I'd recommend using an operating system that will build skills in an area where the skills will be reusable.
I'm a professional software developer. I started out with computers that are horrible brain-dead toys in comparison with modern computers, using horrible brain-dead languages (proprietary flavors of BASIC). Nonetheless, the general lessons and skills proved useful to me.
Microsoft moves everything around in Windows every few years. Are you going to claim that experience using Windows XP will help kids get around in Windows 8 (with the "no-longer-called-Metro" UI)? How much less useful could it be to use a non-Windows desktop?
And I specifically suggested Linux because it is so easy to get free stuff and install it, and since you are pulling from a managed repository you are less likely to get spyware and other malware. If I had a 7-year-old, I'd set him up with the Potato Guy software, which turns out not to only feature a potato guy but also trains, airplanes, and lots of cool stuff. I'm an adult and I thought Potato Guy was fun; I have to imagine a 7-year-old would go for it. And that's just one of the free things that he could find and install (on his own or with help).
7 years old might be a little bit young for a scripting language, but maybe not. I wasn't much older than that when I wrote my first program, which was something like:
10 PRINT "STEVE " 20 GOTO 10
For some people, a programming language is a fun toy, and it turns out I am one of those people. Maybe the 7-year-old in the question will be one also.
Anyway, when I'm browsing all the free stuff I can get from the Ubuntu repositories, I sometimes get a "kid in a candy store" feeling. My hope is that an actual kid might get that feeling also. And he won't need to spend his allowance.
I am not sure if building a PC from parts is really an important part of the experience. I suggest getting any decent computer and installing Linux. Ubuntu or Mint would be good choices.
Why Linux? He can learn how to find new things, install them, and try them out. The package management system on Linux is so much better than the mess on Windows, and there is a ton of cool stuff that is free.
If you can, have him learn a good scripting language. I recommend Python, because even if he doesn't become a software developer he can use Python (for math, astronomy, statistics, web development, mass-converting his media collection to a new file format, etc.).
in many cases you could just use alsa without a sound demon
For many users this is not possible anymore. There are plenty of sound devices out there with fancy features, including the ability to mix multiple streams together for you; but many newer computers come with brain-dead sound devices that have no features at all. You get one sampling rate (probably 48000 Hz), and you get one audio stream. If you want to be able to play sound files that were recorded at 44100 Hz, or mix multiple streams, you must have some sort of sound system managing your sound device. Like PulseAudio.
If we didn't have PulseAudio, we would need some other audio daemon that had similar features. And at this point I would rather see effort put into polishing PulseAudio than effort put into writing yet another sound system and trying to promote it as a superior alternative to PulseAudio.
Now the current situation is: you have almost only pulseaudio, sitting on top of alsa, hiding all the interesting stuff of alsa (an example: alsa provides for a typical soundcard about 10 different audio channels, where you can control the volume. pulseaudio hides this all and provides ONE volumecontrol. you cannot say the front jack has another volume than the rear one).
That's an interesting complaint. But it's a long walk from the original "it's broken and they shove a new one down my throat each year" complaint.
There is no reason why a sound system like PulseAudio couldn't expose the controls the way you want. And I'll bet that the controls you want actually are in PulseAudio somewhere, even if the GUI desktop environment you use doesn't expose them.
Many applications use an intermediate framework, such as gstreamer, to abstract the painful details. which of course adds latency and sources for trouble.
You can say that about any sort of intermediate framework: they are always trying to abstract the painful details, and they are always sources of potential trouble. And for audio, they are always sources of potential latency.
Linux has two audio standards: PulseAudio and JACK.
PulseAudio had serious, horrible issues when it was first adopted, but in my experience it now Just Works. (For at least the last couple of years, whenever I have installed Linux, audio has just worked with no tweaking needed by me; plugging in USB audio devices has also just worked.) PulseAudio's architecture runs the stuff in user space that I think should be run in user space, so I think it is basically a good idea, and as far as I know the most serious kinks have been smoothed out.
JACK also works well: it takes some work to get it set up right, and if you tried to use it on a laptop you would kill your battery, but lots of people use JACK every day to do pro audio work.
If you need ultra low latency for pro audio work, JACK is a good idea. If you want to run on a desktop or a portable device, for typical use cases PulseAudio is a good idea. I like having both. Apple just has CoreAudio, and they claim it is good for both use cases; so maybe it really is possible to have one system that does everything for everyone. But I'd rather just keep what we have and make it reliable, than try to introduce yet another sound system.
Also, PulseAudio has been on the Linux desktop since about 2008, and I haven't noticed any effort to "shove a new sound daemon/system down our throat" even once since then, let alone every year. If someone has tried to shove a sound system newer than PulseAudio down your throat recently, please tell us about it; I'm interested.
Keith Hennesey is an economic policy expert who worked for President George W. Bush. He wrote a very informative blog post about President Obama's CAFE announcement in 2009.
If you accept that President Obama is a true believer in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, then it makes perfect sense that he would require the highest efficiency numbers he possibly could. (President Bush, not so much a CAGW believer, chose the "maximum net societal benefits" baseline.)
I am wondering how this new announcement compares with the "technology exhaustion" baseline.
I'm also wondering how a 54.5 MPG standard will impact prices and what the result will be. When new cars are more expensive, people try harder to keep old junker cars going, so if you make new cars more expensive you may keep people from upgrading to newer and more fuel-efficient cars. Making new cars as expensive as possible may reduce overall fuel efficiency of the cars actually in use.
Some people claim that all the top cyclists were doping, and if Lance won the Tour de France at all, he must have been doping as well.
That's possible, but if anyone could have won the tour without cheating, it was Lance Armstrong. He had all the legal advantages he could have: his team always had a bunch of the world's top cyclists, riding for him; his team always had enough money that they could just ride whatever training rides they thought would best help Lance win (many teams have to win races during the season to get the prize money; Lance's team had plenty of money and didn't need to do that). Manufacturers gave him their best new technology to use. Heck, he would go ride the toughest mountain climbs multiple times, trying different angles through the turns and seeing what numbers he got on his power meter. In short, he had every legal edge.
On the other hand, the Tour de France is possibly the toughest athletic competition in the world, without hyperbole. How many competitions take 21 days to complete, with the athletes working hard for hours and only two rest days? And all that in the July heat in France? My bike mechanic says that he believes all the top riders are cheating, just because with that level of effort, the cheating would give an edge that non-cheaters couldn't touch.
Also, I'm deeply suspicious of the anti-cheating lab work. When Floyd Landis was accused of doping with synthetic testosterone, all sorts of details came out: the lab knew which sample was his, the lab engaged in shoddy lab work and flawed chain-of-custody procedures, and (worst of all, in my opinion) the same lab tested both the "A" and "B" samples. (Never mind whether a French lab is "out to get" an American athlete... it would be highly embarrassing if the "B" result was negative after all the hoopla over the "A" result. I would have much rather seen that B sample sent to a different lab in Switzerland or something.)
I'm also troubled by the question of fairness. There is an old saying, "military justice bears the same relationship to justice that military music bears to music." The anti-doping system is stacked against the athlete; once an athlete is accused, bad things happen to the athlete, and there is no hope. Even in the case of Floyd Landis, where a bunch of people worked to help him and submitted all sorts of testimony that (IMHO) invalidated all the evidence against him, he was still found guilty and stripped of his Tour win. (Later he confessed, so maybe he was guilty after all... but I still am not convinced that the evidence used against him should have been used.)
Now for one moment assume that Lance Armstrong is completely innocent. What possible recourse does he have within the USADA system? How can you prove a negative? He was the most-tested man in all of sports and he never failed a test... USADA doesn't care. The witnesses against him have something to gain from denouncing him... USADA doesn't care. How can he prove that he wasn't doping 17 years ago? He doesn't have a witness who was with him 24/7 and can say he never doped. He doesn't have lab results of his own, and if he did he wouldn't be allowed to present them. So if he participates, all he can do is stand there and say "it's not true".
Some people think that Lance Armstrong is implicitly admitting guilt by not contesting this ruling. But his public statement explicitly says he n
That is, if you can make a coherent system that has a good workflow for 90% of users, don't go breaking the consistency and coherency for the 10% that have a wide variety of weird and unique workflows.
Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that is what he meant... how does he know that GNOME 3 has a good workflow for 90% of users? The big changes for GNOME 3 were introduced without usability testing.
Every big change in GNOME 3 was explained as to why it's "better". In every case, I disagree completely; for me, it isn't better. For example, they took away the window list on the grounds that it might distract the user, and the cleaner design is less distracting. I for one find the "Expose" effect very distracting, and I hate that you must use it a lot in GNOME 3.
It could be that everyone in the world who hates GNOME 3 is a geek who hangs out in Slashdot, and the hoi polloi all love it. If so, usability testing will prove it.
Just as you should use a profiler first before you try to optimize your program for speed, you should use usability testing before you try to change how a user interface works. The bigger and more controversial the change, the more usability testing is needed.
I feel like gnome 3 finally hit the nail on the head for what users want and need
Some users. Not, for example, me.
And even if you are correct, it's a happy accident. The GNOME 3 team didn't do a lot of user research; for example, the removal of the minimize button happened because one developer thought about it for a while and decided that nobody really needs a minimize button. Users were not asked, they were told. Consider this quote:
In the end, I think with GNOME 3 we need to emphasize design coherency and slickness - what is different and better, and that actually is more important than being 100% sure we perfectly meet everybody's workflow.
That's stunning... "design coherency and slickness" is more important than a good workflow!
A while back, Sun Microsystems paid for a bunch of usability research on GNOME and the results were incorporated into GNOME 2.x. It might not be a coincidence that many users (like me) have a strong preference for the way GNOME 2.x works.
GNOME 3 is, from all I have heard, well-architected. The plumbing is better than the legacy plumbing inside GNOME 2. When Cinnamon gets all the little details right, it may become the desktop environment of the future. For now, I'm using MATE.
Noteworthy: "The Misplaced Battleship" (the first Stainless Steel Rat story) Deathworld (the first Deathworld novel)
It would be cool to see the Stainless Steel Rat adventures turned into movies. I'd love to see what a.75 calibre recoilless pistol would look like as a prop.
His work was nominated for Hugo awards on numerous occasions, but the top names released popular stories at the same time and he lost to those.
Somewhere I saw a discussion of the best SF books to give to SF-hating friends to try to win them over. The Time Patrol books were chosen by several. "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" is fantastic.
Baen collected all the Time Patrol stuff into one mega volume:
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is pretty darn bleak: a crazed and omnipotent computer has killed off all of humanity except for six people; by the end of the story there is only one left alive, and he has been turned into an amorphous blob that will live forever in torment (with no mouth and yet needing to scream).
Speaker for the Dead is also pretty depressing. After reading it, I was done with Orson Scott Card and I still haven't gone back. Some humans get killed on a newly settled planet, and Ender goes to investigate. Since there is no faster than light travel for matter (only for information), by the time he gets there years have gone by and pretty much everyone's life was ruined by the tragedy. Then Ender's investigation rips open the old wounds. Then he figures out what went wrong and it was all a horrible tragic misunderstanding. I was upset about all this, because Ender was fabulously wealthy and had unlimited access to the "ansibles" (FTL communicators) so at the beginning I thought he was going to play Nero Wolfe, hire someone on the planet to be his investigator, and solve the mystery immediately after it happened and before everyone's lives were ruined. Nope.
Dancers in the Afterglow had such a downer of an ending that it left me thinking "WTF?!?" for days. A plucky female gets captured by bad guys, who torture her, cut off her arms and legs, and put fast-reproducing bacteria in the wounds so they can never be healed properly. At the end of the story she has been rescued, has been given care, seems to be coping and is almost happy again... and then a meteor falls from the sky and kills her instantly. WTF?!? (I don't think Jack L. Chalker hated women... he never wrote anything else like that; and e.g. Mavra Chang found a pretty happy ending in the Well Worlds series.)
There was a short story, "Quietus", where there was some sort of apocalypse and there is only one young man left alive. Against all the odds, there is also one young woman left alive, and he meets her. Through a tragic misunderstanding, an alien who came to help kills the man, and the woman is left grieving over the dead body. The alien then has to live with the knowledge that he had rendered an intelligent species extinct.
Because Apple enjoys making a 40% margin on tablets, and Apple's customers don't mind paying it. Then Android competitors have (I think) set their prices using iPad prices as a guide.
The iPad is still selling for about three reasons: Apple has been milking their first-mover advantage, Apple has done a great job on the user experience, and the iPad hardware is excellent quality. This has been enough, especially given the problems in the Android tablets until about this year or so.
But now, with Jellybean, Android is a great tablet experience. Some folks will say it still doesn't match the iPad, but it's way better than before. Now, quality tablets are here, at attractive price points.
I love my Nexus 7 tablet. It's everything I want in a tablet. (Well, I guess I'd like HDMI and a card reader, but I really haven't needed them.) Do I wish I had spent twice as much for an iPad 2? No, I really don't.
I can see the day coming when more Android tablets are sold than Apple tablets, in a replay of what happened in the smartphone market.
All in all, this is a good thing for AMD, and not nearly so good for Apple. The litany of execs leaving AMD of late has caused SemiAccurate to say that nothing good can come of this far too often for our liking lately. This time, all we can say is that a lot of good can and will come of this. Jim Keller is one of the good ones, and you don't leave directorships at Apple without a damn good reason.
Microsoft has just stepped hard on their OEMs' feet. Many of the companies with which Microsoft does business are not happy that Microsoft is now going to be competing with them in this product space, and Microsoft will have a huge advantage because MS makes the OEMs pay a lot for the software. So the whole Surface project was wrapped in secrecy for as long as possible.
If MS had filed for a new trademark on "MS KeyTablet" or something, that would have tipped their hand early. "Surface" was a trademark that MS already had, and they didn't have a big investment in that as a brand for giant tables. So "Surface" let MS hold the secret as long as possible, while still having a trademarked brand they could use from day 0.
P.S. MS has re-branded the giant table product as "PixelSense".
Tablets can run programming languages, drawing programs, word processing, etc. Why can't they create content on it?
Of course they can create content on a tablet. It's not as good as a Mac Pro, but that was never an option anyway.
And the better question is: How much content can you create using paper textbooks? Because that's the option really, inexpensive tablets or paper textbooks.
Also if you read the specs these tablets have a battery life of 2-3 hours, if there is no power at the school you better hope the students have it at home and remembered to charge their tablet. In a way this is one thing OLPC got right with the XO1 include a hand crank.
Actually, the hand crank thing was just an idea and never implemented.
Instead of a hand crank, they decided to go with a "yo-yo" charger, not attached to the laptop at all. The "yo-yo" would allow kids to use leg muscles, rather than (weaker) arm muscles, to charge the laptop.
And, speaking as someone who bought an XO, I think a 2-3 hour battery life is pretty comparable. (I suppose that OLPC might have modified the system software and stretched the battery life later, after I gave away my XO. But the XO is still an x86 chip instead of an ARM, and the battery life is not likely to be that much better than an Android tablet.)
Overall, I think the Android tablet is going to be at least as good for education as an XO. The Android tablet doesn't have the cool feature of a screen that works in bright sunlight as a black-and-white, and probably doesn't have a camera, but I think neither deficiency is a deal-breaker. And Android 4.0 ICS is a much better environment than Sugar, IMHO.
This isn't a magical silver bullet; nothing is. But these tablets cost $80 and are planned to last for three years; that's less than $30 per year, and then the student gets to keep the 3-year-old tablet. The tablet can serve as a textbook, or can run interactive lessons, and the article says the Thai education ministry is developing tutorial content that will run on the tablets.
Like the OLTP XO computers, these tablets will have no moving parts, and no cooling fan. If they are well-made, they should be reliable even in Thailand's climate; and they may be more cost-effective than paper textbooks.
P.S. It's amazing to me how so many people here can speed-read a summary and go straight to the dismissive comments about how this won't solve anything, etc. Presumably the Thai education ministry studied the problem and came to the conclusion that these tablets would be worth buying. Maybe you really are that much smarter than the Thai education ministry... or, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to make a snap judgement.
How does "loser pays" work when a little guy goes after a big company like Apple, Google, or Microsoft with a legitimate complaint
You are saying that $BIG_COMPANY can afford to hire $BIG_LAW_FIRM_A (or else has its own lawyers that are effectively its own big law firm). $LITTLE_GUY has no chance.
But under "loser pays", $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B can take the case; since you stipulated that it is a legitimate complaint, odds are good that $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B will be paid by the loser ($BIG_COMPANY). $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B is not guaranteed to be paid but the odds are good, since they are as big as $BIG_LAW_FIRM_A and the complaint is legitimate. Contrast to the current situation in America, where $LITTLE_GUY cannot afford to pay any big law firm, so if any big law firm agrees to take his case, they are doing it knowing they won't get paid very much.
So, you have brought up one of the major reasons why "loser pays" is better: the defense can automatically scale if needed to match the offense.
The other major reason why "loser pays" is better: filing lawsuits without merit now actually costs money. Maybe $BIG_COMPANY doesn't even file the lawsuit against $LITTLE_GUY in the first place, which is an even better situation for $LITTLE_GUY than having a big law firm handling his defense.
There, that's two ways that "loser pays" helps in the situation you describe.
The idea of psychohistory was also explored by Michael F. Flynn in a novel called In the Country of the Blind; he didn't use that word, but rather the word "cliology". In that novel, cliology was independently invented by multiple people at approximately the same time, and there were several secret societies trying to use cliology to model what would happen and steer the course of history. But with multiple societies working at cross-purposes, things got a bit messy at times. (But at least one of the secret societies just used cliology to pick stocks and get fabulously wealthy.)
I agree. The word "sabotage" would fit the bill perfectly for events as we understand them.
More sensationally, "bio-warfare" could arguably be used (because if we can have a War on Drugs or a War on Poverty, why not a War on Eucalyptus Trees).
But I think "bio-sabotage" or just "sabotage" is the word.
P.S. Wikipedia has an article on sabotage, and that mentions ecotage. But rather than meaning "ecological sabotage", ecotage means "sabotage intended to interfere with damage to the environment".
It has quite good hardware specs. Why isn't this thing running the Google TV software already?
All it really is: a media player that must pull media from the Google Play store or from YouTube. For $300?
I like the design; it looks different, and I like the LEDs. If this thing grows a few more features I might actually buy one. But it would be a hard sell with just its current feature set.
Wow, you got in to Google I/O. Good for you. I didn't get in, but I would have liked to.
So there are several thousand phones in existence that have Jelly Bean and you have one. Good for you.
Sounds like you dont know what you are talking about, There are several thousand phones with it on it.
Okay, fine. What I should have written there was "There hasn't been time for the various Android phone companies to roll out Jelly Bean in their mobile phone lines." For extra points and a gold star I should have said "But of course Google has Jelly Bean available on Nexus phones."
I was writing in a few spare moments at a coffee shop, using my phone's tiny keyboard. I apologize that I wrote something less scrupulously correct than the above.
I think the larger point stands. The larger point: it is silly to say that some phone companies are "three major releases behind" when one of the major releases has been available to the world for less than a week, and another was for tablets only.
P.S. Please consider, in future, using language such as "you are mistaken on this point" rather than "you don't know what you're talking about"... unless it was actually your intent to alienate me, in which case the latter is more efficient.
TFA says devices are still "three major releases behind". Well, let's think about that.
After 2.3 came 3.0, Honeycomb, which was for tablets only. Then after a long time came 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, for phones again. Now 4.1, Jellybean, is the next major release, and it is so new that Google just announced it.
So, what is the actual current situation? Jellybean is totally new and there is no way any phone can have it yet. ICS is shipping on some phones, and other phones have shipped with 2.3 Gingerbread but with a promise to upgrade to ICS soon. No phones are running Honeycomb because it is for tablets only.
So I think the "three major releases behind" bit is disingenuous. It would be more fair to say "ICS has been a bit slow to roll out" but I guess that's not as impressive.
It doesn't say there whether the USB is OTG or not, but I'll bet that it is. The latest Nexus phone has a micro USB with OTG. But, according to this video, flash drives don't just work out of the box. He speculates that you could root your device and get it to work or that perhaps an update will enable it.
I'm with you: I want to be able to plug in a USB flash drive, an SD card reader, etc. And I want this even more because the tablet doesn't have a socket for SD or Micro SD cards anywhere. (Not a deal-breaker for me... I already pre-ordered a 16 GB model.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd recommend using an operating system that will build skills in an area where the skills will be reusable.
I'm a professional software developer. I started out with computers that are horrible brain-dead toys in comparison with modern computers, using horrible brain-dead languages (proprietary flavors of BASIC). Nonetheless, the general lessons and skills proved useful to me.
Microsoft moves everything around in Windows every few years. Are you going to claim that experience using Windows XP will help kids get around in Windows 8 (with the "no-longer-called-Metro" UI)? How much less useful could it be to use a non-Windows desktop?
And I specifically suggested Linux because it is so easy to get free stuff and install it, and since you are pulling from a managed repository you are less likely to get spyware and other malware. If I had a 7-year-old, I'd set him up with the Potato Guy software, which turns out not to only feature a potato guy but also trains, airplanes, and lots of cool stuff. I'm an adult and I thought Potato Guy was fun; I have to imagine a 7-year-old would go for it. And that's just one of the free things that he could find and install (on his own or with help).
7 years old might be a little bit young for a scripting language, but maybe not. I wasn't much older than that when I wrote my first program, which was something like:
10 PRINT "STEVE "
20 GOTO 10
For some people, a programming language is a fun toy, and it turns out I am one of those people. Maybe the 7-year-old in the question will be one also.
Anyway, when I'm browsing all the free stuff I can get from the Ubuntu repositories, I sometimes get a "kid in a candy store" feeling. My hope is that an actual kid might get that feeling also. And he won't need to spend his allowance.
steveha
I am not sure if building a PC from parts is really an important part of the experience. I suggest getting any decent computer and installing Linux. Ubuntu or Mint would be good choices.
Why Linux? He can learn how to find new things, install them, and try them out. The package management system on Linux is so much better than the mess on Windows, and there is a ton of cool stuff that is free.
If you can, have him learn a good scripting language. I recommend Python, because even if he doesn't become a software developer he can use Python (for math, astronomy, statistics, web development, mass-converting his media collection to a new file format, etc.).
oh, a newbie ...
No, I'm not a newbie.
in many cases you could just use alsa without a sound demon
For many users this is not possible anymore. There are plenty of sound devices out there with fancy features, including the ability to mix multiple streams together for you; but many newer computers come with brain-dead sound devices that have no features at all. You get one sampling rate (probably 48000 Hz), and you get one audio stream. If you want to be able to play sound files that were recorded at 44100 Hz, or mix multiple streams, you must have some sort of sound system managing your sound device. Like PulseAudio.
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/jeffrey-stedfast.html
If we didn't have PulseAudio, we would need some other audio daemon that had similar features. And at this point I would rather see effort put into polishing PulseAudio than effort put into writing yet another sound system and trying to promote it as a superior alternative to PulseAudio.
Now the current situation is: you have almost only pulseaudio, sitting on top of alsa, hiding all the interesting stuff of alsa (an example: alsa provides for a typical soundcard about 10 different audio channels, where you can control the volume. pulseaudio hides this all and provides ONE volumecontrol. you cannot say the front jack has another volume than the rear one).
That's an interesting complaint. But it's a long walk from the original "it's broken and they shove a new one down my throat each year" complaint.
There is no reason why a sound system like PulseAudio couldn't expose the controls the way you want. And I'll bet that the controls you want actually are in PulseAudio somewhere, even if the GUI desktop environment you use doesn't expose them.
Many applications use an intermediate framework, such as gstreamer, to abstract the painful details. which of course adds latency and sources for trouble.
You can say that about any sort of intermediate framework: they are always trying to abstract the painful details, and they are always sources of potential trouble. And for audio, they are always sources of potential latency.
steveha
Could you elaborate? What do you want fixed?
Linux has two audio standards: PulseAudio and JACK.
PulseAudio had serious, horrible issues when it was first adopted, but in my experience it now Just Works. (For at least the last couple of years, whenever I have installed Linux, audio has just worked with no tweaking needed by me; plugging in USB audio devices has also just worked.) PulseAudio's architecture runs the stuff in user space that I think should be run in user space, so I think it is basically a good idea, and as far as I know the most serious kinks have been smoothed out.
JACK also works well: it takes some work to get it set up right, and if you tried to use it on a laptop you would kill your battery, but lots of people use JACK every day to do pro audio work.
If you need ultra low latency for pro audio work, JACK is a good idea. If you want to run on a desktop or a portable device, for typical use cases PulseAudio is a good idea. I like having both. Apple just has CoreAudio, and they claim it is good for both use cases; so maybe it really is possible to have one system that does everything for everyone. But I'd rather just keep what we have and make it reliable, than try to introduce yet another sound system.
Also, PulseAudio has been on the Linux desktop since about 2008, and I haven't noticed any effort to "shove a new sound daemon/system down our throat" even once since then, let alone every year. If someone has tried to shove a sound system newer than PulseAudio down your throat recently, please tell us about it; I'm interested.
steveha
...but I would also go for MateBuntu.
http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/
http://mate-desktop.org/
Keith Hennesey is an economic policy expert who worked for President George W. Bush. He wrote a very informative blog post about President Obama's CAFE announcement in 2009.
http://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/
If you accept that President Obama is a true believer in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, then it makes perfect sense that he would require the highest efficiency numbers he possibly could. (President Bush, not so much a CAGW believer, chose the "maximum net societal benefits" baseline.)
I am wondering how this new announcement compares with the "technology exhaustion" baseline.
I'm also wondering how a 54.5 MPG standard will impact prices and what the result will be. When new cars are more expensive, people try harder to keep old junker cars going, so if you make new cars more expensive you may keep people from upgrading to newer and more fuel-efficient cars. Making new cars as expensive as possible may reduce overall fuel efficiency of the cars actually in use.
steveha
Some people claim that all the top cyclists were doping, and if Lance won the Tour de France at all, he must have been doping as well.
That's possible, but if anyone could have won the tour without cheating, it was Lance Armstrong. He had all the legal advantages he could have: his team always had a bunch of the world's top cyclists, riding for him; his team always had enough money that they could just ride whatever training rides they thought would best help Lance win (many teams have to win races during the season to get the prize money; Lance's team had plenty of money and didn't need to do that). Manufacturers gave him their best new technology to use. Heck, he would go ride the toughest mountain climbs multiple times, trying different angles through the turns and seeing what numbers he got on his power meter. In short, he had every legal edge.
On the other hand, the Tour de France is possibly the toughest athletic competition in the world, without hyperbole. How many competitions take 21 days to complete, with the athletes working hard for hours and only two rest days? And all that in the July heat in France? My bike mechanic says that he believes all the top riders are cheating, just because with that level of effort, the cheating would give an edge that non-cheaters couldn't touch.
Also, I'm deeply suspicious of the anti-cheating lab work. When Floyd Landis was accused of doping with synthetic testosterone, all sorts of details came out: the lab knew which sample was his, the lab engaged in shoddy lab work and flawed chain-of-custody procedures, and (worst of all, in my opinion) the same lab tested both the "A" and "B" samples. (Never mind whether a French lab is "out to get" an American athlete... it would be highly embarrassing if the "B" result was negative after all the hoopla over the "A" result. I would have much rather seen that B sample sent to a different lab in Switzerland or something.)
I'm also troubled by the question of fairness. There is an old saying, "military justice bears the same relationship to justice that military music bears to music." The anti-doping system is stacked against the athlete; once an athlete is accused, bad things happen to the athlete, and there is no hope. Even in the case of Floyd Landis, where a bunch of people worked to help him and submitted all sorts of testimony that (IMHO) invalidated all the evidence against him, he was still found guilty and stripped of his Tour win. (Later he confessed, so maybe he was guilty after all... but I still am not convinced that the evidence used against him should have been used.)
The USADA proceedings are not legal proceedings in a courtroom environment, and the protections that the accused receive in a courtroom are not there. The head of USADA gets to act as prosecutor, judge, and gets to hand-pick the jury: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/sports/other-sports/usada-s-travis-tygart-plays-prosecutor-jury-and-judge-lance-armstrong-case
Now for one moment assume that Lance Armstrong is completely innocent. What possible recourse does he have within the USADA system? How can you prove a negative? He was the most-tested man in all of sports and he never failed a test... USADA doesn't care. The witnesses against him have something to gain from denouncing him... USADA doesn't care. How can he prove that he wasn't doping 17 years ago? He doesn't have a witness who was with him 24/7 and can say he never doped. He doesn't have lab results of his own, and if he did he wouldn't be allowed to present them. So if he participates, all he can do is stand there and say "it's not true".
Some people think that Lance Armstrong is implicitly admitting guilt by not contesting this ruling. But his public statement explicitly says he n
That is, if you can make a coherent system that has a good workflow for 90% of users, don't go breaking the consistency and coherency for the 10% that have a wide variety of weird and unique workflows.
Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that is what he meant... how does he know that GNOME 3 has a good workflow for 90% of users? The big changes for GNOME 3 were introduced without usability testing.
Every big change in GNOME 3 was explained as to why it's "better". In every case, I disagree completely; for me, it isn't better. For example, they took away the window list on the grounds that it might distract the user, and the cleaner design is less distracting. I for one find the "Expose" effect very distracting, and I hate that you must use it a lot in GNOME 3.
It could be that everyone in the world who hates GNOME 3 is a geek who hangs out in Slashdot, and the hoi polloi all love it. If so, usability testing will prove it.
Just as you should use a profiler first before you try to optimize your program for speed, you should use usability testing before you try to change how a user interface works. The bigger and more controversial the change, the more usability testing is needed.
steveha
I feel like gnome 3 finally hit the nail on the head for what users want and need
Some users. Not, for example, me.
And even if you are correct, it's a happy accident. The GNOME 3 team didn't do a lot of user research; for example, the removal of the minimize button happened because one developer thought about it for a while and decided that nobody really needs a minimize button. Users were not asked, they were told. Consider this quote:
That's stunning... "design coherency and slickness" is more important than a good workflow!
A while back, Sun Microsystems paid for a bunch of usability research on GNOME and the results were incorporated into GNOME 2.x. It might not be a coincidence that many users (like me) have a strong preference for the way GNOME 2.x works.
GNOME 3 is, from all I have heard, well-architected. The plumbing is better than the legacy plumbing inside GNOME 2. When Cinnamon gets all the little details right, it may become the desktop environment of the future. For now, I'm using MATE.
steveha
Harry Harrison wrote quite a bit of stuff during the days when copyright actually could expire.
http://www.feedbooks.com/books/search?query=harry+harrison
Noteworthy: "The Misplaced Battleship" (the first Stainless Steel Rat story) Deathworld (the first Deathworld novel)
It would be cool to see the Stainless Steel Rat adventures turned into movies. I'd love to see what a .75 calibre recoilless pistol would look like as a prop.
steveha
Most unappreciated has to go to Poul Anderson.
He wrote so much stuff, and almost all of it top-notch. His name deserves to be right up there with Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein.
The Flandry books. The van Rijn books. The Time Patrol. The Hoka books!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson
http://baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=panderson
His work was nominated for Hugo awards on numerous occasions, but the top names released popular stories at the same time and he lost to those.
Somewhere I saw a discussion of the best SF books to give to SF-hating friends to try to win them over. The Time Patrol books were chosen by several. "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" is fantastic.
Baen collected all the Time Patrol stuff into one mega volume:
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-428-time-patrol.aspx
You can read the first novella and most of the second one for free at the above link (click on "View sample chapters").
steveha
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is pretty darn bleak: a crazed and omnipotent computer has killed off all of humanity except for six people; by the end of the story there is only one left alive, and he has been turned into an amorphous blob that will live forever in torment (with no mouth and yet needing to scream).
Speaker for the Dead is also pretty depressing. After reading it, I was done with Orson Scott Card and I still haven't gone back. Some humans get killed on a newly settled planet, and Ender goes to investigate. Since there is no faster than light travel for matter (only for information), by the time he gets there years have gone by and pretty much everyone's life was ruined by the tragedy. Then Ender's investigation rips open the old wounds. Then he figures out what went wrong and it was all a horrible tragic misunderstanding. I was upset about all this, because Ender was fabulously wealthy and had unlimited access to the "ansibles" (FTL communicators) so at the beginning I thought he was going to play Nero Wolfe, hire someone on the planet to be his investigator, and solve the mystery immediately after it happened and before everyone's lives were ruined. Nope.
Dancers in the Afterglow had such a downer of an ending that it left me thinking "WTF?!?" for days. A plucky female gets captured by bad guys, who torture her, cut off her arms and legs, and put fast-reproducing bacteria in the wounds so they can never be healed properly. At the end of the story she has been rescued, has been given care, seems to be coping and is almost happy again... and then a meteor falls from the sky and kills her instantly. WTF?!? (I don't think Jack L. Chalker hated women... he never wrote anything else like that; and e.g. Mavra Chang found a pretty happy ending in the Well Worlds series.)
There was a short story, "Quietus", where there was some sort of apocalypse and there is only one young man left alive. Against all the odds, there is also one young woman left alive, and he meets her. Through a tragic misunderstanding, an alien who came to help kills the man, and the woman is left grieving over the dead body. The alien then has to live with the knowledge that he had rendered an intelligent species extinct.
steveha
So why do [tablets] cost so much more?
Because Apple enjoys making a 40% margin on tablets, and Apple's customers don't mind paying it. Then Android competitors have (I think) set their prices using iPad prices as a guide.
The iPad is still selling for about three reasons: Apple has been milking their first-mover advantage, Apple has done a great job on the user experience, and the iPad hardware is excellent quality. This has been enough, especially given the problems in the Android tablets until about this year or so.
But now, with Jellybean, Android is a great tablet experience. Some folks will say it still doesn't match the iPad, but it's way better than before. Now, quality tablets are here, at attractive price points.
I love my Nexus 7 tablet. It's everything I want in a tablet. (Well, I guess I'd like HDMI and a card reader, but I really haven't needed them.) Do I wish I had spent twice as much for an iPad 2? No, I really don't.
I can see the day coming when more Android tablets are sold than Apple tablets, in a replay of what happened in the smartphone market.
steveha
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/08/01/apples-cpu-architect-jim-keller-moves-back-to-amd/
P.S. I liked the subheading: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave AMD"
steveha
I thought that was pretty obvious.
Microsoft has just stepped hard on their OEMs' feet. Many of the companies with which Microsoft does business are not happy that Microsoft is now going to be competing with them in this product space, and Microsoft will have a huge advantage because MS makes the OEMs pay a lot for the software. So the whole Surface project was wrapped in secrecy for as long as possible.
If MS had filed for a new trademark on "MS KeyTablet" or something, that would have tipped their hand early. "Surface" was a trademark that MS already had, and they didn't have a big investment in that as a brand for giant tables. So "Surface" let MS hold the secret as long as possible, while still having a trademarked brand they could use from day 0.
P.S. MS has re-branded the giant table product as "PixelSense".
steveha
Tablets can run programming languages, drawing programs, word processing, etc. Why can't they create content on it?
Of course they can create content on a tablet. It's not as good as a Mac Pro, but that was never an option anyway.
And the better question is: How much content can you create using paper textbooks? Because that's the option really, inexpensive tablets or paper textbooks.
steveha
Also if you read the specs these tablets have a battery life of 2-3 hours, if there is no power at the school you better hope the students have it at home and remembered to charge their tablet. In a way this is one thing OLPC got right with the XO1 include a hand crank.
Actually, the hand crank thing was just an idea and never implemented.
Instead of a hand crank, they decided to go with a "yo-yo" charger, not attached to the laptop at all. The "yo-yo" would allow kids to use leg muscles, rather than (weaker) arm muscles, to charge the laptop.
But the "yo-yo" was never implemented either.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/YoYo
And, speaking as someone who bought an XO, I think a 2-3 hour battery life is pretty comparable. (I suppose that OLPC might have modified the system software and stretched the battery life later, after I gave away my XO. But the XO is still an x86 chip instead of an ARM, and the battery life is not likely to be that much better than an Android tablet.)
Overall, I think the Android tablet is going to be at least as good for education as an XO. The Android tablet doesn't have the cool feature of a screen that works in bright sunlight as a black-and-white, and probably doesn't have a camera, but I think neither deficiency is a deal-breaker. And Android 4.0 ICS is a much better environment than Sugar, IMHO.
steveha
This isn't a magical silver bullet; nothing is. But these tablets cost $80 and are planned to last for three years; that's less than $30 per year, and then the student gets to keep the 3-year-old tablet. The tablet can serve as a textbook, or can run interactive lessons, and the article says the Thai education ministry is developing tutorial content that will run on the tablets.
Like the OLTP XO computers, these tablets will have no moving parts, and no cooling fan. If they are well-made, they should be reliable even in Thailand's climate; and they may be more cost-effective than paper textbooks.
P.S. It's amazing to me how so many people here can speed-read a summary and go straight to the dismissive comments about how this won't solve anything, etc. Presumably the Thai education ministry studied the problem and came to the conclusion that these tablets would be worth buying. Maybe you really are that much smarter than the Thai education ministry... or, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to make a snap judgement.
steveha
How does "loser pays" work when a little guy goes after a big company like Apple, Google, or Microsoft with a legitimate complaint
You are saying that $BIG_COMPANY can afford to hire $BIG_LAW_FIRM_A (or else has its own lawyers that are effectively its own big law firm). $LITTLE_GUY has no chance.
But under "loser pays", $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B can take the case; since you stipulated that it is a legitimate complaint, odds are good that $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B will be paid by the loser ($BIG_COMPANY). $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B is not guaranteed to be paid but the odds are good, since they are as big as $BIG_LAW_FIRM_A and the complaint is legitimate. Contrast to the current situation in America, where $LITTLE_GUY cannot afford to pay any big law firm, so if any big law firm agrees to take his case, they are doing it knowing they won't get paid very much.
So, you have brought up one of the major reasons why "loser pays" is better: the defense can automatically scale if needed to match the offense.
The other major reason why "loser pays" is better: filing lawsuits without merit now actually costs money. Maybe $BIG_COMPANY doesn't even file the lawsuit against $LITTLE_GUY in the first place, which is an even better situation for $LITTLE_GUY than having a big law firm handling his defense.
There, that's two ways that "loser pays" helps in the situation you describe.
steveha
The idea of psychohistory was also explored by Michael F. Flynn in a novel called In the Country of the Blind; he didn't use that word, but rather the word "cliology". In that novel, cliology was independently invented by multiple people at approximately the same time, and there were several secret societies trying to use cliology to model what would happen and steer the course of history. But with multiple societies working at cross-purposes, things got a bit messy at times. (But at least one of the secret societies just used cliology to pick stocks and get fabulously wealthy.)
http://books.google.com/books/about/In_the_Country_of_the_Blind.html?id=xVqB5-DLRAgC
It's not a perfect book, but some of the ideas are really interesting.
steveha
I agree. The word "sabotage" would fit the bill perfectly for events as we understand them.
More sensationally, "bio-warfare" could arguably be used (because if we can have a War on Drugs or a War on Poverty, why not a War on Eucalyptus Trees).
But I think "bio-sabotage" or just "sabotage" is the word.
P.S. Wikipedia has an article on sabotage, and that mentions ecotage. But rather than meaning "ecological sabotage", ecotage means "sabotage intended to interfere with damage to the environment".
steveha
It has quite good hardware specs. Why isn't this thing running the Google TV software already?
All it really is: a media player that must pull media from the Google Play store or from YouTube. For $300?
I like the design; it looks different, and I like the LEDs. If this thing grows a few more features I might actually buy one. But it would be a hard sell with just its current feature set.
steveha
Odd, the Phone I got at IO has 4.1 on it.
Wow, you got in to Google I/O. Good for you. I didn't get in, but I would have liked to.
So there are several thousand phones in existence that have Jelly Bean and you have one. Good for you.
Sounds like you dont know what you are talking about, There are several thousand phones with it on it.
Okay, fine. What I should have written there was "There hasn't been time for the various Android phone companies to roll out Jelly Bean in their mobile phone lines." For extra points and a gold star I should have said "But of course Google has Jelly Bean available on Nexus phones."
I was writing in a few spare moments at a coffee shop, using my phone's tiny keyboard. I apologize that I wrote something less scrupulously correct than the above.
I think the larger point stands. The larger point: it is silly to say that some phone companies are "three major releases behind" when one of the major releases has been available to the world for less than a week, and another was for tablets only.
P.S. Please consider, in future, using language such as "you are mistaken on this point" rather than "you don't know what you're talking about"... unless it was actually your intent to alienate me, in which case the latter is more efficient.
steveha
TFA says devices are still "three major releases behind". Well, let's think about that.
After 2.3 came 3.0, Honeycomb, which was for tablets only. Then after a long time came 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, for phones again. Now 4.1, Jellybean, is the next major release, and it is so new that Google just announced it.
So, what is the actual current situation? Jellybean is totally new and there is no way any phone can have it yet. ICS is shipping on some phones, and other phones have shipped with 2.3 Gingerbread but with a promise to upgrade to ICS soon. No phones are running Honeycomb because it is for tablets only.
So I think the "three major releases behind" bit is disingenuous. It would be more fair to say "ICS has been a bit slow to roll out" but I guess that's not as impressive.
steveha
It has a micro USB socket. Also GPS! See the specs in the Google Play store:
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_16gb
It doesn't say there whether the USB is OTG or not, but I'll bet that it is. The latest Nexus phone has a micro USB with OTG. But, according to this video, flash drives don't just work out of the box. He speculates that you could root your device and get it to work or that perhaps an update will enable it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EFl8UEAMcw
I'm with you: I want to be able to plug in a USB flash drive, an SD card reader, etc. And I want this even more because the tablet doesn't have a socket for SD or Micro SD cards anywhere. (Not a deal-breaker for me... I already pre-ordered a 16 GB model.)
steveha