You are correct in a way, but I think that unions tip the scales too far in the other direction. Now instead of the corporation holding all the power, the union holds all the power. There's been more than a few cases where the union priced the workers out of a job. "American" cars are now manufactured in Mexico. Hostess had to stop making Twinkies. Lots of other examples abound. When the option is to either give employees the desired wage increase, or shut down operations while you find and train new workers, the corporation doesn't have much of a choice but to give the workers what they want.
Except for that last one ( female gamer who wants to play World of Warcraft without being hit on or harassed), I can see why you might want to be using a pseudonym, but I wouldn't expect it to really cover your identity either. If you have a big online presence, people will be able to figure out who you are.
As far as games go, I like online games using the "Mario Kart" model much better than anything else. When you're playing against the general public, it's more enjoyable to just play. No talking, no messaging, no real names. I actually prefer the private server model, where I only play against people I know, but that sadly seems to be going away.
I wouldn't consider it a 12 year old product. They only stopped selling Windows XP in 2009. So, I would say it's only about 5 years old. Calling it 12 years old is a little bit misleading, because if you bought a machine with Windows on it in 2008, it's very likely it could have come with Windows XP. It didn't even have a successor until Vista came out in 2006, and almost nobody wanted to switch to that. The first real OS worth upgrading to was Windows 7, which didn't come out until 2009.
I don't know if it's about being stubborn. I still have my main desktop using Windows XP (although I mostly use my laptop now). The reason isn't because I'm stubborn (My laptops runs Windows 8), It's because the cost of a new windows license is way too high. It's $100 for a Windows 7 or 8 license. I'm not going to spend that on an old PC. Sure I'll get a new OS when/if that machine ever dies, but for now, it's working just fine. Although I do agree you are right about the fact that giving out free CDs won't get anyone to change. They can make their own CD or install it from a USB stick if they really wanted to switch to Ubuntu. Having the government give it out isn't going to increase the chances of someone making a permanent change.
Exactly. Fires like this don't happen often enough that I would think they would be any less common in a first world country. Also, they had the fire on Sept. 4, and resumed (some) operations on Sept. 7. That's only 3 days of operations being completely halted. In a first world country, because of safety concerns, I could see production being shut down for much longer. Plus, first world countries have all sorts of other things that slow down production. Like unions. Imagine if the workers went on strike for a few weeks. That could really mess up production. Personally, I'm looking forward to the point where these fabs are almost completely staffed by robots. Should bring prices down a bit, and it will stop people complaining about the terrible working conditions.
Why don't you run it then? Hosting that much content, accessed by that many people takes some serious resources. You can't just spend $10 a month on a shared host and call it a day.
This is a big problem in general. Most local/independent businesses have little-to-no online presence. It doesn't really need a big money push. Just someone to develop some half decent service where the retailer doesn't have to manage a website. There's a couple offerings out there, but probably nothing that is geared towards grocery delivery.It wouldn't take a huge amount of cash or time to get a service online that would give them the basics. Especially for the players in this industry who already have a system that has most of the features.
But then perhaps they should be putting the printer on display, possibly in operation. Charge people to print out their own trinkets so the museum can generate some money. I'm sure there's thousands of other things you could print out that would be a much better example of "the high quality output of a 3D printer" than a 3d printed gun. You can't demonstrate the high quality of a printer, by showing a low quality product. It would be like demonstrating a high quality laser printer by displaying a 32x32 icon that's been scaled up to fill an entire page.
This gun is not an AK. Not even close. It's probably the equivalent of a zip gun. Those are quite easy to make, and don't require that you have an expensive printer as a starting point.
That isn't even enough to keep my phone from discharging itself, although it will discharge slower. I've had this happen a couple times, where I had a faulty cable, or a plugged it into the wrong port on my laptop. My laptop isn't that old, and it still has unpowered USB ports.
I code in VB.Net as my day job, and I have to say, I don't mind the verbosity one bit. End If is a lot more self explanitory that "}". Who knows if you're ending an "if", a function, a class, or some other construct. Next i lets you know what you are at the end of without scrolling up to see what's above it. I will never get why people want programming languages to be so terse. Given the choice between extremely verbose, like VB or even Cobol, and extremely terse like Perl or J, I would choose more verbose. Sadly though, it autocorrects "Wend" to "End While" At least let me shorten things a little.
How are they supposed to charge the website when they don't know who I'm communicating with? Just another reason to use HTTPS for everything, or even use a VPN in conjunction with HTTPS.
Lenovo has some laptops that support changing out the optical drive for a second hard drive. They have some really nice stuff. I'm considering them for my next laptop purchase.
Personally, I'd rather just spend the money on a boatload of RAM. Modern OSes are good enough at caching that I very rarely find that I'm waiting on my workstation to access the disk. Sure boot-up is slower, but I generally only reboot my machine when there's updates that required it. Once you got most of your working data in memory, everything is snappy anyway. Perhaps if I was dealing with a much larger dataset (editing videos, or lots of different photos), I might see a reason for having an SSD. But as it stands now, I find that my computer responds quite quickly with a mechanical HDD.
Yeah, but who takes control after he dies? Linux is already fragmented enough with all the distributions, I would hate to think what would happen when Linus dies or gets tired of programming, and then a bunch of companies/people decide to fork the kernel, because they all want to be in control of the "official" kernel.
First, there's RAID, so that the death of a single drive doesn't make you lose any time. Just replace the dead disk, and go about your work. Everybody likes to say that RAID isn't a backup, but it's better than nothing. If you have RAID, and pair it with nightly backups of everything that's changed, which is pretty easy to set up, then you're pretty well covered. The only important part being that you actually have to be connected to another machine with a reasonably fast connection in order for the backup to be done. For laptops, this often isn't possible, especially if you are on the road. But even then, you can make sure you copy the really important stuff off to a USB hard disk or some other medium. It's better than nothing.
Makes me wonder what would happen to Linux development if Torvalds was to get hit by a bus, or be incapacitated in some way. Is kernel development that reliant on one person that a single laptop breaking brings everything to a halt?
The iPhone 5C is $99 with a 2 year contract. Only $100 less than the iPhone 5s. I'm pretty sure the iPhone 5 was $699 without a plan. If they price the iPhone 5s similarly, then the iPhone 5c will probably cost around $599. Which isn't cheap at all by my standards. Sure it's a little cheaper, but hardly cheap enough to even warrant a different model. Make it free on the 2 year plan, or less than $300 for the unlocked phone, and then you are getting closer. I really don't know how people justify paying $700 for a phone. Seems just ludicrous to me.
You would think so, but I beg to differ. I've had 2 Kobo eReaders fail on me, both in less than 6 months (second was a replacement unit). In the first case, the thing just got stuck on a reboot loop, so that's some kind of firmware error as far as I could figure, still unfixable from my point of view. Second was half the screen being stuck, which is a hardware error. I've had plenty of solid state devices die over the years. Possibly more often than I've had mechanical devices fail.
The original iPod had a small hard drive inside. It was the only way at the time to have a reasonable amount of storage. At that point in time, the iPod had around 10 GB of storage, which may not sound like a lot, but a lot of other MP3 players at the time had something like 64 MB of storage. Hardly even enough for a whole album. There's tons of laptops out there which don't have problems with mechanical drives. Any drop that would damage the drive would probably break something else as well, like the screen. Having a tablet with 500 GB of storage would really increase their usability.
Which might be a good reason for the government to get involved. I'm not sure which branch of the government, but probably the FDA (in the US). If people are inhaling stuff into their lungs, they should at least be able to know what chemicals are in it, and try to make it as safe as possible. They should be reasonably assured that there aren't dangerous chemicals being put in them for no reason other than cost cutting.
There's an e-cig kiosk at my local mall. In Ottawa, Canada. You can't smoke real cigarettes anywhere. Not in any workplace (including restaurants and bars), I think the one exception being hotel rooms, but that's only in designated smoking rooms, and not in common areas. You can't even smoke in public parks. Anyway, the people selling the e-cigs were smoking them at the kiosk. I didn't notice any odour, and it definitely didn't bother me. But I do kind of wonder if there are any effects anyway. If completely safe, I wouldn't mind this coming into general use for people who wish to smoke. It's much nicer than stepping into an elevator with a person who just came in from smoking, or even an elevator that was recently used by a smoker. The smell tends to linger quite a while. I used to not think it was such a bad thing, but since they've just about outlawed it everywhere, I've started to get bothered by it more and more. Also, can't say I'd miss having tons of cigarette butts left on the ground at the entrance to every building.
I just backed my first Kickstarter because of this. Sounds like a really good idea. I've often thought that music wasn't really a good idea for a Kickstarter, because most musicians already have their own equipment, and all it really takes to record an album is time. I'm much more interested in Kickstarters for physical objects, but I've been turned away by the thought of losing my money if they didn't deliver, and most physical items are usually not that cheap. Most interesting ones have been over $100. However, putting the recordings into the public domain really sparks my interest, and this project seems like something that would be reasonable to complete. Let's hope I'm not disappointed on my first Kickstarter experience,
They should probably come up with a better definition of "largest volcano" then. I vote for measuring the amount of magma that spews forth from the volcano in the average month. A dormant volcano, no matter how large, isn't really that exciting to me. By a tiny little volcano that spews forth billlions of litres of magma on a daily basis would be awesome. Olympus Mons appears to be a dead volcano, which makes it no more interesting to me than any other large mountain. It's still pretty cool as far as mountains go, just based on it's height.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct in a way, but I think that unions tip the scales too far in the other direction. Now instead of the corporation holding all the power, the union holds all the power. There's been more than a few cases where the union priced the workers out of a job. "American" cars are now manufactured in Mexico. Hostess had to stop making Twinkies. Lots of other examples abound. When the option is to either give employees the desired wage increase, or shut down operations while you find and train new workers, the corporation doesn't have much of a choice but to give the workers what they want.
Except for that last one ( female gamer who wants to play World of Warcraft without being hit on or harassed), I can see why you might want to be using a pseudonym, but I wouldn't expect it to really cover your identity either. If you have a big online presence, people will be able to figure out who you are.
As far as games go, I like online games using the "Mario Kart" model much better than anything else. When you're playing against the general public, it's more enjoyable to just play. No talking, no messaging, no real names. I actually prefer the private server model, where I only play against people I know, but that sadly seems to be going away.
I wouldn't consider it a 12 year old product. They only stopped selling Windows XP in 2009. So, I would say it's only about 5 years old. Calling it 12 years old is a little bit misleading, because if you bought a machine with Windows on it in 2008, it's very likely it could have come with Windows XP. It didn't even have a successor until Vista came out in 2006, and almost nobody wanted to switch to that. The first real OS worth upgrading to was Windows 7, which didn't come out until 2009.
I don't know if it's about being stubborn. I still have my main desktop using Windows XP (although I mostly use my laptop now). The reason isn't because I'm stubborn (My laptops runs Windows 8), It's because the cost of a new windows license is way too high. It's $100 for a Windows 7 or 8 license. I'm not going to spend that on an old PC. Sure I'll get a new OS when/if that machine ever dies, but for now, it's working just fine. Although I do agree you are right about the fact that giving out free CDs won't get anyone to change. They can make their own CD or install it from a USB stick if they really wanted to switch to Ubuntu. Having the government give it out isn't going to increase the chances of someone making a permanent change.
Exactly. Fires like this don't happen often enough that I would think they would be any less common in a first world country. Also, they had the fire on Sept. 4, and resumed (some) operations on Sept. 7. That's only 3 days of operations being completely halted. In a first world country, because of safety concerns, I could see production being shut down for much longer. Plus, first world countries have all sorts of other things that slow down production. Like unions. Imagine if the workers went on strike for a few weeks. That could really mess up production. Personally, I'm looking forward to the point where these fabs are almost completely staffed by robots. Should bring prices down a bit, and it will stop people complaining about the terrible working conditions.
Why don't you run it then? Hosting that much content, accessed by that many people takes some serious resources. You can't just spend $10 a month on a shared host and call it a day.
This is a big problem in general. Most local/independent businesses have little-to-no online presence. It doesn't really need a big money push. Just someone to develop some half decent service where the retailer doesn't have to manage a website. There's a couple offerings out there, but probably nothing that is geared towards grocery delivery .It wouldn't take a huge amount of cash or time to get a service online that would give them the basics. Especially for the players in this industry who already have a system that has most of the features.
But then perhaps they should be putting the printer on display, possibly in operation. Charge people to print out their own trinkets so the museum can generate some money. I'm sure there's thousands of other things you could print out that would be a much better example of "the high quality output of a 3D printer" than a 3d printed gun. You can't demonstrate the high quality of a printer, by showing a low quality product. It would be like demonstrating a high quality laser printer by displaying a 32x32 icon that's been scaled up to fill an entire page.
This gun is not an AK. Not even close. It's probably the equivalent of a zip gun. Those are quite easy to make, and don't require that you have an expensive printer as a starting point.
That isn't even enough to keep my phone from discharging itself, although it will discharge slower. I've had this happen a couple times, where I had a faulty cable, or a plugged it into the wrong port on my laptop. My laptop isn't that old, and it still has unpowered USB ports.
I code in VB.Net as my day job, and I have to say, I don't mind the verbosity one bit. End If is a lot more self explanitory that "}". Who knows if you're ending an "if", a function, a class, or some other construct. Next i lets you know what you are at the end of without scrolling up to see what's above it. I will never get why people want programming languages to be so terse. Given the choice between extremely verbose, like VB or even Cobol, and extremely terse like Perl or J, I would choose more verbose. Sadly though, it autocorrects "Wend" to "End While" At least let me shorten things a little.
How are they supposed to charge the website when they don't know who I'm communicating with? Just another reason to use HTTPS for everything, or even use a VPN in conjunction with HTTPS.
Sounds like a function from PHP.
Astronomy_Is_In_Solar_System(X,Y,Z)
Is deprecated, please call
Astronomy_Real_Is_In_Solar_System(X,Y,Z)
Prepared statements can't help you this time.
Lenovo has some laptops that support changing out the optical drive for a second hard drive. They have some really nice stuff. I'm considering them for my next laptop purchase.
Personally, I'd rather just spend the money on a boatload of RAM. Modern OSes are good enough at caching that I very rarely find that I'm waiting on my workstation to access the disk. Sure boot-up is slower, but I generally only reboot my machine when there's updates that required it. Once you got most of your working data in memory, everything is snappy anyway. Perhaps if I was dealing with a much larger dataset (editing videos, or lots of different photos), I might see a reason for having an SSD. But as it stands now, I find that my computer responds quite quickly with a mechanical HDD.
Yeah, but who takes control after he dies? Linux is already fragmented enough with all the distributions, I would hate to think what would happen when Linus dies or gets tired of programming, and then a bunch of companies/people decide to fork the kernel, because they all want to be in control of the "official" kernel.
First, there's RAID, so that the death of a single drive doesn't make you lose any time. Just replace the dead disk, and go about your work. Everybody likes to say that RAID isn't a backup, but it's better than nothing. If you have RAID, and pair it with nightly backups of everything that's changed, which is pretty easy to set up, then you're pretty well covered. The only important part being that you actually have to be connected to another machine with a reasonably fast connection in order for the backup to be done. For laptops, this often isn't possible, especially if you are on the road. But even then, you can make sure you copy the really important stuff off to a USB hard disk or some other medium. It's better than nothing.
Makes me wonder what would happen to Linux development if Torvalds was to get hit by a bus, or be incapacitated in some way. Is kernel development that reliant on one person that a single laptop breaking brings everything to a halt?
The iPhone 5C is $99 with a 2 year contract. Only $100 less than the iPhone 5s. I'm pretty sure the iPhone 5 was $699 without a plan. If they price the iPhone 5s similarly, then the iPhone 5c will probably cost around $599. Which isn't cheap at all by my standards. Sure it's a little cheaper, but hardly cheap enough to even warrant a different model. Make it free on the 2 year plan, or less than $300 for the unlocked phone, and then you are getting closer. I really don't know how people justify paying $700 for a phone. Seems just ludicrous to me.
You would think so, but I beg to differ. I've had 2 Kobo eReaders fail on me, both in less than 6 months (second was a replacement unit). In the first case, the thing just got stuck on a reboot loop, so that's some kind of firmware error as far as I could figure, still unfixable from my point of view. Second was half the screen being stuck, which is a hardware error. I've had plenty of solid state devices die over the years. Possibly more often than I've had mechanical devices fail.
The original iPod had a small hard drive inside. It was the only way at the time to have a reasonable amount of storage. At that point in time, the iPod had around 10 GB of storage, which may not sound like a lot, but a lot of other MP3 players at the time had something like 64 MB of storage. Hardly even enough for a whole album. There's tons of laptops out there which don't have problems with mechanical drives. Any drop that would damage the drive would probably break something else as well, like the screen. Having a tablet with 500 GB of storage would really increase their usability.
Which might be a good reason for the government to get involved. I'm not sure which branch of the government, but probably the FDA (in the US). If people are inhaling stuff into their lungs, they should at least be able to know what chemicals are in it, and try to make it as safe as possible. They should be reasonably assured that there aren't dangerous chemicals being put in them for no reason other than cost cutting.
There's an e-cig kiosk at my local mall. In Ottawa, Canada. You can't smoke real cigarettes anywhere. Not in any workplace (including restaurants and bars), I think the one exception being hotel rooms, but that's only in designated smoking rooms, and not in common areas. You can't even smoke in public parks. Anyway, the people selling the e-cigs were smoking them at the kiosk. I didn't notice any odour, and it definitely didn't bother me. But I do kind of wonder if there are any effects anyway. If completely safe, I wouldn't mind this coming into general use for people who wish to smoke. It's much nicer than stepping into an elevator with a person who just came in from smoking, or even an elevator that was recently used by a smoker. The smell tends to linger quite a while. I used to not think it was such a bad thing, but since they've just about outlawed it everywhere, I've started to get bothered by it more and more. Also, can't say I'd miss having tons of cigarette butts left on the ground at the entrance to every building.
I just backed my first Kickstarter because of this. Sounds like a really good idea. I've often thought that music wasn't really a good idea for a Kickstarter, because most musicians already have their own equipment, and all it really takes to record an album is time. I'm much more interested in Kickstarters for physical objects, but I've been turned away by the thought of losing my money if they didn't deliver, and most physical items are usually not that cheap. Most interesting ones have been over $100. However, putting the recordings into the public domain really sparks my interest, and this project seems like something that would be reasonable to complete. Let's hope I'm not disappointed on my first Kickstarter experience,
They should probably come up with a better definition of "largest volcano" then. I vote for measuring the amount of magma that spews forth from the volcano in the average month. A dormant volcano, no matter how large, isn't really that exciting to me. By a tiny little volcano that spews forth billlions of litres of magma on a daily basis would be awesome. Olympus Mons appears to be a dead volcano, which makes it no more interesting to me than any other large mountain. It's still pretty cool as far as mountains go, just based on it's height.