I sort of like this idea. However rather than 99 cent one time fee, I think I would be more inclined to say have a 10 cent fee on every post.
I think if I wanted to share my thoughts on something I feel strongly about, I wouldn't really care about an amount as trivial as 10 cents. Also it might make discourse more well thought out and intelligible. It also may discourage the jerk who just want to post "You suck man meat fagbag!" as it will cost them 10 cents to do so. It wouldn't however limit discussion as if I do feel strongly contrary to your opinion on some subject I would also be likely to not care about the 10 cent fee to counter your argument.
I know this goes against a lot of stuff but, it might at least be an interesting experiment on social interaction in forums on the internet. I would also ditch the real name thing. Using only the fee as the deterrent against flamers and trolls. Likely wouldn't stop it, but it may be a positive step. Of course it might keep me from commenting on topics I am not all that invested it also, for good or bad.
40 Billion (no idea if that is accurate in anyway)
Convert to millions for fun: 40,000 Million
How much did the court cases cost? 16 Million
Its a drop in the bucket to try and perpetuate their current business model.
Its like the damages that BP will face... realistically the amount is nothing to them if you consider how much money they make. Call it a cost of doing buisness and move on.
I saw this study also. Larger percentage of "older" drivers seem to have this problem. Take what you will from that. Likely there is some design flaw or at least bad design on Toyota's part, but it seems that it is mostly effecting older people's ability to drive.
Only difference is I only kicked him once. Right in the jewels. He fell like a tree, and didn't get up. He missed 2 or 3 days of school. Never messed with me again.
Funny part of the story is that later on in high school we became best friends. I was also in his wedding party when he got married years later. I still keep in touch with him each Christmas.
is Live. If I like the music and they are selling a CD, I'll buy it and pay cash (About the only place I play a CD is in my Car anyway). That way I know the artist is getting the money directly, and by paying cash they will likely not pay taxes on it either. They are also likely to spend it directly on whatever bar they are in, or to cover traveling expenses.
I think I am much more likely to go to a concert these days than go to a retail store and buy a CD of anything.
That said, I don't think I have downloaded anything in quite some time, mostly as I haven't heard anything too compelling that I would really wish to hear. I think I downloaded 3 CD's last year, that I might go out and buy simply because I like them, and I feel a bit guilty about it because of that. However, none of them are really mainstream so I might have a hard time even finding them... Though I can probably find them on Amazon or something.
No matter how cheap you labour, and you would actually need very skilled construction labour, the primary costs would be in material.
Equipment, Lots of Steel and Concrete, as well as built items like turbines, power infrastructure and transmission lines, etc... None of it trivial.
Now try and do all of this in the Ocean.
You are talking about a LOT of money to build these things to anything of scale, and very little of that has to do with cheap unskilled labour.
Very few have ever been built. I know of 3. One in France, One in Russia, and One in Canada. I used to live pretty close to the one in Canada in Nova Scotia.
Ya before I posted I checked nVidia to check to see if they had a technology like that. I didn't see it. I did see the 3D stuff, but nothing uses or supports that yet to my knowlege.
As for Eyefinity, it only allows for 3 rather than 2 monitors to be set up, except for one model of card that does allow for 6 (All display port).
When I build my last computer, Vista had just come out. I was left with a very crappy decision.
Buy a copy of XP, older technology that won't be supported. Or buy Vista, by all accounts very much a buggy, and a real bitch to get any drivers to run properly. Supposedly the 64-bit edition was even WORSE. This was like the first year of the Vista release, bad timing I know, but I needed a computer.
I also didn't want to run Linux as I wanted to play computer games.
So I took what I thought was the lesser of evils and bought Vista 32-bit for compatibility. All told it has worked pretty good.
I tried to get a free upgrade MS was offering at one point to 64-bit Vista, but was told this was only for "Retail" and not "OEM" so I was SOL.
I am certainly not buying anything new. When I build a new computer in the next couple of years hopefully I have better choices available to me than I did the last time. By all account Win7 seems to be ok, but who knows what will be the OS flavor of the day when it comes time to build again...
Also not everything is about speed or horsepower but capability.
I would buy the ATI card all things being equal for the "Eyefinity" technology alone.
It would let me use 3 monitors not just 2 (tho one needs to be a special new one with a "display port" apparently) It would also let me set different resolutions on my different monitors.
With my current setup I would likely have HD 1080 resolution set on my 37" HD TV DVI-HDMI 16:9 connection, and then run my 4:3 normal LCD monitors at a more usable resolution.
With my current video card I have to set my TV basically at 720p because it is the highest supported resolution between both TV and Monitor, and they have to be the same but due to different aspect ratios this is problematic.
Eyefinity would change that, and that's a pretty big deal to me. To my knowlege the Geforce cards cannot do it.
I would even go cheaper and get a 5750 or 5770 in the 125-150$ range as they still have that technology even in the lower range cards.
USA Average Broadband Speed less than 10MB/s and Population Density of 32 People/Km squared. Finland Average Broadband Speed greater than 20MB/s and Population Density of 16 People/Km squared.
So stop the "Awww wahhh we are a big country and spread out" excuses already"!
Finland has a population that is TWICE as sparse as the USA, yet has average broadband speeds that are TWICE as fast.
I heard on the CBC news last week that they did some looking into Canada's No Cal list. The main points were:
1) Since its inception years ago, only 72,000$ in fines have been laid in all of Canada for violators of the No Call List. 2) Of the 72,000$ in fines, only 250$ has ever been collected.
That's right. Two Hundred and Fifty dollars in grand total.
When I am playing WOW with a buddy sitting next to me, it makes sense to do this on a server, you know because there are a massive amount of other players also playing.
When I am playing 2 player Co-op SC2 against computer AI, it seems rather stupid to have to connect to the internet in order to accomplish this feat. Exactly why are we connecting in order to connect, I mean he is siting there a few feet away connected to my very own LAN. Yet I have to have an ISP, modems, internet connection, transmit to some server who knows where, sign on, have an account, pay for all of that, all for what? DRM.
Don't try and makes a reasoned argument if you don't have one. It is lame (having no LAN that is).
That said, I will still buy it, and play it. However that move does stick in my craw a bit. I'll let it go, however if that bar keeps moving in that sort of screw you direction, even Blizzard can wear out its welcome over time.
Two examples. I got caught on the fringe twice which caused me problems.
My first year University, they assumed everyone had intro high school calculus. Not only did I not have it, it wasn't even offered at my high school should I even wanted to take it. This had everything to do with there being 13 grades in Ontario, and 12 in Nova Scotia (Canada). The year AFTER I graduated it became mandatory curriculum in my high school (well mandatory in that the school has to at least offer the course). In any event, considering everyone in the class had taken calculus, and I needing calculus as a requirement of a CS degree had to take it. It was not an easy go for me. I was always behind, and by the time I learned the fundamentals of one thing, the class would have already progressed to something else. I did have a wonderfully understanding professor who gave me lots of extra help, but in the end I think she passed me just because she felt sorry for my frustration.
My second year University they changed programming languages from Pascal to C. The second year CS class was the weeder class, and not only did I have to try and absorb the new programming concepts, but also learn from scratch a whole new language syntax. While in the grand scheme of things, one has to be ready to learn new languages its true, but at such a juncture in my degree it really sucked (though in the end was likely helpful, but didn't help my performance at the time any).
Anyway while I didn't cheat I can see in those circumstances why students would, particularly when grades count towards grad or professional school, and the cost to attend is so great. In the end I think I got a 55% in Calculus, which was enough to get credit and move on, and I ended up dropping CS201a my second year changing majors to Environmental Science for a brief stint, until I woke up and just took it again the following year to pass it easily.
I would agree with your list above as well. There are really great Professors out there, but for everyone of them, I bet there are two lazy ones that breed lazy students.
On a humorous note, great accomplished professors also prevent cheating. For example as an elective my first year I took Classical History 100 for kicks. Just something I was interested in, and needed a credit that wasn't CS. Anyway I had to write a paper, and I submitted my idea and topic to the professor for approval, which I got. I didn't bother to do too much research on the topic, it was more of just an idea (it was a 100-level class so sue me). Anyway when I finally got around to going to the library and doing research on this particular topic I found I think 5 specific books, 4 of which were written personally my my professor. I remember thinking to myself, "Well I guess I'm not plagiarizing anything on this one!":)
Agreed. I am aware of a large corporate DB design project that actually plans to denormalize to increase performance, as how the primary searches are done currently is much slower.
I was recently at a design workshop for a very large database. They were looking to denormalize, ALOT. I know went I took CompSci it was all about normalization, however in this case it made sense. (They called it flattening)
In any case the DB was terribly complex, with many of those normalized tables not really being used anyway. Even with my background I agreed with what they are doing, with the only cravat being to be careful how the output was implemented. That is to say, when a user gets say 10-12 fields to deal with it is manageable, outputting like 30-40 fields to a table is just cumbersome to the user. All the design should be hidden anyway, and the user should only see what they need to see.
Anyway I just thought it was neat to see a large corporate DB go "backwards" and denormalize. Funny thing is I bet if I was interviewing for a job there a year ago, and designed some tables like that in the interview written component, I would likely get a negative score, as most are educated to normalize, normalize, normalize...:)
or how the hell are you Director of IT without any background in DB design.
Anyone who has taken the first couple years of a Computer Science degree, should have a handful of expensive books on their bookshelf collecting dust.
Also if your looking for a "New" book, you are interested in particular implementation of modern software. Get My/MS SQL for dummies or something. The basic principles of how to design optimal relational databases hasn't changed all that much in the past decade that I am aware of.
About the only thing that has changed other than the software with some nice new tools, is scale in that Databases are continually getting larger over time, which may influence how you design things for optimal performance depending on what/how you use your DB for. Modern Databases also allow for more than just text and numbers now, and you can now store things like media and various other constructs, how these are organized may have more a function of the software you are using, and design may impinge upon application design which is something else entirely.
Also the type of book you need depends on the type of DB you plan on designing as well. My advice is to take some DB courses at your local university or online. If you don't have the prerequisites for those, I would argue you have no business trying to do this work yourself, and to hire a Computer Science Grad. They are a dime a dozen now, and will likely be happy just to have a job in his field when he graduates.
There are plenty of concrete roads in Canada. I remember a large one going in Quebec. You have to treat it for the conditions, just like everything. The same reason road beds are way thicker in colder climates to fight frost.
The problem is Concrete is 2x the price to construct. Industry points out it lasts longer, but project costs trump long term stuff many times.
I would also bet that the CO concrete is even more expensive. So when your a Municipality and Asphalt costs 10,000$/Km and CO Concrete costs 40,000$/Km it would be a hard sell for any kind of meaningful project.
I can see some big city doing it in limited areas, as a PR campaign and posting signs all over the place bragging about it. It also likely has limited availability, so not all contractors would be able to bid. Largest cost for Aggregates is transportation also, which would also inflate the price. I guess it really depends on what exactly is involved in turning normal cement into CO cement. Also another factor would be the ability to make it at scale that's useful, if you can only make small amounts its not much good, which would also make it more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
I sort of like this idea. However rather than 99 cent one time fee, I think I would be more inclined to say have a 10 cent fee on every post.
I think if I wanted to share my thoughts on something I feel strongly about, I wouldn't really care about an amount as trivial as 10 cents. Also it might make discourse more well thought out and intelligible. It also may discourage the jerk who just want to post "You suck man meat fagbag!" as it will cost them 10 cents to do so. It wouldn't however limit discussion as if I do feel strongly contrary to your opinion on some subject I would also be likely to not care about the 10 cent fee to counter your argument.
I know this goes against a lot of stuff but, it might at least be an interesting experiment on social interaction in forums on the internet. I would also ditch the real name thing. Using only the fee as the deterrent against flamers and trolls. Likely wouldn't stop it, but it may be a positive step. Of course it might keep me from commenting on topics I am not all that invested it also, for good or bad.
Who the heck designed these phones? Psychlos?
How much money does the music industry make?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_money_does_the_music_industry_make
40 Billion (no idea if that is accurate in anyway)
Convert to millions for fun: 40,000 Million
How much did the court cases cost? 16 Million
Its a drop in the bucket to try and perpetuate their current business model.
Its like the damages that BP will face... realistically the amount is nothing to them if you consider how much money they make. Call it a cost of doing buisness and move on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candu#cite_note-13
I saw this study also. Larger percentage of "older" drivers seem to have this problem. Take what you will from that. Likely there is some design flaw or at least bad design on Toyota's part, but it seems that it is mostly effecting older people's ability to drive.
Long story short I did the same thing.
Only difference is I only kicked him once. Right in the jewels. He fell like a tree, and didn't get up. He missed 2 or 3 days of school. Never messed with me again.
Funny part of the story is that later on in high school we became best friends. I was also in his wedding party when he got married years later. I still keep in touch with him each Christmas.
is Live. If I like the music and they are selling a CD, I'll buy it and pay cash (About the only place I play a CD is in my Car anyway). That way I know the artist is getting the money directly, and by paying cash they will likely not pay taxes on it either. They are also likely to spend it directly on whatever bar they are in, or to cover traveling expenses.
I think I am much more likely to go to a concert these days than go to a retail store and buy a CD of anything.
That said, I don't think I have downloaded anything in quite some time, mostly as I haven't heard anything too compelling that I would really wish to hear. I think I downloaded 3 CD's last year, that I might go out and buy simply because I like them, and I feel a bit guilty about it because of that. However, none of them are really mainstream so I might have a hard time even finding them... Though I can probably find them on Amazon or something.
Um no, it isn't "digging a huge pit".
Your basically making a Hydro Electric Dam.
No matter how cheap you labour, and you would actually need very skilled construction labour, the primary costs would be in material.
Equipment, Lots of Steel and Concrete, as well as built items like turbines, power infrastructure and transmission lines, etc... None of it trivial.
Now try and do all of this in the Ocean.
You are talking about a LOT of money to build these things to anything of scale, and very little of that has to do with cheap unskilled labour.
Very few have ever been built. I know of 3. One in France, One in Russia, and One in Canada. I used to live pretty close to the one in Canada in Nova Scotia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Royal_Generating_Station
Someone should have told this to the Toronto police during the G8.
Might have saved a few burned out cop cars.
Too bad it would also be very expensive, and you already gave all your money to Bankers and Wall Street. A wise and sound decision indeed.
If North Korea makes military robots, they are all going to look like Kim Jon'il.
Kimbots Transform!
Ya before I posted I checked nVidia to check to see if they had a technology like that. I didn't see it. I did see the 3D stuff, but nothing uses or supports that yet to my knowlege.
As for Eyefinity, it only allows for 3 rather than 2 monitors to be set up, except for one model of card that does allow for 6 (All display port).
ATI 1950Pro.
I believe you might be able to on old XP drivers, but not on Vista or 7. (I am running Vista)
If you google around, it is a big problem with no solution apparently.
In a Word, Vista.
When I build my last computer, Vista had just come out. I was left with a very crappy decision.
Buy a copy of XP, older technology that won't be supported. Or buy Vista, by all accounts very much a buggy, and a real bitch to get any drivers to run properly. Supposedly the 64-bit edition was even WORSE. This was like the first year of the Vista release, bad timing I know, but I needed a computer.
I also didn't want to run Linux as I wanted to play computer games.
So I took what I thought was the lesser of evils and bought Vista 32-bit for compatibility. All told it has worked pretty good.
I tried to get a free upgrade MS was offering at one point to 64-bit Vista, but was told this was only for "Retail" and not "OEM" so I was SOL.
I am certainly not buying anything new. When I build a new computer in the next couple of years hopefully I have better choices available to me than I did the last time. By all account Win7 seems to be ok, but who knows what will be the OS flavor of the day when it comes time to build again...
If he doesn't like it, tell him to drive a cab for a living then.
Putting up with stupid people who don't agree with you is a pretty big part of being a Scientist I think.
Also not everything is about speed or horsepower but capability.
I would buy the ATI card all things being equal for the "Eyefinity" technology alone.
It would let me use 3 monitors not just 2 (tho one needs to be a special new one with a "display port" apparently)
It would also let me set different resolutions on my different monitors.
With my current setup I would likely have HD 1080 resolution set on my 37" HD TV DVI-HDMI 16:9 connection, and then run my 4:3 normal LCD monitors at a more usable resolution.
With my current video card I have to set my TV basically at 720p because it is the highest supported resolution between both TV and Monitor, and they have to be the same but due to different aspect ratios this is problematic.
Eyefinity would change that, and that's a pretty big deal to me. To my knowlege the Geforce cards cannot do it.
I would even go cheaper and get a 5750 or 5770 in the 125-150$ range as they still have that technology even in the lower range cards.
Fine. Just ban it like Pakistan. Problem solved.
Its not like you have a problem censoring things eh?
I did my research in approximately 5 minutes.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
USA Average Broadband Speed less than 10MB/s and Population Density of 32 People/Km squared.
Finland Average Broadband Speed greater than 20MB/s and Population Density of 16 People/Km squared.
So stop the "Awww wahhh we are a big country and spread out" excuses already"!
Finland has a population that is TWICE as sparse as the USA, yet has average broadband speeds that are TWICE as fast.
You suck.
I heard on the CBC news last week that they did some looking into Canada's No Cal list. The main points were:
1) Since its inception years ago, only 72,000$ in fines have been laid in all of Canada for violators of the No Call List.
2) Of the 72,000$ in fines, only 250$ has ever been collected.
That's right. Two Hundred and Fifty dollars in grand total.
Disgrace.
When I am playing WOW with a buddy sitting next to me, it makes sense to do this on a server, you know because there are a massive amount of other players also playing.
When I am playing 2 player Co-op SC2 against computer AI, it seems rather stupid to have to connect to the internet in order to accomplish this feat. Exactly why are we connecting in order to connect, I mean he is siting there a few feet away connected to my very own LAN. Yet I have to have an ISP, modems, internet connection, transmit to some server who knows where, sign on, have an account, pay for all of that, all for what? DRM.
Don't try and makes a reasoned argument if you don't have one. It is lame (having no LAN that is).
That said, I will still buy it, and play it. However that move does stick in my craw a bit. I'll let it go, however if that bar keeps moving in that sort of screw you direction, even Blizzard can wear out its welcome over time.
Standard foundations would help also.
Two examples. I got caught on the fringe twice which caused me problems.
My first year University, they assumed everyone had intro high school calculus. Not only did I not have it, it wasn't even offered at my high school should I even wanted to take it. This had everything to do with there being 13 grades in Ontario, and 12 in Nova Scotia (Canada). The year AFTER I graduated it became mandatory curriculum in my high school (well mandatory in that the school has to at least offer the course). In any event, considering everyone in the class had taken calculus, and I needing calculus as a requirement of a CS degree had to take it. It was not an easy go for me. I was always behind, and by the time I learned the fundamentals of one thing, the class would have already progressed to something else. I did have a wonderfully understanding professor who gave me lots of extra help, but in the end I think she passed me just because she felt sorry for my frustration.
My second year University they changed programming languages from Pascal to C. The second year CS class was the weeder class, and not only did I have to try and absorb the new programming concepts, but also learn from scratch a whole new language syntax. While in the grand scheme of things, one has to be ready to learn new languages its true, but at such a juncture in my degree it really sucked (though in the end was likely helpful, but didn't help my performance at the time any).
Anyway while I didn't cheat I can see in those circumstances why students would, particularly when grades count towards grad or professional school, and the cost to attend is so great. In the end I think I got a 55% in Calculus, which was enough to get credit and move on, and I ended up dropping CS201a my second year changing majors to Environmental Science for a brief stint, until I woke up and just took it again the following year to pass it easily.
I would agree with your list above as well. There are really great Professors out there, but for everyone of them, I bet there are two lazy ones that breed lazy students.
On a humorous note, great accomplished professors also prevent cheating. For example as an elective my first year I took Classical History 100 for kicks. Just something I was interested in, and needed a credit that wasn't CS. Anyway I had to write a paper, and I submitted my idea and topic to the professor for approval, which I got. I didn't bother to do too much research on the topic, it was more of just an idea (it was a 100-level class so sue me). Anyway when I finally got around to going to the library and doing research on this particular topic I found I think 5 specific books, 4 of which were written personally my my professor. I remember thinking to myself, "Well I guess I'm not plagiarizing anything on this one!" :)
Agreed. I am aware of a large corporate DB design project that actually plans to denormalize to increase performance, as how the primary searches are done currently is much slower.
I was recently at a design workshop for a very large database. They were looking to denormalize, ALOT. I know went I took CompSci it was all about normalization, however in this case it made sense. (They called it flattening)
In any case the DB was terribly complex, with many of those normalized tables not really being used anyway. Even with my background I agreed with what they are doing, with the only cravat being to be careful how the output was implemented. That is to say, when a user gets say 10-12 fields to deal with it is manageable, outputting like 30-40 fields to a table is just cumbersome to the user. All the design should be hidden anyway, and the user should only see what they need to see.
Anyway I just thought it was neat to see a large corporate DB go "backwards" and denormalize. Funny thing is I bet if I was interviewing for a job there a year ago, and designed some tables like that in the interview written component, I would likely get a negative score, as most are educated to normalize, normalize, normalize... :)
or how the hell are you Director of IT without any background in DB design.
Anyone who has taken the first couple years of a Computer Science degree, should have a handful of expensive books on their bookshelf collecting dust.
Also if your looking for a "New" book, you are interested in particular implementation of modern software. Get My/MS SQL for dummies or something. The basic principles of how to design optimal relational databases hasn't changed all that much in the past decade that I am aware of.
About the only thing that has changed other than the software with some nice new tools, is scale in that Databases are continually getting larger over time, which may influence how you design things for optimal performance depending on what/how you use your DB for. Modern Databases also allow for more than just text and numbers now, and you can now store things like media and various other constructs, how these are organized may have more a function of the software you are using, and design may impinge upon application design which is something else entirely.
Also the type of book you need depends on the type of DB you plan on designing as well. My advice is to take some DB courses at your local university or online. If you don't have the prerequisites for those, I would argue you have no business trying to do this work yourself, and to hire a Computer Science Grad. They are a dime a dozen now, and will likely be happy just to have a job in his field when he graduates.
Not true.
There are plenty of concrete roads in Canada. I remember a large one going in Quebec. You have to treat it for the conditions, just like everything. The same reason road beds are way thicker in colder climates to fight frost.
http://www.cement.ca/index.php/en/Highways/Building_Sustainable_Highways_in_Canada.html
The problem is Concrete is 2x the price to construct. Industry points out it lasts longer, but project costs trump long term stuff many times.
I would also bet that the CO concrete is even more expensive. So when your a Municipality and Asphalt costs 10,000$/Km and CO Concrete costs 40,000$/Km it would be a hard sell for any kind of meaningful project.
I can see some big city doing it in limited areas, as a PR campaign and posting signs all over the place bragging about it. It also likely has limited availability, so not all contractors would be able to bid. Largest cost for Aggregates is transportation also, which would also inflate the price. I guess it really depends on what exactly is involved in turning normal cement into CO cement. Also another factor would be the ability to make it at scale that's useful, if you can only make small amounts its not much good, which would also make it more expensive.
So ya, in summary. $$$.