The Wii was backwards compatible with the Gamecube, which uses a completely different disk type. While it was still optical disk, it wasn't the kind of disk you could use with a standard CD/DVD drive, but then again neither was the Wii. Actually, do the the small size of the GameCube disk, and the slot loading feature of the Wii, it was probably non-trivial to get it to work properly. IT wouldn't have been difficult to put an extra cartridge slot on the SNES to have it accept NES games, but it probably wasn't cost effective to have 2 different systems in 1 box.
Nobody complained that the SNES wasn't backward compatible with the NES, or that the N64 wasn't backwards compaitble with the SNES, or that the Gamecube wasn't backwards compatible with the the N64. I think the first backwards compatible games console was the PS2. Now it's something that's a deal breaker? You can still play the old games on the old system, and the new games on the new system. It's not like your PS3 stops working because you buy a PS4. Sure it would be a nice feature for the PS4 to be backwards compatible, but I don't see how it's really a deal-breaker. People complain that consoles are getting too expensive, yet they expect that the newest console will contain a whole other console internally with the new console, without thinking about how this effects the price of the system. It's especially difficult when they completely switch system architectures like they did with the PS4.
The business doesn't have to offer a price so low they are losing money. That's just another thing that Groupon pushes them to do. Groupon could operate similar services while ensuring that the business actually made a profit off each sale, as well as ensure that they weren't overwhelmed with more business than they can handle. There's plenty of cases where Groupon can be good for the business. I noticed my local rock climbing gym on there. They don't really have an expendables. Sure their equipment will undergo a bit more use, and their staff might be a little busier training newbs on how to belay, but if they introduce a couple new people to the sport, and get a couple memberships out of the deal, they most likely end up ahead. It's not like there's another rock climbing gym for the people to go to anywhere in the area.
The thing is, they could probably stand to make a lot of money if they weren't quite so predatory. I think that for the most part, the people who bought the groupons were quite happy. However, the businesses who offered the groupons often got shafted. I'm sure they could easily change the way they they deal with businesses to make sure they have a much better experience. For instance, most of the time they push for no limits on the number of coupons sold. Instead, there should always be a limit, because most businesses aren't set up to handle the amount of business that Groupon could send to them. Groupon would still make money off the deal, and would probably even have some repeat business.
Exactly. People will like to do what they like to do. My one daughter loves to watch hockey. We almost never watched hockey until she said she wanted to watch it. I really don't know where her love of watching hockey came from. I have another daughter, and she could care less about watching the hockey game (except when she found out I was taking her sister to a game, then she suddenly feigned interest) There was plenty of encouragement for me to like team sports when I was a kid, but to this day I don't really care so much for any of them.
Despite all that, I think it would be much more beneficial for kids to focus more on intellectual skills than on physical skills. If you aren't in the top 1000 in whatever sport you choose, then there's basically no way to make money from playing the sport. Even if you count coaches, trainers, and a bunch of ancillary jobs, there just aren't that many jobs out there in sports. Compare that with programming, where there are literally millions of people making money by writing code. Also, it's conceivable that coding skills would come up in many other non-coding jobs (creating a spreadsheet for example) whereas skills from a sport would almost never be of any use in any job, except for basic strength and co-ordination skills, which aren't really specific to any sport, but just being in shape in general, which is important, but you don't really have to excel at any sport to do that.
According to Wikipedia he was promoted to Specialist in 2009. He was then demoted back to Private a couple days before being arrested. Also, I don't think you can really say just by somebody's age what their rank should be. If you don't include a lot of other variables such as what age they joined the military, how well they actually performed, and what missions the person participated in. Stating that a number of years should equal a specific rank kind of reminds me of some union jobs, where people get pay raises for their entire career, even though they keep doing the exact same job, and don't necessarily do it any better than the new recruits.
Exactly. If you were just going to plead guilty anyway, wouldn't you want to hold off that plea (and the corresponding prison sentence) for as long as possible?
Impossible to skid is completely false. Take it for a drive on icy roads, and I'm sure it will skid all over the place. A Gyro car might be a good idea for fairweather driving, but I wouldn't want to drive any 2 wheeled vehicle when there's 12 inches of snow on the ground.
But what happens when the advertisers abandon DNS and just access their services with IP addresses. Since they have Javascript running on the page anyway, it would be trivial to set up an HTTP server that returns IP addresses for Domain Names, and then the Javascript could substitute in the correct IP Address when loading the ads.
As a personal user, you probably have no reason not to upgrade, but for companies, there's many intranet applications that will break if you move to IE10. We're still running some machines on IE8 because it's the latest version that works with some of our stuff, and there's no way to upgrade the existing software.
I don't know about that. There's a ton of 15 inch laptops out there with 1300x768 resolution, which is way worse DPI than a 7 inch tablet with a 1024x600 resolution. Sure it's not up there with the iPad or Nexus 10, but it's perfectly fine for watching a few vidoes or browsing the web.
I imagine that Torvalds would lose specifically because of the reason you state. He would probably just leave and therefore lose by default. Arguing with people who can't form a logical coherent argument is both frustrating and a huge waste of your time. You can't win an argument if the person you are arguing with refuses to change their opinion and doesn't even use logic and truths to back up their own opinions.
The expensive part of the phone seems to be the screen and battery. You can get tiny Android PCs withe almost the same specs as a very capable Android phone for $50. If you are offering a Firefox OS phone for the price of a feature phone, then you're going to get the screen and battery of a feature phone, which there are already plenty of Android handsets that exist like this. If you think you are going to get a 4+ inch hi-res display with a battery that doesn't have to be charged throughout the day, you aren't going to be paying "feature phone" prices.
Sure the good resumes take 3 or 4 minutes to go though, at least for the first pass, but 80% (and I think I'm being generous here) of them could be thrown out in the first 10 seconds. I guess it depends what industry you work in, but many of the resumes I've seen for programmers are people I would never even think of hiring.
But we're not talking about programming here, we're talking about tire factories. After a bit of training, I don't think there's any difference in the per hour output of a Chinese factory worker vs. the French/US factory worker. If that 3 hour work day is what usually goes on in France (and judging by what I've seen of union workers in Canada, it's believable), then they would be nuts to build a factory there. If you could get them to actually work hard for 7-8 hours day, then it "might" be worth it, but even then, the wages for union jobs are usually so much higher than what their skill level dictates that it isn't even worth it too open a factory.
Actually, this only ever worked on Windows 7, and I'm sad to see it go. With Windows XP, you had keys that only worked on disks you had to acquire from the OEM, but those usually weren't even included with the PC. With Windows 7, if you could get your hands on a retail Windows 7 disc, it didn't matter if you had bought a computer from HP, Dell, Acer, or whoever, the same key would always work. I wasn't aware they had gotten rid of this feature in Windows 8, but that gives me another reason not to like it.
The only problem with what you say isn't really true. Because "Online mega merchant" doesn't operate a retail store, they can cut costs by a lot. Also, because they sell so many items, the book distributor (or whatever product they sell) gives them a good deal on the item to begin with, so in the end, it ends up looking like this.
Mom & Pop (AKA Women & Women First) = $20 + tax = $22
Online mega Merchant (AKA Amazon) = $12 + shipping (or not) = $12-$17
Retail Mega Merchant (AKA Walmart) = $15 + tax = $16.50
So what ends up happening is if you buy with the Mom and Pop, you always pay more. If you go with either of the Mega Merchants, you sometimes get a better deal if you buy it online, and sometimes get a better deal if you buy it at a retail location.
Very much agree with this. I worked for a "Mom and Pop" store when I was just out of university and hadn't found a job yet, and needed to pay the rent. I was a cheese shop. I basically stocked shelves, served customers, that sort of thing. Not easy work either, Their main storage fridge was in the basement and it wasn't uncommon to get 50 lbs. wheels of cheese. They payed just a little over minimum wage. There was no benefits. Meanwhile, all the large grocery stores had unionized workers, and got paid at least 50% more than I did. They also had benefits. So I don't believe that small businesses are any better to their employees. They really can't afford to be, because the big corps get much better prices on goods.
And as a consumer, I almost have to say "good riddance". My local book store (and by local I mean megachain with retail outlets, Chapters to be specific). Took a week after release to get copies of a brand new release, now New York Times best seller (so not like it was unpopular) on their shelfs. I ended up buying the eBook instead, even though I really wanted a hard copy, because I wanted to have it the day it came out. Since Amazon and other large online chains have come out, I now have access to more books, and at better prices, then I ever had with smaller book stores.
Also, Just because we are in a recession (are we still?) doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people with a lot of money. A family (with or without kids) where there are two adults each making $75K a year should be able to afford $50,000 for a car. Unless you're living where it's very expensive (San Fran, Manhattan), a family making this kind of money should have no problem buying a car that costs that much, as long as they keep their other expenses in order. And while maybe not you, or me, or a lot of people make that kind of money, there are still a quite a few people who are in that financial situation.
This. Pick any programming language you want, store the data in a real database, and write some code to output the results to CSV so it can be imported into Excel or any other spreadsheet.
At this point they might as well "artificially" produce the stuff. They said it has something to do with the stomach acids. So bath the beans in acid prior to roasting them. Some people say it has something to do with the scent glands of the civet cat. I'm sure they could find some way to reproduce that in the lab, or at least harvest it from the animals in a humane way without having to force feed them coffee.
Yeah, but there are always downsides to a monoculture. x86 is a big example. It took years longer than it should have to get 64 bit desktop computers because Intel was dragging it's heels. It's only once AMD came up with their own implementation and they had no other choice that they had to go along. Also look at power usage. We are finally getting real serious about mobile computing but Intel is too power hungry so you either get a device with less than stellar battery life, or a device that won't run all your old applications. There are some advantages in an open source perspective, such as if one browser implements a new feature, or fixes some CSS rendering bug, all the other browsers can immediately upgrage or fix their browsers. But I think that without real competition there is too much of a likelihood of things stagnating.
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The Wii was backwards compatible with the Gamecube, which uses a completely different disk type. While it was still optical disk, it wasn't the kind of disk you could use with a standard CD/DVD drive, but then again neither was the Wii. Actually, do the the small size of the GameCube disk, and the slot loading feature of the Wii, it was probably non-trivial to get it to work properly. IT wouldn't have been difficult to put an extra cartridge slot on the SNES to have it accept NES games, but it probably wasn't cost effective to have 2 different systems in 1 box.
Nobody complained that the SNES wasn't backward compatible with the NES, or that the N64 wasn't backwards compaitble with the SNES, or that the Gamecube wasn't backwards compatible with the the N64. I think the first backwards compatible games console was the PS2. Now it's something that's a deal breaker? You can still play the old games on the old system, and the new games on the new system. It's not like your PS3 stops working because you buy a PS4. Sure it would be a nice feature for the PS4 to be backwards compatible, but I don't see how it's really a deal-breaker. People complain that consoles are getting too expensive, yet they expect that the newest console will contain a whole other console internally with the new console, without thinking about how this effects the price of the system. It's especially difficult when they completely switch system architectures like they did with the PS4.
The business doesn't have to offer a price so low they are losing money. That's just another thing that Groupon pushes them to do. Groupon could operate similar services while ensuring that the business actually made a profit off each sale, as well as ensure that they weren't overwhelmed with more business than they can handle. There's plenty of cases where Groupon can be good for the business. I noticed my local rock climbing gym on there. They don't really have an expendables. Sure their equipment will undergo a bit more use, and their staff might be a little busier training newbs on how to belay, but if they introduce a couple new people to the sport, and get a couple memberships out of the deal, they most likely end up ahead. It's not like there's another rock climbing gym for the people to go to anywhere in the area.
The thing is, they could probably stand to make a lot of money if they weren't quite so predatory. I think that for the most part, the people who bought the groupons were quite happy. However, the businesses who offered the groupons often got shafted. I'm sure they could easily change the way they they deal with businesses to make sure they have a much better experience. For instance, most of the time they push for no limits on the number of coupons sold. Instead, there should always be a limit, because most businesses aren't set up to handle the amount of business that Groupon could send to them. Groupon would still make money off the deal, and would probably even have some repeat business.
Exactly. People will like to do what they like to do. My one daughter loves to watch hockey. We almost never watched hockey until she said she wanted to watch it. I really don't know where her love of watching hockey came from. I have another daughter, and she could care less about watching the hockey game (except when she found out I was taking her sister to a game, then she suddenly feigned interest) There was plenty of encouragement for me to like team sports when I was a kid, but to this day I don't really care so much for any of them.
Despite all that, I think it would be much more beneficial for kids to focus more on intellectual skills than on physical skills. If you aren't in the top 1000 in whatever sport you choose, then there's basically no way to make money from playing the sport. Even if you count coaches, trainers, and a bunch of ancillary jobs, there just aren't that many jobs out there in sports. Compare that with programming, where there are literally millions of people making money by writing code. Also, it's conceivable that coding skills would come up in many other non-coding jobs (creating a spreadsheet for example) whereas skills from a sport would almost never be of any use in any job, except for basic strength and co-ordination skills, which aren't really specific to any sport, but just being in shape in general, which is important, but you don't really have to excel at any sport to do that.
According to Wikipedia he was promoted to Specialist in 2009. He was then demoted back to Private a couple days before being arrested. Also, I don't think you can really say just by somebody's age what their rank should be. If you don't include a lot of other variables such as what age they joined the military, how well they actually performed, and what missions the person participated in. Stating that a number of years should equal a specific rank kind of reminds me of some union jobs, where people get pay raises for their entire career, even though they keep doing the exact same job, and don't necessarily do it any better than the new recruits.
Exactly. If you were just going to plead guilty anyway, wouldn't you want to hold off that plea (and the corresponding prison sentence) for as long as possible?
Yeah, but noscript is a pain to use, and stops sites that should work from working.
Impossible to skid is completely false. Take it for a drive on icy roads, and I'm sure it will skid all over the place. A Gyro car might be a good idea for fairweather driving, but I wouldn't want to drive any 2 wheeled vehicle when there's 12 inches of snow on the ground.
But what happens when the advertisers abandon DNS and just access their services with IP addresses. Since they have Javascript running on the page anyway, it would be trivial to set up an HTTP server that returns IP addresses for Domain Names, and then the Javascript could substitute in the correct IP Address when loading the ads.
As a personal user, you probably have no reason not to upgrade, but for companies, there's many intranet applications that will break if you move to IE10. We're still running some machines on IE8 because it's the latest version that works with some of our stuff, and there's no way to upgrade the existing software.
I don't know about that. There's a ton of 15 inch laptops out there with 1300x768 resolution, which is way worse DPI than a 7 inch tablet with a 1024x600 resolution. Sure it's not up there with the iPad or Nexus 10, but it's perfectly fine for watching a few vidoes or browsing the web.
I imagine that Torvalds would lose specifically because of the reason you state. He would probably just leave and therefore lose by default. Arguing with people who can't form a logical coherent argument is both frustrating and a huge waste of your time. You can't win an argument if the person you are arguing with refuses to change their opinion and doesn't even use logic and truths to back up their own opinions.
The expensive part of the phone seems to be the screen and battery. You can get tiny Android PCs withe almost the same specs as a very capable Android phone for $50. If you are offering a Firefox OS phone for the price of a feature phone, then you're going to get the screen and battery of a feature phone, which there are already plenty of Android handsets that exist like this. If you think you are going to get a 4+ inch hi-res display with a battery that doesn't have to be charged throughout the day, you aren't going to be paying "feature phone" prices.
Sure the good resumes take 3 or 4 minutes to go though, at least for the first pass, but 80% (and I think I'm being generous here) of them could be thrown out in the first 10 seconds. I guess it depends what industry you work in, but many of the resumes I've seen for programmers are people I would never even think of hiring.
But we're not talking about programming here, we're talking about tire factories. After a bit of training, I don't think there's any difference in the per hour output of a Chinese factory worker vs. the French/US factory worker. If that 3 hour work day is what usually goes on in France (and judging by what I've seen of union workers in Canada, it's believable), then they would be nuts to build a factory there. If you could get them to actually work hard for 7-8 hours day, then it "might" be worth it, but even then, the wages for union jobs are usually so much higher than what their skill level dictates that it isn't even worth it too open a factory.
Actually, this only ever worked on Windows 7, and I'm sad to see it go. With Windows XP, you had keys that only worked on disks you had to acquire from the OEM, but those usually weren't even included with the PC. With Windows 7, if you could get your hands on a retail Windows 7 disc, it didn't matter if you had bought a computer from HP, Dell, Acer, or whoever, the same key would always work. I wasn't aware they had gotten rid of this feature in Windows 8, but that gives me another reason not to like it.
That's kind of debatable. Japanese emperors have been around since 660 BC.
The only problem with what you say isn't really true. Because "Online mega merchant" doesn't operate a retail store, they can cut costs by a lot. Also, because they sell so many items, the book distributor (or whatever product they sell) gives them a good deal on the item to begin with, so in the end, it ends up looking like this.
Mom & Pop (AKA Women & Women First) = $20 + tax = $22
Online mega Merchant (AKA Amazon) = $12 + shipping (or not) = $12-$17
Retail Mega Merchant (AKA Walmart) = $15 + tax = $16.50
So what ends up happening is if you buy with the Mom and Pop, you always pay more. If you go with either of the Mega Merchants, you sometimes get a better deal if you buy it online, and sometimes get a better deal if you buy it at a retail location.
Very much agree with this. I worked for a "Mom and Pop" store when I was just out of university and hadn't found a job yet, and needed to pay the rent. I was a cheese shop. I basically stocked shelves, served customers, that sort of thing. Not easy work either, Their main storage fridge was in the basement and it wasn't uncommon to get 50 lbs. wheels of cheese. They payed just a little over minimum wage. There was no benefits. Meanwhile, all the large grocery stores had unionized workers, and got paid at least 50% more than I did. They also had benefits. So I don't believe that small businesses are any better to their employees. They really can't afford to be, because the big corps get much better prices on goods.
And as a consumer, I almost have to say "good riddance". My local book store (and by local I mean megachain with retail outlets, Chapters to be specific). Took a week after release to get copies of a brand new release, now New York Times best seller (so not like it was unpopular) on their shelfs. I ended up buying the eBook instead, even though I really wanted a hard copy, because I wanted to have it the day it came out. Since Amazon and other large online chains have come out, I now have access to more books, and at better prices, then I ever had with smaller book stores.
Also, Just because we are in a recession (are we still?) doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people with a lot of money. A family (with or without kids) where there are two adults each making $75K a year should be able to afford $50,000 for a car. Unless you're living where it's very expensive (San Fran, Manhattan), a family making this kind of money should have no problem buying a car that costs that much, as long as they keep their other expenses in order. And while maybe not you, or me, or a lot of people make that kind of money, there are still a quite a few people who are in that financial situation.
This. Pick any programming language you want, store the data in a real database, and write some code to output the results to CSV so it can be imported into Excel or any other spreadsheet.
At this point they might as well "artificially" produce the stuff. They said it has something to do with the stomach acids. So bath the beans in acid prior to roasting them. Some people say it has something to do with the scent glands of the civet cat. I'm sure they could find some way to reproduce that in the lab, or at least harvest it from the animals in a humane way without having to force feed them coffee.
Yeah, but there are always downsides to a monoculture. x86 is a big example. It took years longer than it should have to get 64 bit desktop computers because Intel was dragging it's heels. It's only once AMD came up with their own implementation and they had no other choice that they had to go along. Also look at power usage. We are finally getting real serious about mobile computing but Intel is too power hungry so you either get a device with less than stellar battery life, or a device that won't run all your old applications. There are some advantages in an open source perspective, such as if one browser implements a new feature, or fixes some CSS rendering bug, all the other browsers can immediately upgrage or fix their browsers. But I think that without real competition there is too much of a likelihood of things stagnating.