You don't have to be a professional level programmer to teach basic programming to elementary and highschool kids. They teach soccer at schools, that doesn't mean the teacher has to be Pele or Diego Maradona. They teach woodworking, but that doesn't mean the teacher has to be Norm Abram. They just have to have some basic skills, and some interest in the subject.
Would it have been any less creepy if that was done without sending your data out to the cloud? What if your computer had real artificial intelligence, and could determine the meaning of your email, and do things for you based on what's actually going on in your life. Would it be creepy if it offered a book at that might help out in a certain situation, maybe with a list of places where you could buy it. I the computer could do all this without sending your personal correspondence out to the cloud, and instead provided a selection of books, available at a selection of retailers, so that it obviously wasn't trying to push a specific book or store, would the interaction be any more welcome?
I don't even think it matters how cheap it is. It won't stop people from starving in third world countries. Even if the food is free, you still have to get it to the impoverished nation, which can cost quite a bit, especially with inland areas. Sure they could cultivate their own land, farm their own bugs, but they could do that with the crops and livestock we currently have. The reason they don't is because their who system is completely messed up. You could have a farm, but someone could come around and burn all your crops, and kill all your livestock because there is no rule of law. Lack of food isn't really a supply or cost issue to do with the food itself, but more a problem with the way the social and political systems are set up where people are starving.
This is how a lot of other industries work as well. Sure for cars, there's laws in certain states which say you have to sell through a dealer, which is a bit over the top, but for many other industries, it's the defacto standard of how business is done. If you're building a datacenter, and buying 1000 servers, you'd think you can just go straight to HP/Lenovo/IBM and get a special deal, and cut out all the middle men. But that's now how it works. HP/Lenovo/IBM will give you a special price, but they'll still make you do the actual ordering though a reseller, who orders from a supplier. The supply chain is set up to ensure that the reseller and supplier get their cut of the sale. The reason they do this, is because manufacturers are very scared of their resellers/suppliers abandoning them for getting cut out of the loop.
The problem with that argument, is that they are only talking about blocking illegal things. I think it's a bit of a stretch to go from blocking illegal things, to blocking legal things. I mean, if they can stop people from selling drugs, or illegal firearms, or alcohol to minors, they can also stop them from selling stuff that someone doesn't like. But in reality that doesn't happen.
Personally, I've never had bad experiences with PayPal. But I've only ever used it to buy stuff. I also only have a credit card hooked up, which limits the amount of problems I could really have. Personally, I would rather give my credit card number to PayPal, the give it to some random Chinese website that I'm buying cheap stuff from. There really should be a more convenient way, without a third party like PayPal to send money to someone else, without giving them your credit card specifics. Visa, MasterCard, Amex, (and the others) should be providing this as a service to the cardholders (and merchants), not relying one someone like PayPal to act as an intermediary.
Very much agree with this. How many parents have kids in tow when buying a case of beer or a bottle of wine? This happens a lot especially in cases where they sell the stuff at grocery stores. That doesn't mean they are going to let the kids drink the beer/wine. Maybe the fact that the kids were there meant that they didn't want to get a baby sitter just to go pick up a copy of the latest video game.
The Surface Pro is great, but it has to compete with all the $900+ laptops and ultrabooks on the market. By the time you've bought the Surface Pro, and the keyboard cover, you're up over $1000. And if you get an ultrabook, it really isn't any bigger than carrying around the Surface Pro, and in many cases you'll get much better specs for the same price. You can't compare a $900 Surface Pro (2) to an iPad. You're much better off comparing it to a Mac Book Air.
It needs more than a spec bump, because everybody else did a spec bump as well. A 10 inch tablet with only 1080p resolution might be sufficient, but it is less than all the other guys. It's specced the same as a Nexus 7, with a larger screen, but costs $200 (80%) more, and the only thing that sets it apart is the keyboard/touch cover, which doesn't even come included.
I guess that's a problem with buying Season's passes in general though. Nobody knows how many episodes there's going to be. They could cancel the show (unlikely in this case), or there could be another writer's strike. In most cases they aren't even done writing all the episodes, let alone filming them, when you buy the season's pass. If you can't handle the thought that you might lose out on some money in the case where the show doesn't make as many episodes as you expected, you should either buy them one at a time, or wait until the season is over before paying for the whole thing.
I know you're being funny, but personally, I think that copying has gotten a little bit out of hand. It was one thing when we copied floppies from friends. At least they had a copy, or they knew someone who had a copy who they got it from originally. But now, with technologies like BitTorrent, a single person can have a copy of a game, movie or music album, and from that one copy, can effectively transmit it to the entire world. Basically, everyone downloads from a single source. That would have been pretty much impossible in the days of the sneaker net. My uncle had hundreds of copied VHS tapes back in early 90s, but he was also one of Jumbo Video's best customers. Now, I know people with just as many movies, but they haven't spent a single cent that has gone to the movie industry. They simply just pirate everything, from a guy who may have possibly bought a copy (or rented), and then that copy got seeded out to millions of people. That kind of copying just isn't sustainable.
They could premium price it, assuming they actually provided something premium. But they aren't even throwing in the keyboard, which is the one thing that makes the Surface unique. They are only now getting a 1080p screen, but even that's low resolution. The new Nexus has a 1080p screen, and is only 7 inch. Anything that's 10+ inches should have a 2048x1536. They give you quite a bit of storage on the default tablet, but a good chunk of it is taken up by the OS. If they sold something at the same specs as the Nexus 7-2, at a similar price, or the same price as the Nexus 10/iPad, but at the same price, they would probably get quite a few more sales. Instead, they're selling the Nexus 7 specs on a larger screen (same resolution) for the price of an iPad/Nexus 10. And did I mention it doesn't even come with the keyboard. They really should at least include the touch cover by default.
I also think that HTML and Javascript are great for the same reason. With HTML, it doesn't matter if your syntax doesn't make any sense, and you put a div inside a span, Or starting putting content between the </tr of one row, and the <tr of the next row. The browser doesn't refuse to render because you messed up the syntax. Same goes for Javascript. Put in semicolons, leave them out, it doesn't matter. You don't have to use "var" to define your variables, but the default scope is global, it will come back to get you later. It's not that PHP, JS, And HTML are terrible languages, but I don't think they are suited to the beginner very well, as they don't enforce very much structure or adherence to the rules, and they do a terrible job at catching errors common to new programmers.
That depends on what you want to do with it. If you don't want to hook it up to a monitor, you don't have to hook it up to a monitor. You can't do a completely headless install by putting the base Linux image on the SD card, and using SSH to remote into the machine. Assuming you already have another computer, the only things you need are, an SD Card, A Network cable, and a USB Power Supply. You can get those three items for under $15 total, and most people who would be interested in using a Raspberry Pi probably have this stuff sitting around already.
They way you're describing it, you might as well throw in the cost of the printer you can hook up the USB port of the PI, or any other peripherals. Also, if you don't have a TV that uses HDMI, you can use the composite video port on your TV if you really want a display. I don't think I've seen a TV recently that doesn't have either composite or HDMI.
Personally, living in Canada, I wish they would stop coming up with inventions that don't work in the winter. First, it's capacitive touch screens that won't work with regular gloves. Now we have special gloves with a special material on the fingertips so that you can use your tablet/phone with gloves. Then there's eBook readers, which advertise as being still readable in sunlight, but if the screen gets too cold, they don't refresh properly. Now they have fingerprint readers on the phone. So I have to take my gloves off, just to make a phone call. I'm tired of my hands getting cold!
Yeah, but if you're streaming something wouldn't it be better just to have like a big buffer? If your connection dies, you keep grabbing data out of the buffer, and in the meantime, the connection is re-established on a working network. You could easily store 5 minutes of audio in memory incase your connection drops. With phones now having gigabytes of memory, having 10 megs dedicated to an audio buffer isn't a lot to ask. Even if you're streaming video, you could easily store up enough of the video for the amount of time that you would lose a connection for.
I personally can't really believe how many people these companies have working for them. Last Time I heard about the layoffs, it was 3000 people they were letting go of. How do they even find work for these people to do? according to wikipedia, they currenly have around 12,700 employees. They need to trim some fat. That is seriously too many employees for the out put of the company. You could probably do the same amount of stuff with 1000 people if they just decided what they were going to do, and stayed on task.
Yeah, PlayStation got a lot of attention for using discs, because it meant they could have actual recorded audio tracks and lots of shiny looking cutscenes. But those characteristics really don't make a game that enjoyable. I still miss the fast load times of cartridges. Haven't played Wii U, but it seems that Nintendo has always put good load times ahead of "ooooh shiny". The Gamecube used smaller disks, and many games had almost no noticeable load times. Meanwhile, everyone was waiting minutes for things to load on PS2 and XBox. The first party titles for Wii also had great load times. It's not impossible to have quick load times on a disc based system. I don't know why so many developers don't pay attention to this aspect.
I agree with you there. I don't go to the pub very often, but last time I went, it was about $8 for a pint of good beer. Even the mass market domestic beers were over $6. That's a lot of money to ask for a beer. $60 for a game that I will play for 30 hours just to finish the first time around (I don't play GTA, but the games buy usually take at least this long), are totally worth it. In terms of "total entertainment value", video games are probably one of the best deals out there.
I Seriously wish the consoles would just get on with it, and encourage everybody to use a keyboard and mouse. Or at least something that gives a similar level of control, but can still be used on a couch, like a trackball, and a boatload of buttons/keys. Some custom controller with a trackball with about 4 buttons, plus about half a keyboard's worth of keys, could easily sit on your lap, and would allow much better control in most first person games than we currently get with gamepads. To this day, the only first person game I really enjoyed on console was Metroid Prime (GC), because it was mostly about exploring, and not fast reflexes. Still, I didn't ever finish it, because later in the game, it becomes pretty difficult, and the distance between savepoints is too far. The part where I quit was when I was 45 minutes from the previous checkpoint, following a walkthrough (because I was convinced I was going the wrong way), only to die because of an onslaught of enemies. Probably still about 20 minutes from the next save point. After a couple times doing that, I just stopped playing. I never understood why anybody enjoyed first person games on consoles. The love everyone seems to have for GoldenEye just blows my mind.
Even though I didn't make an itemized list, doesn't mean I didn't account for it.
non-development employees such as executives. I didn't disount these guys. We can lump them in with the 6000 employees working on the project. I didn't say that the 6000 people were all writing code. That would be even more absurd. This would probably include benefits as well. $100,000 is actually a somewhat high salary.
The rest can be lumped into the 8 billion I took off at the beginning for "hardware" Obviously, you can't spend 8 billion on hardware just to run the systems that support this. That includes all hardware needed to run the project, along with any service fees like electricity, phone service, and other incidentals.
Yeah, It certainly is absurd. I can't even imagine it if you factor in the hardware to run it on. Assuming you spent half of it on hardware, you'd have $8 billion worth of hardware (which is just plain ridiculous). You now have $8 billion left over to pay people, assuming each person working on the project makes $100,000 a year, for $8b, you can get 80,000 person years. The project was launched in 2002, so even counting 12 years, that means they could have hired 6666.667 (nice how that works out) people to work on the project.
I think you are being funny, but I remember reading a lot of people saying the Nexus is pocketable. Personally, I find my 4 inch phone to be a little large in my pockets. Sure it fits, but it's really not comfortable. If I have any other place to carry it than my pants pocket (backpack, jacket/coat, pannier, cycling jersey) I'll put it there before in my pants pocket. I can't imagine carrying around a 5 inch (or larger) device without having some kind of backpack or bag to carry it in.
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You don't have to be a professional level programmer to teach basic programming to elementary and highschool kids. They teach soccer at schools, that doesn't mean the teacher has to be Pele or Diego Maradona. They teach woodworking, but that doesn't mean the teacher has to be Norm Abram. They just have to have some basic skills, and some interest in the subject.
Would it have been any less creepy if that was done without sending your data out to the cloud? What if your computer had real artificial intelligence, and could determine the meaning of your email, and do things for you based on what's actually going on in your life. Would it be creepy if it offered a book at that might help out in a certain situation, maybe with a list of places where you could buy it. I the computer could do all this without sending your personal correspondence out to the cloud, and instead provided a selection of books, available at a selection of retailers, so that it obviously wasn't trying to push a specific book or store, would the interaction be any more welcome?
I don't even think it matters how cheap it is. It won't stop people from starving in third world countries. Even if the food is free, you still have to get it to the impoverished nation, which can cost quite a bit, especially with inland areas. Sure they could cultivate their own land, farm their own bugs, but they could do that with the crops and livestock we currently have. The reason they don't is because their who system is completely messed up. You could have a farm, but someone could come around and burn all your crops, and kill all your livestock because there is no rule of law. Lack of food isn't really a supply or cost issue to do with the food itself, but more a problem with the way the social and political systems are set up where people are starving.
This is how a lot of other industries work as well. Sure for cars, there's laws in certain states which say you have to sell through a dealer, which is a bit over the top, but for many other industries, it's the defacto standard of how business is done. If you're building a datacenter, and buying 1000 servers, you'd think you can just go straight to HP/Lenovo/IBM and get a special deal, and cut out all the middle men. But that's now how it works. HP/Lenovo/IBM will give you a special price, but they'll still make you do the actual ordering though a reseller, who orders from a supplier. The supply chain is set up to ensure that the reseller and supplier get their cut of the sale. The reason they do this, is because manufacturers are very scared of their resellers/suppliers abandoning them for getting cut out of the loop.
The problem with that argument, is that they are only talking about blocking illegal things. I think it's a bit of a stretch to go from blocking illegal things, to blocking legal things. I mean, if they can stop people from selling drugs, or illegal firearms, or alcohol to minors, they can also stop them from selling stuff that someone doesn't like. But in reality that doesn't happen.
Personally, I've never had bad experiences with PayPal. But I've only ever used it to buy stuff. I also only have a credit card hooked up, which limits the amount of problems I could really have. Personally, I would rather give my credit card number to PayPal, the give it to some random Chinese website that I'm buying cheap stuff from. There really should be a more convenient way, without a third party like PayPal to send money to someone else, without giving them your credit card specifics. Visa, MasterCard, Amex, (and the others) should be providing this as a service to the cardholders (and merchants), not relying one someone like PayPal to act as an intermediary.
Probably had him confused with Count Duckula
Very much agree with this. How many parents have kids in tow when buying a case of beer or a bottle of wine? This happens a lot especially in cases where they sell the stuff at grocery stores. That doesn't mean they are going to let the kids drink the beer/wine. Maybe the fact that the kids were there meant that they didn't want to get a baby sitter just to go pick up a copy of the latest video game.
The Surface Pro is great, but it has to compete with all the $900+ laptops and ultrabooks on the market. By the time you've bought the Surface Pro, and the keyboard cover, you're up over $1000. And if you get an ultrabook, it really isn't any bigger than carrying around the Surface Pro, and in many cases you'll get much better specs for the same price. You can't compare a $900 Surface Pro (2) to an iPad. You're much better off comparing it to a Mac Book Air.
It needs more than a spec bump, because everybody else did a spec bump as well. A 10 inch tablet with only 1080p resolution might be sufficient, but it is less than all the other guys. It's specced the same as a Nexus 7, with a larger screen, but costs $200 (80%) more, and the only thing that sets it apart is the keyboard/touch cover, which doesn't even come included.
I guess that's a problem with buying Season's passes in general though. Nobody knows how many episodes there's going to be. They could cancel the show (unlikely in this case), or there could be another writer's strike. In most cases they aren't even done writing all the episodes, let alone filming them, when you buy the season's pass. If you can't handle the thought that you might lose out on some money in the case where the show doesn't make as many episodes as you expected, you should either buy them one at a time, or wait until the season is over before paying for the whole thing.
I know you're being funny, but personally, I think that copying has gotten a little bit out of hand. It was one thing when we copied floppies from friends. At least they had a copy, or they knew someone who had a copy who they got it from originally. But now, with technologies like BitTorrent, a single person can have a copy of a game, movie or music album, and from that one copy, can effectively transmit it to the entire world. Basically, everyone downloads from a single source. That would have been pretty much impossible in the days of the sneaker net. My uncle had hundreds of copied VHS tapes back in early 90s, but he was also one of Jumbo Video's best customers. Now, I know people with just as many movies, but they haven't spent a single cent that has gone to the movie industry. They simply just pirate everything, from a guy who may have possibly bought a copy (or rented), and then that copy got seeded out to millions of people. That kind of copying just isn't sustainable.
They could premium price it, assuming they actually provided something premium. But they aren't even throwing in the keyboard, which is the one thing that makes the Surface unique. They are only now getting a 1080p screen, but even that's low resolution. The new Nexus has a 1080p screen, and is only 7 inch. Anything that's 10+ inches should have a 2048x1536. They give you quite a bit of storage on the default tablet, but a good chunk of it is taken up by the OS. If they sold something at the same specs as the Nexus 7-2, at a similar price, or the same price as the Nexus 10/iPad, but at the same price, they would probably get quite a few more sales. Instead, they're selling the Nexus 7 specs on a larger screen (same resolution) for the price of an iPad/Nexus 10. And did I mention it doesn't even come with the keyboard. They really should at least include the touch cover by default.
I also think that HTML and Javascript are great for the same reason. With HTML, it doesn't matter if your syntax doesn't make any sense, and you put a div inside a span, Or starting putting content between the </tr of one row, and the <tr of the next row. The browser doesn't refuse to render because you messed up the syntax. Same goes for Javascript. Put in semicolons, leave them out, it doesn't matter. You don't have to use "var" to define your variables, but the default scope is global, it will come back to get you later. It's not that PHP, JS, And HTML are terrible languages, but I don't think they are suited to the beginner very well, as they don't enforce very much structure or adherence to the rules, and they do a terrible job at catching errors common to new programmers.
That depends on what you want to do with it. If you don't want to hook it up to a monitor, you don't have to hook it up to a monitor. You can't do a completely headless install by putting the base Linux image on the SD card, and using SSH to remote into the machine. Assuming you already have another computer, the only things you need are, an SD Card, A Network cable, and a USB Power Supply. You can get those three items for under $15 total, and most people who would be interested in using a Raspberry Pi probably have this stuff sitting around already.
They way you're describing it, you might as well throw in the cost of the printer you can hook up the USB port of the PI, or any other peripherals. Also, if you don't have a TV that uses HDMI, you can use the composite video port on your TV if you really want a display. I don't think I've seen a TV recently that doesn't have either composite or HDMI.
Personally, living in Canada, I wish they would stop coming up with inventions that don't work in the winter. First, it's capacitive touch screens that won't work with regular gloves. Now we have special gloves with a special material on the fingertips so that you can use your tablet/phone with gloves. Then there's eBook readers, which advertise as being still readable in sunlight, but if the screen gets too cold, they don't refresh properly. Now they have fingerprint readers on the phone. So I have to take my gloves off, just to make a phone call. I'm tired of my hands getting cold!
When I was a kid, we thought the code was:
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, B, A (Select), Start
Notice the two sets of B A. It seemed to make more sense. Everything else was in pairs.
Yeah, but if you're streaming something wouldn't it be better just to have like a big buffer? If your connection dies, you keep grabbing data out of the buffer, and in the meantime, the connection is re-established on a working network. You could easily store 5 minutes of audio in memory incase your connection drops. With phones now having gigabytes of memory, having 10 megs dedicated to an audio buffer isn't a lot to ask. Even if you're streaming video, you could easily store up enough of the video for the amount of time that you would lose a connection for.
I personally can't really believe how many people these companies have working for them. Last Time I heard about the layoffs, it was 3000 people they were letting go of. How do they even find work for these people to do? according to wikipedia, they currenly have around 12,700 employees. They need to trim some fat. That is seriously too many employees for the out put of the company. You could probably do the same amount of stuff with 1000 people if they just decided what they were going to do, and stayed on task.
Yeah, PlayStation got a lot of attention for using discs, because it meant they could have actual recorded audio tracks and lots of shiny looking cutscenes. But those characteristics really don't make a game that enjoyable. I still miss the fast load times of cartridges. Haven't played Wii U, but it seems that Nintendo has always put good load times ahead of "ooooh shiny". The Gamecube used smaller disks, and many games had almost no noticeable load times. Meanwhile, everyone was waiting minutes for things to load on PS2 and XBox. The first party titles for Wii also had great load times. It's not impossible to have quick load times on a disc based system. I don't know why so many developers don't pay attention to this aspect.
I agree with you there. I don't go to the pub very often, but last time I went, it was about $8 for a pint of good beer. Even the mass market domestic beers were over $6. That's a lot of money to ask for a beer. $60 for a game that I will play for 30 hours just to finish the first time around (I don't play GTA, but the games buy usually take at least this long), are totally worth it. In terms of "total entertainment value", video games are probably one of the best deals out there.
I Seriously wish the consoles would just get on with it, and encourage everybody to use a keyboard and mouse. Or at least something that gives a similar level of control, but can still be used on a couch, like a trackball, and a boatload of buttons/keys. Some custom controller with a trackball with about 4 buttons, plus about half a keyboard's worth of keys, could easily sit on your lap, and would allow much better control in most first person games than we currently get with gamepads. To this day, the only first person game I really enjoyed on console was Metroid Prime (GC), because it was mostly about exploring, and not fast reflexes. Still, I didn't ever finish it, because later in the game, it becomes pretty difficult, and the distance between savepoints is too far. The part where I quit was when I was 45 minutes from the previous checkpoint, following a walkthrough (because I was convinced I was going the wrong way), only to die because of an onslaught of enemies. Probably still about 20 minutes from the next save point. After a couple times doing that, I just stopped playing. I never understood why anybody enjoyed first person games on consoles. The love everyone seems to have for GoldenEye just blows my mind.
Even though I didn't make an itemized list, doesn't mean I didn't account for it.
non-development employees such as executives. I didn't disount these guys. We can lump them in with the 6000 employees working on the project. I didn't say that the 6000 people were all writing code. That would be even more absurd. This would probably include benefits as well. $100,000 is actually a somewhat high salary.
The rest can be lumped into the 8 billion I took off at the beginning for "hardware" Obviously, you can't spend 8 billion on hardware just to run the systems that support this. That includes all hardware needed to run the project, along with any service fees like electricity, phone service, and other incidentals.
Yeah, It certainly is absurd. I can't even imagine it if you factor in the hardware to run it on. Assuming you spent half of it on hardware, you'd have $8 billion worth of hardware (which is just plain ridiculous). You now have $8 billion left over to pay people, assuming each person working on the project makes $100,000 a year, for $8b, you can get 80,000 person years. The project was launched in 2002, so even counting 12 years, that means they could have hired 6666.667 (nice how that works out) people to work on the project.
I think you are being funny, but I remember reading a lot of people saying the Nexus is pocketable. Personally, I find my 4 inch phone to be a little large in my pockets. Sure it fits, but it's really not comfortable. If I have any other place to carry it than my pants pocket (backpack, jacket/coat, pannier, cycling jersey) I'll put it there before in my pants pocket. I can't imagine carrying around a 5 inch (or larger) device without having some kind of backpack or bag to carry it in.