Personally, I like iTunes. It automatically backs up my iPhone, syncs all of my pictures/calendar/entries/music/etc without having to do anything other than plug it in. Any music in my library with a given star rating or greater is automatically synced, how much easier could it get? It also does a pretty good job of organizing my music folders, so I don't have to do it manually. It can even play through wifi connected speakers quite easily. I've had other MP3 players and for me, dealing with "disk mode" is slow and inefficient. Browsing/ copying/moving/deleting between multiple folder structures takes more effort than a single click to mark music as good while I'm listening on my laptop. I'll admit that I've been frustrated by the lack of formats or automatic transcoding, but I doubt the average person cares as the device will play all of their legitimately and illegally downloaded music. I doubt the average person bothers with FLAC or watches movies on their phone.
iPods became popular because the vast majority of people who aren't overly computer literate find them easier to use as a whole.
Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that total gas taxes and fees in the US amounted to about $29 billion in 2008. Presumably the actual cost per mile is closer to what you'd pay on a toll road. For extra fun you could add in public health and pollution costs, as automobiles are extraordinarily dangerous and dirty.
So, it's almost definitely a communist style subsidy.
The "Financial Services Modernization Act" of 1999 is mostly to blame for our current mess. If we hadn't allowed banks to merge into such large conglomerates, none of them would have been "too big to fail" and the bailouts would not have been considered.
When foreign based companies are allowed to lobby congress and achieve a very high rate of return on their lobbying dollars, there's no hope for the people.
One of the worst problems with the Gateway stores is that they couldn't fix your computer, they could only ship it to be fixed, even if it just needed a disk swapped. One of the best features of the Apple store is that you can have your hardware fixed relatively quickly. If they're out of the part, you might have to get it the next day.
If MS can't fix any of the hardware they sell on site, even if it's from another vendor, it's going to hurt their reputation and make people hate the stores.
According to Graham, programming is exactly like painting so you don't have to plan anything. What is there to discuss in a meeting? Your clients can only interfere with your artistic vision, they can't understand what they want until they've viewed your complete masterpiece.
During my brief 10 years as a programmer, I've seen time and time again that a well planned meeting with an agenda almost always eliminates more work than it takes to have the meeting. It's important to spend time prior to the meeting to plan what needs to be talked about. If interrupting your work is an issue, then you need to have your meetings at a time when you're already forced to lose focus, so as before you begin work or bordering lunch.
The Apple stores provide for people's needs. This is why the Apple store is profitable. You can buy a computer and have it fixed there with minimal delays (they fix it or replace it in store instead of waiting for round trip shipping to Taiwan). If your XBox is broken, you should be able to take it to a Microsoft store and have it fixed or replaced within 24 hours. They need to hire knowledgeable attractive employees who don't come off like shady car salesmen. All products must be priced similarly to their cheapest vendors.
Gateway's stores didn't fix computers (they'd ship them somewhere and you'd have to wait) and you couldn't even walk out with one because they didn't carry any stock. If Microsoft's stores fail to offer any utility to people other than a chance to look at the products, they will fail.
Our society will most certainly fall apart when machines can harvest our crops, weave our clothes, wash dishes, clean floors, launder clothing, smash rocks, mine tunnels without shovels, deliver our news, and water our lawns.
What will the stupid people do when these jobs are unavailable?
The device probably has its own temperature compensated real time clock. It likely doesn't deviate by more than a couple seconds between the 6 month intervals when it would be corrected by syncing with the progressive servers.
You're right that this won't necessarily have the intended consequences. Insurance costs of about $0.20/mile were one of the main reasons I stopped owning a car.
Due to expensive insurance, I switched purely to bicycle, walking, and rarely a taxi or public transit, reducing my carbon output.
Either that or the FBI could have bothered to check the phone book for the names and addresses of wanted terrorists that they knew to be living in the US.
Zabbix allows you to build some fairly powerful rulesets and chains of overrides using its web gui. It's not perfect, but it keeps improving and the attitude of the developers is friendly unlike some of the other projects.
Firefox's plugins are what make it unstable. Flash is by far the worst. If you install flashblock or simply remove flash entirely, it will crash a lot less.
The trip costs $19 and takes a little over an hour.
I don't think halving the trip time is a compelling reason to spend $27B, apparently people are willing to spend far more than an hour in traffic to avoid the existing train route.
Ordering the parts and assembling them is the easy part.
You're failing to account for the time spent tracking down issues such as hardware conflicts or other issues. The best case scenario is that you have a spare of every part and your crashes are frequent enough to tell if you fixed the problem.
I use my computer for work, so it's very worthwhile to pay a little extra to be able to send the entire thing back when it starts locking up once every couple days.
Foxit does not yet support JetForm/LiveCycle based PDFs. Neither does OSX's Preview.
I wish people would stop using LiveCycle to produce PDFs, from what I can tell the format is not documented in the PDF ISO specification. Additionally, the newer format does not seem to provide any features that were not previously available in PDF. One can only speculate that it was done out of laziness or to thwart competition after they opened the format.
Milspec can make anything absurdly expensive to produce. This is important when you're building nuclear weapons where failures are very expensive.
It's not so expensive when the cost of one breaking is to simply replace it with another practically free device. Surely the rugged cases they are in will protect them from water and shock.
If you've got a phone with GPS, they know where you are and that you're still waiting for them. Calling for a pickup is problematic as you can only call a single cab company at a time and that particular cab company may not have a cab near you. The same issues exist with the iphone app, as it can at best only interface with a single cab company's dispatch. This works fine for smaller cities which only have a couple taxi companies, but is very difficult with larger cities.
It's beneficial for the cab drivers as may not need to spend nearly as long looking for a fare (sometimes hours) and beneficial for the rider as they may be able to get a cab which otherwise would have driven by them empty half a block away. There are no guarantees on either end, but providing a more efficient means of connecting cabs with fares should help reduce the amount of time cabs travel around empty.
How about a method for electronically hailing a cab?
Part of the inefficiency taxis is that they drive around looking for fares, while interested riders may be waiting nearby but out of visual range.
Some method of being able to hail a cab from a cel phone with built in GPS would improve the ability of cabs and customers to find each other. The technology should be fairly easy to set up, simply requiring smartphones on both the passenger and driver end and at least a couple of servers to manage the information. Costs could be paid for with advertisements or very small fees from participants.
The biggest barrier to such a system is critical mass, which would be easy to obtain if the city simply picked an official provider of such a system.
A similar thing happened to my coworker. His hard drive failed 2 months out of warranty. Apple replaced it entirely free, no charge for parts or labor. He was able to pick it up within 24 hours of dropping it off.
My coworker had a laptop from Toshiba which failed 2 days after purchase, it took 2 weeks to replace the hard drive.
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Personally, I like iTunes. It automatically backs up my iPhone, syncs all of my pictures/calendar/entries/music/etc without having to do anything other than plug it in. Any music in my library with a given star rating or greater is automatically synced, how much easier could it get? It also does a pretty good job of organizing my music folders, so I don't have to do it manually. It can even play through wifi connected speakers quite easily. I've had other MP3 players and for me, dealing with "disk mode" is slow and inefficient. Browsing/ copying/moving/deleting between multiple folder structures takes more effort than a single click to mark music as good while I'm listening on my laptop. I'll admit that I've been frustrated by the lack of formats or automatic transcoding, but I doubt the average person cares as the device will play all of their legitimately and illegally downloaded music. I doubt the average person bothers with FLAC or watches movies on their phone.
iPods became popular because the vast majority of people who aren't overly computer literate find them easier to use as a whole.
Assuming we replant, isn't this the case now with products that come from trees?
Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that total gas taxes and fees in the US amounted to about $29 billion in 2008. Presumably the actual cost per mile is closer to what you'd pay on a toll road. For extra fun you could add in public health and pollution costs, as automobiles are extraordinarily dangerous and dirty.
So, it's almost definitely a communist style subsidy.
This would be an amazing thing in the US, we could use it to monitor our elected officials to know who they're meeting with to prevent corruption.
The "Financial Services Modernization Act" of 1999 is mostly to blame for our current mess. If we hadn't allowed banks to merge into such large conglomerates, none of them would have been "too big to fail" and the bailouts would not have been considered.
When foreign based companies are allowed to lobby congress and achieve a very high rate of return on their lobbying dollars, there's no hope for the people.
One of the worst problems with the Gateway stores is that they couldn't fix your computer, they could only ship it to be fixed, even if it just needed a disk swapped. One of the best features of the Apple store is that you can have your hardware fixed relatively quickly. If they're out of the part, you might have to get it the next day.
If MS can't fix any of the hardware they sell on site, even if it's from another vendor, it's going to hurt their reputation and make people hate the stores.
According to Graham, programming is exactly like painting so you don't have to plan anything. What is there to discuss in a meeting? Your clients can only interfere with your artistic vision, they can't understand what they want until they've viewed your complete masterpiece.
During my brief 10 years as a programmer, I've seen time and time again that a well planned meeting with an agenda almost always eliminates more work than it takes to have the meeting. It's important to spend time prior to the meeting to plan what needs to be talked about. If interrupting your work is an issue, then you need to have your meetings at a time when you're already forced to lose focus, so as before you begin work or bordering lunch.
The Apple stores provide for people's needs. This is why the Apple store is profitable. You can buy a computer and have it fixed there with minimal delays (they fix it or replace it in store instead of waiting for round trip shipping to Taiwan). If your XBox is broken, you should be able to take it to a Microsoft store and have it fixed or replaced within 24 hours. They need to hire knowledgeable attractive employees who don't come off like shady car salesmen. All products must be priced similarly to their cheapest vendors.
Gateway's stores didn't fix computers (they'd ship them somewhere and you'd have to wait) and you couldn't even walk out with one because they didn't carry any stock. If Microsoft's stores fail to offer any utility to people other than a chance to look at the products, they will fail.
Our society will most certainly fall apart when machines can harvest our crops, weave our clothes, wash dishes, clean floors, launder clothing, smash rocks, mine tunnels without shovels, deliver our news, and water our lawns.
What will the stupid people do when these jobs are unavailable?
The device probably has its own temperature compensated real time clock. It likely doesn't deviate by more than a couple seconds between the 6 month intervals when it would be corrected by syncing with the progressive servers.
You're right that this won't necessarily have the intended consequences. Insurance costs of about $0.20/mile were one of the main reasons I stopped owning a car.
Due to expensive insurance, I switched purely to bicycle, walking, and rarely a taxi or public transit, reducing my carbon output.
Either that or the FBI could have bothered to check the phone book for the names and addresses of wanted terrorists that they knew to be living in the US.
Doesn't the radio frequency request need to reach the RFID chip in order for it to send a signal back out?
Zabbix allows you to build some fairly powerful rulesets and chains of overrides using its web gui. It's not perfect, but it keeps improving and the attitude of the developers is friendly unlike some of the other projects.
Firefox's plugins are what make it unstable. Flash is by far the worst. If you install flashblock or simply remove flash entirely, it will crash a lot less.
The trip costs $19 and takes a little over an hour.
I don't think halving the trip time is a compelling reason to spend $27B, apparently people are willing to spend far more than an hour in traffic to avoid the existing train route.
Ordering the parts and assembling them is the easy part.
You're failing to account for the time spent tracking down issues such as hardware conflicts or other issues. The best case scenario is that you have a spare of every part and your crashes are frequent enough to tell if you fixed the problem.
I use my computer for work, so it's very worthwhile to pay a little extra to be able to send the entire thing back when it starts locking up once every couple days.
If it's like anything else half implemented in PHP (such as exceptions), it will most likely result in: Unknown Error At Line 0 of Unknown
And filing a ticket to ask that said error be made more descriptive will be angrily closed with a resolution of "that's just the way it is"
However, due to government provided monopolies given because businesses are allowed to lobby the government, this doesn't happen.
The best solution is probably to strip the cable and phone providers of its guaranteed monopoly and let other businesses compete.
Foxit does not yet support JetForm/LiveCycle based PDFs. Neither does OSX's Preview.
I wish people would stop using LiveCycle to produce PDFs, from what I can tell the format is not documented in the PDF ISO specification. Additionally, the newer format does not seem to provide any features that were not previously available in PDF. One can only speculate that it was done out of laziness or to thwart competition after they opened the format.
Milspec can make anything absurdly expensive to produce. This is important when you're building nuclear weapons where failures are very expensive.
It's not so expensive when the cost of one breaking is to simply replace it with another practically free device. Surely the rugged cases they are in will protect them from water and shock.
Most of the suburban residents I know take the Metra to work, which doesn't go very fast, but is far faster and easier than driving.
You're right that high speed rail simply doesn't make any sense for work commutes.
If you've got a phone with GPS, they know where you are and that you're still waiting for them. Calling for a pickup is problematic as you can only call a single cab company at a time and that particular cab company may not have a cab near you. The same issues exist with the iphone app, as it can at best only interface with a single cab company's dispatch. This works fine for smaller cities which only have a couple taxi companies, but is very difficult with larger cities.
It's beneficial for the cab drivers as may not need to spend nearly as long looking for a fare (sometimes hours) and beneficial for the rider as they may be able to get a cab which otherwise would have driven by them empty half a block away. There are no guarantees on either end, but providing a more efficient means of connecting cabs with fares should help reduce the amount of time cabs travel around empty.
How about a method for electronically hailing a cab?
Part of the inefficiency taxis is that they drive around looking for fares, while interested riders may be waiting nearby but out of visual range.
Some method of being able to hail a cab from a cel phone with built in GPS would improve the ability of cabs and customers to find each other. The technology should be fairly easy to set up, simply requiring smartphones on both the passenger and driver end and at least a couple of servers to manage the information. Costs could be paid for with advertisements or very small fees from participants.
The biggest barrier to such a system is critical mass, which would be easy to obtain if the city simply picked an official provider of such a system.
A similar thing happened to my coworker. His hard drive failed 2 months out of warranty. Apple replaced it entirely free, no charge for parts or labor. He was able to pick it up within 24 hours of dropping it off.
My coworker had a laptop from Toshiba which failed 2 days after purchase, it took 2 weeks to replace the hard drive.