You get paid.5 cents per hour if only one person buys your software; in that case perhaps you should consider writing software for which there is more demand. Every person who buys raises your hourly rate.
To make the most money, you don't set the price according to the cost of your labor and capital; instead you set the price according to demand, at the optimal part of the demand curve where lowering the price further wouldn't encourage enough people to buy to make up for the lost revenue. This is Econ 101 here.
What I am saying is that the optimal price is far below the current price. And since software costs practically nothing to distribute, that low price would be feasible if only there was a way to take the payments.
This is why the Internet needs a workable micropayment scheme. $25 is far too high a price for software of the complexity you describe; $.25 is more like it. If people could send you a quarter hassle-free and without minimum per-transaction overhead eating your profits alive, it wouldn't even be worth their time to try and search for a crack. You could be earning $150 in a day (your 600 hits figure) instead of $25 once in a blue moon.
What about XCast? Seems perfect for groups around the size of a typical torrent, and if the torrent gets too large you can just use multiple XCast groups because the number of groups is unrestricted. Even if you need many groups you'll still save a ton of bandwidth compared to unicast.
Seems to me like the multicast people have been going about it the wrong way all these years, with tons of state inside the network. What happened to the dumb network philosophy? A stateless protocol like XCast is what is needed. I don't know if it can help with the billing problem, but surely the fact that each packet lists all of its destinations can't hurt.
Garbage collection is only one part of what makes a language like Java safe, and Objective-C doesn't have any of the other parts. Unless they plan to also implement array bounds checking and restrict pointer casts and arithmetic, this new Objective-C will happily stomp all over your garbage-collected memory, producing bugs just as weird and security holes just as bad as before.
Without the full safety package, the benefits of garbage collection start to look rather meager if one discounts convenience. Personally I think one shouldn't. Saying garbage collection doesn't save effort is ridiculous. Producing optimized code isn't easier with garbage collection, but producing slow code is. Meaning that the routine majority of your coding gets done sooner and you can focus your effort on the parts that actually need to be fast.
Also, a rewinding debugger. With that and DTrace and garbage collection, maybe it's time I tried XCode again. I guess Apple's realized that Visual Studio is the best thing Microsoft has going, and if they can better it they'll truly have the superior platform.
The D-pads on both of my 360 wireless controllers work so badly that one might call them defective. Even navigating menus with them is hard; they frequently don't respond even when pressed all the way to hitting the plastic. I believe there has been a quality control issue with the wireless controller D-pads, and this is the reason for some of the bad reviews. Many people probably didn't notice the D-pad problems before because few games use it much. As soon as I can find a Torx T9 security driver (what's wrong with phillips, anyway?) I'm going to take mine apart and see if I can shim them or sand them down or something.
In fact, OpenGL ES is also used in the PS3, which is hardly the lowest common denominator of graphics. Turns out that OpenGL ES mostly removes all the obsolete and irrelevant cruft that OpenGL has, while keeping the important modern stuff like shaders. It provides a simpler, more streamlined interface that is more appropriate for pushing polygons on modern hardware in both the low-end and the high-end.
Let's run the numbers. Flash lifetimes are on the order of 100,000 write cycles, and to write over an entire 4GB card takes over 10 minutes. 10 minutes * 100,000 = over 2 years of 24/7 use! Even if the card was somehow defective and had its life cut by 1/10, it would take 80 days to find out. You could try writing to one small section of the card but you would have to thwart the wear leveling algorithms employed by the cards and readers, and you wouldn't be testing the whole card.
Let's look at a realistic usage scenario. Say you are a prolific photographer and end up overwriting your 4GB card once every day on average. With the defective 10,000 cycles card, it would still last 27 years of daily use. For 100,000 cycles, that's 2.7 centuries. Furthermore, as I understand it, a failure of Flash is a failure to erase, leaving your data intact. Is it really any wonder that nobody cares about Flash durability?
Interesting... so how does it tell anything about its absolute position? It can tell whether it's pointing at or near the sensor bar, but that doesn't help it determine whether it's near the floor or the ceiling, or right or left of center. It wouldn't even be able to distinguish being far away from being left or right of the TV, since both cases would cause the LEDs to appear closer together.
And how could this thing possibly be calibrated for a shooting game like Duck Hunt? I'll bet it won't be accurate enough for "iron sights" aiming à la the NES Zapper so you will have to use an onscreen crosshair. And it will no longer work to put your gun 1" from the TV (cheating 10-year-olds everywhere will be sorely disappointed).
Personally I was hoping Nintendo would do something really innovative with the sensing, like use trilateration with sound or radio waves to determine the controller's absolute position. Now *that* would be seriously cool.
The system talked about in the article does not spoof tracking systems; it is a real offensive laser weapon that destroys targets by application of heat. In its previous incarnation it has successfully destroyed mortar rounds and missiles (cool video). I believe that normally it works by detonating the warhead carried by the missile/mortar as opposed to causing structural failure, and it requires a second or so of precise tracking for heat to build up in the target, so a brief stray hit to an aircraft probably wouldn't even be noticable. A bigger worry would probably be blinding people who are staring at the target. Reflected infrared radiation could be intense (especially a chance specular reflection), and since infrared is invisible there's no blink reflex.
I believe you are putting words in Apple's mouth here. Do you have any references to back up your statement of their opinion? The web is not for passive consumption like TV, it is interactive. It has been a two-way medium from the start. The very first web browser was in fact a combination browser and editor. So I don't believe it is a reasonable design decision to exclude authoring tools from a browser.
Well, even if it was all ColdFusion it would hardly be a great case study. Myspace is notorious for slowness and downtime. Just today I got several random timeout errors browsing around it.
They don't claim to be unbiased. They claim to strive for the absence of bias, which is true and laudable.
The problem with most criticisms of Wikipedia is that they predict a turning point followed by catastrophe. But the things people predict will bring it down aren't novel. Wikipedia has had every problem people complain about for years now, and they're all being dealt with constantly. If anything catastrophic was going to be triggered by increasing popularity it would have happened already, before Wikipedia became one of the top 20 most visited websites in the world.
Wikipedia has been around long enough to prove it can handle success. There is no catastrophe waiting to bring it down. Like it or not, it will continue to exist in its present form.
The information on Wikipedia is useful not because it is correct, but because it reflects what people think. Even paragraphs which have little basis in reality reflect the actual beliefs of somebody somewhere. Sometimes, figuring out what people think is just as important as learning the truth.
Global high score lists are depressing, because even if you're good your best score is likely orders of magnitude smaller than the global best by some obsessed guy whose entire life is spent playing the game. What would be better is private high score lists. The machines could identify you with a card and show the high scores of your friends, or your hometown, your age group, people with your last name, whatever. So you could realistically be the king of your own little category, with a little dedication. That's far better motivation than being #1288 on the global high score list.
I don't understand this, because we don't need "technical data". Breaking the DRM is the easy part; the hard part is avoiding the lawyers. What we need is for breaking the DRM to be legal!
The fact is, from a technical perspective, DRM doesn't work. It can't work. There is no need to outlaw it because it is inherently flawed as a concept; as long as it is legal to break it, it will be broken. However, we must do more than simply repeal the wrongheaded DRM laws already in existence. DRM can also be given legal protection implicitly through laws not originally designed for that purpose. For example, a patented DRM scheme cannot be legally implemented without permission, and contract law provides the means to control access to the patents. At the very least, patent law must also be reformed if we wish to fully prevent "trivial-yet-illegal-to-break" DRM schemes.
Educating all the bad programmers in the world has always been a stupid idea. It's like saying we should stop spammers by teaching people not to click on their links, or eliminate viruses by teaching people not to open suspicious attachments, or bring about world peace by all holding hands and singing "Kumbaya". It might help just a little, but it won't solve the problem. It didn't before, it isn't now, and if you can't see the future trend, you must have some sort of learning disability.
At some point, when an entire population of users spends years using a tool wrong, you have to stop blaming the users and start fixing the tools.
Re:Oh boy...
on
Earth Sandwich
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It uses longitude and latitude, which assume the Earth is a sphere.
Not true: there are actually several types of latitude and longitude. The most common type (used by most maps) is Geodetic latitude and longitude, which does take into account the oblate shape of the Earth.
What you are talking about would be geocentric latitude and longitude; in reality pretty much everybody prefers and uses geodetic.
There are a lot of interesting problems in the area of defining coordinate systems for maps and navigation. Reading about WGS84 would be a good place to start learning more.
IPv6 includes robust support for renumbering; i.e. changing the IP addresses of whole swaths of a network. Your address will be assigned by DHCP and you can change it regularly if you want. In fact, since there are so many more IPv6 addresses, you're likely to receive a large block of public addresses you can switch around in, instead of having one public IP address that perma-identifies your entire network.
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You get paid .5 cents per hour if only one person buys your software; in that case perhaps you should consider writing software for which there is more demand. Every person who buys raises your hourly rate.
To make the most money, you don't set the price according to the cost of your labor and capital; instead you set the price according to demand, at the optimal part of the demand curve where lowering the price further wouldn't encourage enough people to buy to make up for the lost revenue. This is Econ 101 here.
What I am saying is that the optimal price is far below the current price. And since software costs practically nothing to distribute, that low price would be feasible if only there was a way to take the payments.
This is why the Internet needs a workable micropayment scheme. $25 is far too high a price for software of the complexity you describe; $.25 is more like it. If people could send you a quarter hassle-free and without minimum per-transaction overhead eating your profits alive, it wouldn't even be worth their time to try and search for a crack. You could be earning $150 in a day (your 600 hits figure) instead of $25 once in a blue moon.
What about XCast? Seems perfect for groups around the size of a typical torrent, and if the torrent gets too large you can just use multiple XCast groups because the number of groups is unrestricted. Even if you need many groups you'll still save a ton of bandwidth compared to unicast.
Seems to me like the multicast people have been going about it the wrong way all these years, with tons of state inside the network. What happened to the dumb network philosophy? A stateless protocol like XCast is what is needed. I don't know if it can help with the billing problem, but surely the fact that each packet lists all of its destinations can't hurt.
Garbage collection is only one part of what makes a language like Java safe, and Objective-C doesn't have any of the other parts. Unless they plan to also implement array bounds checking and restrict pointer casts and arithmetic, this new Objective-C will happily stomp all over your garbage-collected memory, producing bugs just as weird and security holes just as bad as before. Without the full safety package, the benefits of garbage collection start to look rather meager if one discounts convenience. Personally I think one shouldn't. Saying garbage collection doesn't save effort is ridiculous. Producing optimized code isn't easier with garbage collection, but producing slow code is. Meaning that the routine majority of your coding gets done sooner and you can focus your effort on the parts that actually need to be fast.
Also, a rewinding debugger. With that and DTrace and garbage collection, maybe it's time I tried XCode again. I guess Apple's realized that Visual Studio is the best thing Microsoft has going, and if they can better it they'll truly have the superior platform.
The D-pads on both of my 360 wireless controllers work so badly that one might call them defective. Even navigating menus with them is hard; they frequently don't respond even when pressed all the way to hitting the plastic. I believe there has been a quality control issue with the wireless controller D-pads, and this is the reason for some of the bad reviews. Many people probably didn't notice the D-pad problems before because few games use it much. As soon as I can find a Torx T9 security driver (what's wrong with phillips, anyway?) I'm going to take mine apart and see if I can shim them or sand them down or something.
In fact, OpenGL ES is also used in the PS3, which is hardly the lowest common denominator of graphics. Turns out that OpenGL ES mostly removes all the obsolete and irrelevant cruft that OpenGL has, while keeping the important modern stuff like shaders. It provides a simpler, more streamlined interface that is more appropriate for pushing polygons on modern hardware in both the low-end and the high-end.
Let's run the numbers. Flash lifetimes are on the order of 100,000 write cycles, and to write over an entire 4GB card takes over 10 minutes. 10 minutes * 100,000 = over 2 years of 24/7 use! Even if the card was somehow defective and had its life cut by 1/10, it would take 80 days to find out. You could try writing to one small section of the card but you would have to thwart the wear leveling algorithms employed by the cards and readers, and you wouldn't be testing the whole card.
Let's look at a realistic usage scenario. Say you are a prolific photographer and end up overwriting your 4GB card once every day on average. With the defective 10,000 cycles card, it would still last 27 years of daily use. For 100,000 cycles, that's 2.7 centuries. Furthermore, as I understand it, a failure of Flash is a failure to erase, leaving your data intact. Is it really any wonder that nobody cares about Flash durability?
Interesting... so how does it tell anything about its absolute position? It can tell whether it's pointing at or near the sensor bar, but that doesn't help it determine whether it's near the floor or the ceiling, or right or left of center. It wouldn't even be able to distinguish being far away from being left or right of the TV, since both cases would cause the LEDs to appear closer together.
And how could this thing possibly be calibrated for a shooting game like Duck Hunt? I'll bet it won't be accurate enough for "iron sights" aiming à la the NES Zapper so you will have to use an onscreen crosshair. And it will no longer work to put your gun 1" from the TV (cheating 10-year-olds everywhere will be sorely disappointed).
Personally I was hoping Nintendo would do something really innovative with the sensing, like use trilateration with sound or radio waves to determine the controller's absolute position. Now *that* would be seriously cool.
The system talked about in the article does not spoof tracking systems; it is a real offensive laser weapon that destroys targets by application of heat. In its previous incarnation it has successfully destroyed mortar rounds and missiles (cool video). I believe that normally it works by detonating the warhead carried by the missile/mortar as opposed to causing structural failure, and it requires a second or so of precise tracking for heat to build up in the target, so a brief stray hit to an aircraft probably wouldn't even be noticable. A bigger worry would probably be blinding people who are staring at the target. Reflected infrared radiation could be intense (especially a chance specular reflection), and since infrared is invisible there's no blink reflex.
I believe you are putting words in Apple's mouth here. Do you have any references to back up your statement of their opinion? The web is not for passive consumption like TV, it is interactive. It has been a two-way medium from the start. The very first web browser was in fact a combination browser and editor. So I don't believe it is a reasonable design decision to exclude authoring tools from a browser.
Well, even if it was all ColdFusion it would hardly be a great case study. Myspace is notorious for slowness and downtime. Just today I got several random timeout errors browsing around it.
The problem with most criticisms of Wikipedia is that they predict a turning point followed by catastrophe. But the things people predict will bring it down aren't novel. Wikipedia has had every problem people complain about for years now, and they're all being dealt with constantly. If anything catastrophic was going to be triggered by increasing popularity it would have happened already, before Wikipedia became one of the top 20 most visited websites in the world.
Wikipedia has been around long enough to prove it can handle success. There is no catastrophe waiting to bring it down. Like it or not, it will continue to exist in its present form.
The information on Wikipedia is useful not because it is correct, but because it reflects what people think. Even paragraphs which have little basis in reality reflect the actual beliefs of somebody somewhere. Sometimes, figuring out what people think is just as important as learning the truth.
Global high score lists are depressing, because even if you're good your best score is likely orders of magnitude smaller than the global best by some obsessed guy whose entire life is spent playing the game. What would be better is private high score lists. The machines could identify you with a card and show the high scores of your friends, or your hometown, your age group, people with your last name, whatever. So you could realistically be the king of your own little category, with a little dedication. That's far better motivation than being #1288 on the global high score list.
I don't understand this, because we don't need "technical data". Breaking the DRM is the easy part; the hard part is avoiding the lawyers. What we need is for breaking the DRM to be legal!
The fact is, from a technical perspective, DRM doesn't work. It can't work. There is no need to outlaw it because it is inherently flawed as a concept; as long as it is legal to break it, it will be broken. However, we must do more than simply repeal the wrongheaded DRM laws already in existence. DRM can also be given legal protection implicitly through laws not originally designed for that purpose. For example, a patented DRM scheme cannot be legally implemented without permission, and contract law provides the means to control access to the patents. At the very least, patent law must also be reformed if we wish to fully prevent "trivial-yet-illegal-to-break" DRM schemes.
Educating all the bad programmers in the world has always been a stupid idea. It's like saying we should stop spammers by teaching people not to click on their links, or eliminate viruses by teaching people not to open suspicious attachments, or bring about world peace by all holding hands and singing "Kumbaya". It might help just a little, but it won't solve the problem. It didn't before, it isn't now, and if you can't see the future trend, you must have some sort of learning disability.
At some point, when an entire population of users spends years using a tool wrong, you have to stop blaming the users and start fixing the tools.
It uses longitude and latitude, which assume the Earth is a sphere.
Not true: there are actually several types of latitude and longitude. The most common type (used by most maps) is Geodetic latitude and longitude, which does take into account the oblate shape of the Earth. What you are talking about would be geocentric latitude and longitude; in reality pretty much everybody prefers and uses geodetic.
There are a lot of interesting problems in the area of defining coordinate systems for maps and navigation. Reading about WGS84 would be a good place to start learning more.
IPv6 includes robust support for renumbering; i.e. changing the IP addresses of whole swaths of a network. Your address will be assigned by DHCP and you can change it regularly if you want. In fact, since there are so many more IPv6 addresses, you're likely to receive a large block of public addresses you can switch around in, instead of having one public IP address that perma-identifies your entire network.