert everything back to the previous software version. It's always smart keep the previous binaries around so you can do a quick revert without even doing a build in the case where there's some unforeseen problem with the code.
I'm not sure if the originals had such good actors either. But anyway, I find that bad acting usually bothers me too. I see it all the time on Indie projects. I'm not sure if it's actually bad acting, or just that they are pressed for time and/or money, and not willing to redo the shot 15 times to get it right. We used to make movies all the time in highschool, and I found this was one of the biggest problems. People would completely botch their lines, but we'd use the scene anyway, because we were all just trying to have fun, and nobody wanted to spend 2 hours doing a 10 minute scene.
Drivers are probably about the biggest problem that Linux has right now. It's the main reason I'm not using it on my laptop. Last I tried, about 6 months ago (2 year old laptop), I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software. Battery life was about half of what it was on windows. Also, because there was no accelerated graphics, I couldn't play any games. Well, that and Netflix. I don't understand why I can run Netflix on Android, but I can't run it on Linux. Personally, I don't even want to run in a browser. I'd actually rather run it as a separate application. And they can make it closed source for all I care.
My brother could beat most of the Nintendo games we owned using his feet on the NES Advantage. He was perfectly capable of using his hands, but got bored with the games we owned and eventually moved onto using his feet. There was some advantages offered by using the NES Advantage like the turbo fire, but I still think the was pretty impressive to beat games using just your feet. Took some serious dedication.
Glad you're getting better service then the people I know. I live in Ottawa, so my experiences and those of people I know may be different than yours. If I knew people with experiences like yours in my area, I'd be more likely to switch.
For TekSavvy, with Cable, they have to send an email to Rogers when something needs fixing. Then there's a full day for them to respond to that email. Sometimes it gets fixed with that first email, but sometimes it doesn't. The only communication channel between the two is email. I know a guy who was without internet for 2 weeks, because there was a problem with the lines. They kept insisting the lines were fine, but they weren't as was proven by the fact that the problem promptly disappeared after they finally replaced the lines.
The problem as I see is is that the lines are owned by Bell (or Rogers in the case of cable). There are many independent ISPs, but they all run through the infrastructure of Bell or Rogers. If your internet connection doesn't work, apart from basic trouble shooting (reset modem, check settings), the independent ISPs have to ask Rogers/Bell to fix the problem for them. You can guess how fast Bell/Rogers will do this. I've been toying with the idea of going with TekSavvy (a popular indie ISP), but all the people I know who have switched (not many, but still quite a few people), have had multi-day outages because they were unable to have the problem fixed directly by their ISP. Until this type of problem is fixed, they're Indie ISPs can't offer a reasonable level of service.
If it was at least linear, I could deal with it. Buy why does upgrading from 16 GB to 32 GB (an additional 16 GB) cost $100, while upgrading from 64 GB to 128 GB (an additional 64 GB) also cost $100? $100 for 64 GB extra is almost reasonable, assuming they are using quality NAND storage chips like you find on hard drives, and not the kind of stuff you find in SD cards. But $100 for 16 GB of storage is just robbery.
I guess that's the big question. My gas company charges 14 cents per cubic meter (1000 litres), so if each cow produced 250 litres a day, you'd get about 3.5 cents per day for each head of cattle. Probably not enough to even pay for the food. Especially considering that's the price to the consumer. You're not going to get anywhere close to 14 cents per cubic meter for bulk methane. However, if you're already raising the cattle for milk or meat, it could be a good way to add an extra source of income. Although at the price you could get, you probably wouldn't even end up breaking even on the collection system.
Well then it's not space. Because in space you shouldn't be able to generate surface lift.
It's really a shame that both diseases share the same name. Although the symptoms are the same (lack of insulin) the two are caused by completely different things. I suppose it's too late now, but they really should change the name of one to avoid confusion to the public at large.
This doesn't surprise me at all. Especially when they mention "computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators". These aren't fields that even require a STEM degree in the first place. I'm sure if you just looked at programmers, you'd probably see a much higher percentage with a STEM degree. If I had a stem degree, and was working as a computer support specialist, I'd probably wonder what the purpose of my degree really was. Also, if you have a degree in chemistry, you technically have a STEM degree, but you're probably no more prepared for a career in IT than somebody with a business or fine arts degree
Personally, I've always hated the fact that they even refer to certain jobs as being in the IT sector. It's so large and all encompassing, that it basically fits anybody from a minimum wage support person to a hardware engineer designing cutting edge processors, or people writing financial systems on wall street.
On one hand, I see where this could be a good idea. On the other hand, I kind of like dumb displays. Stuff like displays and speakers should really just display/play the signal sent to them. They should be as simple as possible, because they are expensive, and this allows them to last for longer and be cheaper. If TVs were smart, I would probably have to upgrade my TV every time they came up with a new video encoding standard. Luckily, TVs just understand a raw signal, and I can much more easily upgrade my computer to interpret the encoded videos than I can upgrade my TV.
The only advantage I see is that you see the image as soon as possible after it's done rendering. If your graphics card is done rendering the scene, but you monitor just refreshed 1 ms before that, you're going to have to wait another .016 seconds (assuming 60 hz) to see that frame, because that's the next time the screen refreshes. If you can make the refresh of the monitor exactly match the rate at which frames are produced, there's minimal lag between the frame being rendered, and the frame being shown to the person playing the game.
That's OK, we can't really feel temperature anyway. We really only feel the ability of objects to change the temperature of our skin. A piece of metal will feel colder than the air around it, even if it's the same temperature as the air itself.