I don't think Windows/Office was created to support a 2 billion dollar black hole of gaming.
And Microsoft BASIC wasn't created to support operating system development. What's your point?
Besides, Microsoft went into this announcing they expected a huge loss first generation. This is called the "long view" - they didn't lose the money, they spent it. Without the losses that the XBox incurred, nobody would take the XB0x 360 seriously. In this market, no first generation platform will ever be taken seriously.
They expect a profit as of their third generation. Considering their business success, I'd wait until the end of their plan before declaring them a failure. Everything is currently going according to their timeline.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a Nintendo fanboy, always have been, probably always will be. I hope they establish a small island nation I can retire in. That said, as so many cultures have quoted in so many ways, "braggartry invokes ignorance, and ignorance be weakness; know thy enemy as would ye know thyself."
The amount Nintendo makes from those side issues, other than the cards, is trivial; the cards' sales are wholly dependant on the games (almost the only cards they make with real sales these days are the game branded games like the Pokémon CCG.) Also, you only named one of their three significant side streams - you missed TV and movies, which are also highly profitable, but are also essentially wholly dependant on their source games.
Whereas Nintendo may have other revenue sources, it doesn't have any *significant* revenue sources which aren't immediately dependant on their gaming. If gaming collapsed for Nintendo, everything else would come down like a house of cards. Parent's point stands - if SCEA completely tanks for two years, Sony has other divisions to pick up the slack while they reorganize. Nintendo has no such safety net.
Whereas it's all well and good to point out how badly Sony is hurting in the effort to get a good view of what's actually going on, it may be worth knowing that Sony's video game division is in fact wildly profitable; it's the rest of Sony that's tanking, and that rest of Sony is tanking hard - especially their TV/Movie division.
To give you a sense of things, the game division is so profitable that in 2004, it accounted for 131% of Sony's profit. That's right: it accounted not only for all of Sony's profit, but in fact covered a loss worth a third of the profit it generated, above and beyond the money that the rest of the company is haemmorraging.
To wit, Microsoft may be losing money, but they knew they'd do that when they went into it; they announced they expected a half billion dollar loss before they even started shipping. (They were in fact pretty close - it's been about $610m.) MS is, if nothing else, one hell of a smart marketing and product initiative firm.
They aren't losing money. They're spending it. The 360 stands a pretty damned good chance of making all that money back, and if you'll remember, they also said they only intended to break even at the end of the second generation. Ladies and gentlemen, stop looking down your noses: they planned this.
Software progress has never been a good indicator of hardware progress. Look at what happened to the Saturn, Sega CD, Nomad, Lynx, Jaguar, N64, Neo Geo Pocket, WonderSwan, Cybiko and GamePark/GP32. All well developed finalized hardware which had dick to show for games. Hell, it even happened to the DS for a while, there.
No, it isn't. The X-Box is. The reason Nintendo can sell the GC so cheap is that it's not nearly as powerful, and therefore it doesn't cost as much to make. Don't get me wrong; I love Nintendo like family. But, look at the specs.
I presume you mean PS3 titles, since the PS2 has thousands of games on the market today. That said, the PS3 has demoed roughly the same amount that the 360 has; it's just that Microsoft is better at marketing than Sony is. If you had gone to E3, you would have seen a lot of fairly one three three seven PS3 stuff.
Maybe developers are having problems dealing with a CPU that has terrible integer performance and a wacky memory system with too little local memory to do a few algorithms like say... collision detection on the SPEs?
Maybe you shouldn't guess at what part of programming is hard until you're a programmer. What you just said is equivalent to "maybe the spark plugs fire so hot that the engine block expands and grinds to a halt" - that is to say, something that sounds superficially reasonable until you know the actual tolerances involved.
Sorta "we're the Big N, we're King. If you want to be allowed to develop for our console, you worthless insignifficant peon, sign there that you're not allowed to _ever_ publish _any_ game for any other system."
Yeah, and you could only publish five games a year, too. They did that for a good reason. It was harsh, and they kept it up too long, but that's what salvaged video gaming. It's also the reason there was a Robbie the Robot.
See, the problem was, Nolan Bushnell didn't know how to keep a tight leash. He treated his programmers like crap (wouldn't even put their names in the manuals, even when it was a two-person job back then, ffs.) As a result, a big block of his programmers split off and formed the first independant game software company, Activision; they were quickly followed by several other outfits.
Now, by the standards of their day, Activision kept their shit together for a while. They were about the only ones. Suddenly, there were 30 ripoff pacmans on the market. Some would crash; a few wouldn't even boot. The market was flooded with crap.
Much like the reaction to the immense mass of crap FPSes in the mid to late 90s (RoTT comes to mind,) parents began to balk, to return too many games; publishers went under. There wasn't this huge mass of other genres to fall back on, like there was with the FPSes; it was the whole market, that time. Quickly, the only games that would sell were games attached to big names, such as movies, since they had the budgets to follow through a four man team for 6 months. (Those were the days.)
Then, ET went big. Much bigger than anyone expected. Way, way too late in the year. The person who managed to get the contract was already spread far too thin. He contracted a single individual to write that game in six weeks, including the art support and writing the manual. Remember, this was pure-ASM days, and it's not easy to write a game for a machine which has no video ram; updating the raster on the h-blank costs you nearly all of the almost-zero CPU time that thing had to throw around.
The result, as you can imagine, was crap. 'Course, you don't need to imagine; everyone throws this game around as an example of the worst game in history, though in fact there are far worse; even though the game sucks, it has no major flaws outside of that it sucks: no crashing bugs, no accidental impossible levels, etc.
Nonetheless, every parent on earth had gotten ET for the 2600 for their kids for christmas. Because the movie had such wide appeal to both kids and parents, the parents often sat down and tried to play it with their kids.
As the old phrase goes, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. It turns out that the game had been made with some fantastically bad decisions: for example, twice as many carts were made as there were systems in circulation, because someone actually believed that that game would singlehandedly drive console circulation to double based on the popularity of the movie. (Had the game not sucked, there's a reasonable chance it might have gone halfway that far.) Furthermore, Sears had been hornswaggled into a contract which made them take the bullet for returns, instead of the publisher, something unheard of in the retail industry.
They lost tens of millions of dollars. Remember, Sears Roebuck was in the seventies what Walmart is now - the 800 lb gorilla whose word made or broke you. When sears trashed all consoles that february, video gaming looked like its first generation was at an end.
It was two years before retail took consoles seriously again. Nintendo was who pulled it off, and they pulled it off by both understanding and duping the retailers, in addition to being at the right technology place at the right time. This required three things:
1) It was the era where RAM dropped to the price point where fu
Don't say you went for the _myth_ that all console hardware is sold at a loss? While Sega and Microsoft tried/tries that, Sony (up until the PSP) and Nintendo don't.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but when the PSX (now called the PS1, to be replaced by a ps2/tivo hybrid; I'm talking about the original) was released, it retailed for $399, and cost $561 to manufacture.
The hardware drop has been a staple of the industry since Sega invented it to get the Master System past Nintendo's dominance with the NES since Robbie had let Sears buyers think it was a toy, rather than another one of those video game debacles.
The gamecube is currently sold at a fourteen dollar loss. It costs $113.41 to manufacture, ship and put on shelves. It sells for $99.
Just because you can say that public knowledge is true doesn't make you correct. Informative my ass. You're lying through your teeth.
The hardware takes a dive to make the price back on the games you're saying we shouldn't expect you to buy. Frankly, you're exactly the kind of consumer we don't want.
"Huhuhu, you should let us steal from you, so you make more money."
It never ceases to amaze me how large of a blind eye people will turn towards their own theft.
Seems like the guy isn't that innocent. I wonder what he'll do with all the money if someone else release a working driver under the GPL...
Wait for someone to do it right, pretty much. What's this about innocence? I even gave explicit language stating a money release clause at six months, ffs.
The reason that contaminating licenses aren't allowed is simple. I'm part of a homebrew community consisting entirely of people whose greatest dream is to go commercial. It would be counterproductive to force someone to rip the network stack out the second they made the cut.
Besides, almost everyone's stack of choice is lwIP, whose stack is commercial friendly. The TCP/IP part isn't the hard part; the only reason I put any money towards that at all was to convince people that the end product would be easy to use, and thusly to give money (huhu.) The hard part is figuring out how the actual hardware works. That's what the bounty is really about.
Compaqard isn't much of a research firm anymore. They sold off most of their interesting assets to IBM, Intel, TI, ARM, Motorola and Hitachi. DEC wasn't so much bought as it was speculatively transferred; Compaqard owns essentially nothing they got from DEC anymore. Their research and development has been a money hole for five years straight.
Why cut an R&D lab which has been failing for half a decade? Oh, I don't know, because the dead weight has to go, maybe? When you merge two leviathan corporations, each of which had recently eaten a few other leviathan corporations, bad groups inevitably emerge. It's a bit silly to suppose that every R&D group has the right to continue; many of them are working on crap, or aren't up to their tasks.
Consider for example value PCs and printers. Both HP and Compaq had lines of each. HP's printer line was significantly superior to Compaq's, but Compaq's value line enjoyed a much stronger popular recognition than HP's.
Now, you could keep both lines around. When the two companies are distinct, that's a good idea - Compaq will still make marginal profit on printers, and HP on value machines. However, when the two companies merge, it's asinine for them to compete with themselves, when the same resources could be going into the stronger of each in each category. So, push the Compaq printer group into HP, and the HP value line into Compaq.
Now, that's good - you get fewer organizations operating at a higher profit margin. Unfortunately, you also get a lot of redundancy - there's no good reason for two ombudsmen, no good reason for two historians, no room for two lead managers in each group.
What you're really looking at is the multiple year fallout from those mergers. Some colliding projects are being merged; when one's seriosly behind, it's being dropped. Redundant individuals are being removed. They've spent a few years figuring out exactly who knows what they're doing and who doesn't, and now they're acting on it.
All in all, cutting 10% of your work force as chaff after the effective merger of Compaq, HP, DEC is quite good.
management FUCKED UP.... and hiring more managers - this is good??
Let's see. Management isn't effective, so they want new managers. No, that doesn't make any sense at all. (cough)
I guess those 120 days on the job does give him the right to slash the pensions on engineers who have been their for 20+ years.
As the head of the company, the first day on the job not only gives him that right, but in fact that obligation. The specific purpose of a CEO is to increase the profits of the corporation. If, when getting this job, they spent four months looking for changes to make, and this is the first one, yes, I think that's perfectly reasonable.
In fact, 10% is relatively common for CEOs entering a company on the downslide. Would you rather they tank one in ten jobs based on merit and need now, or all of them based on inability later?
And they certainly won't celebrate the 150,000 people who still *do* have jobs created by the likes of HP.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, based on the presumption that the absence of a second deleterious effect - another rape - is equivalent to the loss of a positive effect - the jobs.
This is, no offense, absurdism in its most literal sense. If, for example, I were to offer a scholarship from personal funds to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars a year, and then business realities forced me in later years to scale back to eighty thousand dollars a year, your analogy would read like this:
[fake quote] And you certainly aren't celebrating the eighty thousand dollars I'm still giving away annually.
My question is simply this: If I refuse to waive this right for my child
This is only a valid question if that right exists, which it does not; therefore the question is as moot as a question hinged on the requirement for your child to fly.
1) The Supreme Court has held that in balancing the limited but legitimate expectation of privacy on the part of students with the interest on the part of the school to maintain a safe and secure environment, searches by school administrators need only show "reasonable suspicion" rather than "probable cause." In other words, arbitrary and random locker searches are still prohibited.
Nobody made any claim whatsoever about unwarranted suspicion. This is a straw man. In fact, I've already discussed this issue.
Not a ringing endorsement of total surveilance of students, is it?
It most certainly is not. Fortunately, you are the only person which sees things in these immoderate terms. I have repeatedly insisted that I do not find this a reasonable view of the situation discussed.
Furthermore, this case has aparently formed the foundation of the law involving locker searches, despite the fact that in this case, the subject of the search was the student's purse (see Commonwelth of Pennsylvania v. Vincent Francis Case) and the fact that the school holds clear title of ownership to the locker.
If you take the time to match Vincent Francais to the school I told you I attended and the year of the event, you may be in for a surprise. I really don't understand what you're failing to grasp.
A mall cop can search you at the mall, and the mall cop is not responsible for the safety of a thousand kids with ongoing relationships on a daily basis. The security staff at a concert in the park can do this. Hell, the seventeen year old at the gas station can search you.
You are injecting a lot of presupposed rights which do not in fact exist. You can make all the arguments you want about the reasonable expectation of privacy, but there's a reason it's called public land. None of these supposed violations are actually violations.
Maybe you live in a wonderful world where nobody ever does anything wrong. Down here on the ground, people steal, carry illegal weapons and substances, commit crimes, and hurt one another. There are times at which, in a public setting, you just have to submit to a search, for the safety of the public good.
There is nothing forcing you to send your child to school. If you don't like it, get your home schooling certification. A nation which cannot check for scumbags is a nation which falls apart.
Please stop pretending the entire world is your home. These rights do not exist off of your personal property. I've explained this to you now three messages in a row. That you continue to argue as were it not the case is getting troubling.
I am not at all clear why schools should have the automatic and unlimited right to search/monitor property which is provided to the student for the purpose of participating in this fundamental public good.
1) You already found one of the limits, specifically that of the authority in question being required to provide a chain of belief to support the action. There are many others. Ignorance does not equate to absence, and wandering around google for half an hour, no offense, simply isn't research.
2)
And I am even less sure that waiving this right can be an acceptable condition to participating in the public school system.
There is no right being waved. Please focus on that all of your arguments are based on rights which have never existed in any major nation in the history of humanity. It doesn't matter if I claim that my child's right to search the school for vampires is not being upheld; that right does not exist, and therefore every argument based on it does not exist.
I will tell you this one more time, and hopefully this time
Thanks for the terrific suggestion to switch to a wiki.
Hey, no problem. For what it's worth, my personal preference is MediaWiki, because it has a number of top-down and bottom-up organizational tools, such as [[Category:]]. There are some other good ones out there, though. Don't be discouraged by the number of rudimentary wikis out there; they're very easy to write and somewhat entertaining to make, so lots of simple ones exist. Take the time to look for alternatives, if MediaWiki doesn't suit you; there are some other, very different, very high quality wiki suites out there.
Oversight should include a representative from the target grade level, to avoid ivory tower-ism.
I dunno. If they write textbooks, it's because they know how to write textbooks. Kids aren't writers. It's been my (admittedly limited) experience that allowing a client to design reduces the quality of the object, whereas allowing a client to specify constraints results in a high quality object.
Sure, but what about such a paper in, say, English class? Or published in a school newspaper?
The English class is subject to the same stictures as the history class - it's legitimate if and only if it's within the scope of the assignment, which is unlikely. The school newspaper is a much better avenue; that's what it's for.
Or what if the student wears a shirt to school which says "Sanctions against North Korea Kills Babies?"
You know, that's a difficult case. That really walks the line. Were I a principal I would allow it, but I can see the case for the alternative.
Those are all protected forms of expression which exist in school.
Yes, but they're not useful in the context of discussing the use of school property for personal ends, such as a laptop.
IANAL. But my understanding of the legal standard is that the government must show both compelling interest and that the means chosen infringe against constitutional rights in the least possible way.
The error here is that you're presuming some right is being violated. As many people have pointed out, a school child has no rights with regards to the use of public property on loan.
The laptop does not belong to the child. Therefore, the child has no expectation of privacy, which is the only right presented which is contextually useful.
A computer lab is not likely to be something that is used every hour of school the way that this school district is talking about laptops being used.
That really doesn't matter. The issue here is what right is being violated, not how much time the student spends with the device. Again, the student should use personal property for personal projects.
Even in school, they could set up some sort of centralized filtering of content (say on a proxy server). This would be less intrusive.
They could, and should. Why stop there, though? That leaves a dozen avenues of danger open to that child and others.
My concerns are also predicated on the idea that there have already been cases (previously mentioned on Slashdot) where students have been charged with felonies for altering the software on their school-issued laptops. I assume that my son will likely understand enough about computers to figure things out like this and I will *not* expose him to such risk.
Well, that's just silly, and I admit, I had missed those articles. I'm all for the child not being allowed to alter the software, but a felony? (Well, maybe for wardriving tools, or something.)
That said, that is a good reason to take the laptop away from the child for two weeks on the first offense, and totally on the second.
Yes, some people can go too far. I still don't see what that has to do with the principle that telling a student they can't use their school laptop to waste time on school grounds being some kind of rights violation.
And you'd be laughed out of court, just like the fifteen hundred parents that try that over lockers and computer labs every year.
This is different. If I supply and own the computer, then this is different than a locker or a computer that the school owns.
But you're not supplying or paying for the laptop, so this argument is stillborn. I still don't see what you're reacting to so badly. In the four years I was in highschool, three people were searched. Two had weed and one had a gun. That's a reasonable group of people to search. Certainly you don't think school officials are going to waste their time big brothering your kid?
And for that matter, if you're such a concerned parent, why are you so worried? As a concerned parent, surely you've been watching how your child is using state property, and as such there's nothing to worry about on that laptop, right?
You seem to be arguing that the school owns the computer, but I am suggesting that I would give my son a laptop that I would have clear title to, and th
This is hardly new. I first picked up the technique of plopping down two images and styling one of them to invisibility to simulate radio buttons and check boxes something like four years ago. When I had to make a DHTML application for work, I got them right on the first try.
If this is a big enough deal to hit the slashdot front page, perhaps someone could list the other things that are supposedly hard? This one took me ten minutes; maybe I can solve some others, and get some front page traffic of my own.
That's almost enough space for seventy thousand books,
I did that math wrong. 93,206 books, assuming 4 gig and 45k each (300k at 85% compression.) If the books are ROM, the "filesystem" can be one really long string and a block of pointers; assuming 32=bit pointers, that block would be 372k uncompressed, which is close enough to the size of one book that I'm happy to declare it totally unimportant.
So, 93,200 books, or about 15,000 if you put Ulysses in there.:) Or, if you include the entire English text of Wikipedia (um, I'll call its browser 100k, since we wouldn't need HTML), enough space left over for 87,745 books.
Huhuhu. Which means that my previous calculation was off by roughly two Wikipediae.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on nearly every point. I believe that you've misunderstood the cost issue, however, and that's a fairly significant one, so:
The cost of steel wasn't the limiting factor; shock resistant hard drives tended to be, though.
PDAs almost never have had hard drives. The cost isn't the presence of flash but rather its size; however, for an eBook, this is a non-issue, as the cost of the ROM (which incidentally is much cheaper than flash - see Matrix Semiconductor's 3dFRAM for examples - half a gig for about six bucks) could easily be folded into the cost of the book, if the books were distributed individually on carts. The manufacture cost of a 16-megabyte Nintendo GBA cart with 512bytes of EEPROM is $1.18, and that's including any profiteering the actual fabrication firm is doing (Nintendo profits on the license, not the carts.) The smaller ones should be cheaper - the 4 megabyte cart was $0.91 two years ago, and should have dropped by now, though god knows to what.
That means that a 16 megabyte ROM cart at two year old prices is significantly cheaper to manufacture than a paperback, and since Gutenberg HTML-marked (uncompressed) books tend to be in the neighborhood of 300k, that means that you could stuff almost 55 books onto a cart. Considering that PAQ6 gets 82.8% compression on the Calgary corpus, it seems not unlikely that a single-case neural network compressor trained to one specific batch of data could hit 85%, which would allow you to stuff 365 books onto a cart that cost less than a dollar to manufacture. (Amusingly, enough for one a day for a year. Coincidence, but still.)
It should be noted that the theoretical capacity limit of the Nintendo DS MS3dFRAM cart, if the amateur community understands the block addressing correctly, is four gigabytes. (We're pretty certain.) That's almost enough space for seventy thousand books, though the cart would probably cost upwards of twenty dollars to manufacture. For comparison, the total size of the text portion of the current state of English Wikipedia, uncompressed, is about 1.5g; for all languages combined, 4.5g. That doesn't include images and other media; I'm having hard time finding statistics on those. Still, assuming 85% compression on the text, that's 720meg for all languages, or 240 meg for english; that leaves something like 3.25-3.75gig for media, much of which would need to be reduced to fit the smaller screen anyway.
You want "cheap" and "good" at the same time? Well, then, like the engineering rule says, you've ruled out "fast".
I agree. Luckily, Nintendo started in 1991. The thing they released last september is, in my opinion, the first one which would be pleasant in the role of an e-book reader.
I wish you weren't AC. I'd hit "friend" now, otherwise.
I don't think that the question is so much reluctance as it is trust and ignorance. Most teachers don't realize that sort of material is available online, and of those which do, most don't trust the quality of the material. (For fields outside programming, logic and mathematics, it is my belief that such a fear would be justified; Wikipedia, though more complete than any other encyclopedia, is also rife with error.)
And, as someone which has worked on a textbook, it is my belief that the suggestion that you only need a few good people is direly underestimated. I was part of the authoring group of a small, unimportant C++ textbook for high schools (Pennsylvania state advanced placement curriculum.) It took nine authors and eleven editors almost two years to turn out a high-quality book.
Yes, as Apache and Linux and so on show, high quality material can come from small individual pieces of work from the community. I just think it's a lot harder than you expect for it to be.
I applaud your effort: it's bright, and it's socially and ethically beautiful. I just hope that you realize that in order for you to produce works which can compete with the current commercially available offering, you're going to have to get a hell of a lot of work done.
If you have the resources, I have a recommendation. If you have a small group of high caliber individuals whose focuses are similar, attempt to get them to generate a single textbook of commercial quality and size, on a high-school single year class (say, a calc textbook, or physics, or something.) Once you have such a book, you have something to display as evidence that This Could Work (tm), which will convince a great many people which otherwise would not have participated that there is some useful good involved.
Another suggestion I have is for you to step away from sourceforge, at least superficially. Whereas it's comfortable for software people, it's really quite complex and foreboding, and is fantastically difficult for a non-technical person to approach. The simple front page from sourceforge would be enough to scare away virtually every teacher I had in highschool. It's my opinion that a wiki, open but registration required, would be your best bet - they're very easy to use, especially for nontechnical people, very approachable, and it's quite easy for someone to verify the changes made to a page, which helps with the trust issue quite significantly.
Don't force a history teacher to use CVS, or even to find the download link. Switch media, for the sake of the people on whom you will rely.
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall.
It's called the Nintendo DS, and it has a replacable rechargable, which is much cheaper than AAAs in the long run. Its introduction single-unit price to the public was $150; it'll be $100 inside of a year and a half, and Nintendo would drop that price in the meantime for educational bulk users, possibly to below-manufacture costs, in order to get that familiarity with kids. Some would say the Sony PSP, except that touchscreen as an input panel is critically important.
like a larger palm... Laptops are simply Microsoft and Intel's way of locking in customers forever.
Amusingly, the companies which have all but put Palm out of business are Intel and Microsoft.
Steel is cheap.
Acrylic is cheaper and more able to absorb the shock of falling damage. Same reason you have crumple zones in a car - protect the human - is why you want acrylic, which will soak the damage which otherwise will transfer to the internal components.
I'd imagine the publishers love the new hardware DRM being built into the laptops' chipsets by Intel.
Nintendo's "DRM" would be stronger - no opportunity to load secondary software for cracking or screen capture, and you need specialty equipment just to dump the application, much less crack it.
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?... lawsuits from publishers?
The scale of manufacture is too big a problem to make them price-competitive with laptops. A device which costs $100 to make at mass scale would cost something like $400 to make at introductory scale, and none of the major manufacturers seem to believe that the crowd which would buy book devices doesn't already have some form of palmtop. (I suspect they're correct.) Those are three reasons reason that the DS and PSP have a huge advantage - the production scale is already massive, they're already very cheap, and the applicable demographic is totally different.
... lawsuits from publishers?
Nah: an eBook reader would get most of its desirable material from out-of-protection books. No book since before 1923 is still under copyright (though the copyright extensions would apply to older works, some of them came too late for works which would otherwise be protected now.) Whereas this excludes most modern material, this includes literally the entire catalog of classics by definition.
Consider the amount of work that Project Gutenberg, the Google E-Book Initiative, the Bodleian Library, and various commercial groups have already legally released.
I still have a functional 386 laptop. Most things survive if you're good to them. (Granted the battery is for shit these days, but since we're talking about a likely hardware cycle of 4-5y, batteries should still be available.)
When was the last time a school could keep a student from voicing a political opinion?
I've always seem this as an absurdist stance. Nobody would tell a student that they had the right to talk politics in, say, math class - they're there to do algebra. So, the teacher assigns the students to do a paper about the political drive in America which allowed the invasion to happen.
Instead, the student chooses to write a diatribe about how awful the President is, how he's corrupt, whatever. (Mind you, I believe those things myself.) Is the teacher in the right to say that the student cannot read that paper aloud to class?
My opinion is emphatically yes. This isn't a question of censorship: the student should be welcome to discuss this before or after school, at lunch, during any recess that may be available, study break if it's not silent, et cetera.
If the student attempted to read such a paper aloud in Physics, nobody would bat an eyelash when the teacher said "this is neither the place nor the time." Should the child attempt to turn that in as Biology homework, they would be failed, and nobody would say anything. When it may happen in a class which has a tiny corrolary, why would this be any different?
(i.e. a grade school student can't be disciplined because he/she wrote a paper on why it was wrong to invade Iraq, or why Bush should fire Rove).
Students' homework are called "assignments" for a reason. If the teacher says "write me a paper about American politics," that topic would be reasonable. If the teacher says "write me a paper about the American military logistics system," it would not. The phrase "last I checked" should not have been used here; you have not checked. Schools are well within their rights to discipline students which fail to do assignments, and are well within their rights to control the topic of discussion during class, and to reprimand those who refuse to behave. If a student stood up and began reciting Monty Python in the middle of Physics, nobody would complain when they were sent to detention. Why should it be any different if they choose to recite their political views?
I'm all for protecting our constitutional rights, but I'm also for protecting a student's right to learn in school, even be there a politically active person with little self control who waves political documents around at any opportunity.
Telling little Timmy to sit down and shut up so that the rest of the class can learn isn't censorship, it's simple school behavior. Pretending to be well informed on politics and wars and our legal rights is no different than being a class clown - it's hollow, meaningless diatribe with no social value, distributed for attention and self esteem. If the student wants to make a difference, they can talk to the news, to their politicians, or to other students on their own time.
Math is for math, and whether or not you like it, history is for history, and civics is for civics. Schools are not soapboxes. Grow up, please. There is no amendmental question here because the students have no behaviors which are protectable or private. There is no expectation of privacy and there is no venue for censorship.
By the way, censorship is by definition an issuance of government that a particular individual may not voice a particular opinion. It is not an issuance of a governmental body that during hours spent in a public institution during the day, a child may not change the topic the institution chooses to teach.
One might argue that this is acceptable where the laptop computers are not really necessary for the student's studies, but where they are central, one is essentially stating that basic constitutional rights must be waived in order to participate in school which sets a dangerous precident.
It's really easy to say things like that if you fail to explain where the challenge actually is. What specific constitutional privilege is threatened, and how?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Windows/Office was created to support a 2 billion dollar black hole of gaming.
And Microsoft BASIC wasn't created to support operating system development. What's your point?
Besides, Microsoft went into this announcing they expected a huge loss first generation. This is called the "long view" - they didn't lose the money, they spent it. Without the losses that the XBox incurred, nobody would take the XB0x 360 seriously. In this market, no first generation platform will ever be taken seriously.
They expect a profit as of their third generation. Considering their business success, I'd wait until the end of their plan before declaring them a failure. Everything is currently going according to their timeline.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a Nintendo fanboy, always have been, probably always will be. I hope they establish a small island nation I can retire in. That said, as so many cultures have quoted in so many ways, "braggartry invokes ignorance, and ignorance be weakness; know thy enemy as would ye know thyself."
The amount Nintendo makes from those side issues, other than the cards, is trivial; the cards' sales are wholly dependant on the games (almost the only cards they make with real sales these days are the game branded games like the Pokémon CCG.) Also, you only named one of their three significant side streams - you missed TV and movies, which are also highly profitable, but are also essentially wholly dependant on their source games.
Whereas Nintendo may have other revenue sources, it doesn't have any *significant* revenue sources which aren't immediately dependant on their gaming. If gaming collapsed for Nintendo, everything else would come down like a house of cards. Parent's point stands - if SCEA completely tanks for two years, Sony has other divisions to pick up the slack while they reorganize. Nintendo has no such safety net.
Whereas it's all well and good to point out how badly Sony is hurting in the effort to get a good view of what's actually going on, it may be worth knowing that Sony's video game division is in fact wildly profitable; it's the rest of Sony that's tanking, and that rest of Sony is tanking hard - especially their TV/Movie division.
To give you a sense of things, the game division is so profitable that in 2004, it accounted for 131% of Sony's profit. That's right: it accounted not only for all of Sony's profit, but in fact covered a loss worth a third of the profit it generated, above and beyond the money that the rest of the company is haemmorraging.
To wit, Microsoft may be losing money, but they knew they'd do that when they went into it; they announced they expected a half billion dollar loss before they even started shipping. (They were in fact pretty close - it's been about $610m.) MS is, if nothing else, one hell of a smart marketing and product initiative firm.
They aren't losing money. They're spending it. The 360 stands a pretty damned good chance of making all that money back, and if you'll remember, they also said they only intended to break even at the end of the second generation. Ladies and gentlemen, stop looking down your noses: they planned this.
Software progress has never been a good indicator of hardware progress. Look at what happened to the Saturn, Sega CD, Nomad, Lynx, Jaguar, N64, Neo Geo Pocket, WonderSwan, Cybiko and GamePark/GP32. All well developed finalized hardware which had dick to show for games. Hell, it even happened to the DS for a while, there.
The hardware's superior
No, it isn't. The X-Box is. The reason Nintendo can sell the GC so cheap is that it's not nearly as powerful, and therefore it doesn't cost as much to make. Don't get me wrong; I love Nintendo like family. But, look at the specs.
DSlinux.org and Gamemaker port for the win!
DSLinux is no less a cute toy than the GBA Java VM or GBA Contiki, until we have connectivity.
where's the PS2 titles?
I presume you mean PS3 titles, since the PS2 has thousands of games on the market today. That said, the PS3 has demoed roughly the same amount that the 360 has; it's just that Microsoft is better at marketing than Sony is. If you had gone to E3, you would have seen a lot of fairly one three three seven PS3 stuff.
Maybe developers are having problems dealing with a CPU that has terrible integer performance and a wacky memory system with too little local memory to do a few algorithms like say... collision detection on the SPEs?
Maybe you shouldn't guess at what part of programming is hard until you're a programmer. What you just said is equivalent to "maybe the spark plugs fire so hot that the engine block expands and grinds to a halt" - that is to say, something that sounds superficially reasonable until you know the actual tolerances involved.
Plus, it's sorta ironic, that what goes around comes around.
That's not what irony means.
Sorta "we're the Big N, we're King. If you want to be allowed to develop for our console, you worthless insignifficant peon, sign there that you're not allowed to _ever_ publish _any_ game for any other system."
Yeah, and you could only publish five games a year, too. They did that for a good reason. It was harsh, and they kept it up too long, but that's what salvaged video gaming. It's also the reason there was a Robbie the Robot.
See, the problem was, Nolan Bushnell didn't know how to keep a tight leash. He treated his programmers like crap (wouldn't even put their names in the manuals, even when it was a two-person job back then, ffs.) As a result, a big block of his programmers split off and formed the first independant game software company, Activision; they were quickly followed by several other outfits.
Now, by the standards of their day, Activision kept their shit together for a while. They were about the only ones. Suddenly, there were 30 ripoff pacmans on the market. Some would crash; a few wouldn't even boot. The market was flooded with crap.
Much like the reaction to the immense mass of crap FPSes in the mid to late 90s (RoTT comes to mind,) parents began to balk, to return too many games; publishers went under. There wasn't this huge mass of other genres to fall back on, like there was with the FPSes; it was the whole market, that time. Quickly, the only games that would sell were games attached to big names, such as movies, since they had the budgets to follow through a four man team for 6 months. (Those were the days.)
Then, ET went big. Much bigger than anyone expected. Way, way too late in the year. The person who managed to get the contract was already spread far too thin. He contracted a single individual to write that game in six weeks, including the art support and writing the manual. Remember, this was pure-ASM days, and it's not easy to write a game for a machine which has no video ram; updating the raster on the h-blank costs you nearly all of the almost-zero CPU time that thing had to throw around.
The result, as you can imagine, was crap. 'Course, you don't need to imagine; everyone throws this game around as an example of the worst game in history, though in fact there are far worse; even though the game sucks, it has no major flaws outside of that it sucks: no crashing bugs, no accidental impossible levels, etc.
Nonetheless, every parent on earth had gotten ET for the 2600 for their kids for christmas. Because the movie had such wide appeal to both kids and parents, the parents often sat down and tried to play it with their kids.
As the old phrase goes, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. It turns out that the game had been made with some fantastically bad decisions: for example, twice as many carts were made as there were systems in circulation, because someone actually believed that that game would singlehandedly drive console circulation to double based on the popularity of the movie. (Had the game not sucked, there's a reasonable chance it might have gone halfway that far.) Furthermore, Sears had been hornswaggled into a contract which made them take the bullet for returns, instead of the publisher, something unheard of in the retail industry.
They lost tens of millions of dollars. Remember, Sears Roebuck was in the seventies what Walmart is now - the 800 lb gorilla whose word made or broke you. When sears trashed all consoles that february, video gaming looked like its first generation was at an end.
It was two years before retail took consoles seriously again. Nintendo was who pulled it off, and they pulled it off by both understanding and duping the retailers, in addition to being at the right technology place at the right time. This required three things:
1) It was the era where RAM dropped to the price point where fu
TFA is in error. Nintendo's profits have not gone down by 78.5%, they have gone down to 78.5% - that is, of last year's revenues.
They actually took a 21.5% hit. Call for an investor's prospectus; if you're in the US or Japan, they'll send you a big glossy 30-page for free.
Don't say you went for the _myth_ that all console hardware is sold at a loss? While Sega and Microsoft tried/tries that, Sony (up until the PSP) and Nintendo don't.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but when the PSX (now called the PS1, to be replaced by a ps2/tivo hybrid; I'm talking about the original) was released, it retailed for $399, and cost $561 to manufacture.
The hardware drop has been a staple of the industry since Sega invented it to get the Master System past Nintendo's dominance with the NES since Robbie had let Sears buyers think it was a toy, rather than another one of those video game debacles.
The gamecube is currently sold at a fourteen dollar loss. It costs $113.41 to manufacture, ship and put on shelves. It sells for $99.
Just because you can say that public knowledge is true doesn't make you correct. Informative my ass. You're lying through your teeth.
The hardware takes a dive to make the price back on the games you're saying we shouldn't expect you to buy. Frankly, you're exactly the kind of consumer we don't want.
"Huhuhu, you should let us steal from you, so you make more money."
It never ceases to amaze me how large of a blind eye people will turn towards their own theft.
Huhuhuhu. Just you wait until the bounty succeeds - when the amateur community has TCP/IP, gaming changes overnight.
<whore type="money" style="tired">Donate now!</whore>
Contiki does more in about 30k of ram.
Seems like the guy isn't that innocent. I wonder what he'll do with all the money if someone else release a working driver under the GPL...
Wait for someone to do it right, pretty much. What's this about innocence? I even gave explicit language stating a money release clause at six months, ffs.
The reason that contaminating licenses aren't allowed is simple. I'm part of a homebrew community consisting entirely of people whose greatest dream is to go commercial. It would be counterproductive to force someone to rip the network stack out the second they made the cut.
Besides, almost everyone's stack of choice is lwIP, whose stack is commercial friendly. The TCP/IP part isn't the hard part; the only reason I put any money towards that at all was to convince people that the end product would be easy to use, and thusly to give money (huhu.) The hard part is figuring out how the actual hardware works. That's what the bounty is really about.
hey, don't bash people for driving traffic to me
A four month CEO is cutting R&D at a TECH company
... and hiring more managers - this is good??
Compaqard isn't much of a research firm anymore. They sold off most of their interesting assets to IBM, Intel, TI, ARM, Motorola and Hitachi. DEC wasn't so much bought as it was speculatively transferred; Compaqard owns essentially nothing they got from DEC anymore. Their research and development has been a money hole for five years straight.
Why cut an R&D lab which has been failing for half a decade? Oh, I don't know, because the dead weight has to go, maybe? When you merge two leviathan corporations, each of which had recently eaten a few other leviathan corporations, bad groups inevitably emerge. It's a bit silly to suppose that every R&D group has the right to continue; many of them are working on crap, or aren't up to their tasks.
Consider for example value PCs and printers. Both HP and Compaq had lines of each. HP's printer line was significantly superior to Compaq's, but Compaq's value line enjoyed a much stronger popular recognition than HP's.
Now, you could keep both lines around. When the two companies are distinct, that's a good idea - Compaq will still make marginal profit on printers, and HP on value machines. However, when the two companies merge, it's asinine for them to compete with themselves, when the same resources could be going into the stronger of each in each category. So, push the Compaq printer group into HP, and the HP value line into Compaq.
Now, that's good - you get fewer organizations operating at a higher profit margin. Unfortunately, you also get a lot of redundancy - there's no good reason for two ombudsmen, no good reason for two historians, no room for two lead managers in each group.
What you're really looking at is the multiple year fallout from those mergers. Some colliding projects are being merged; when one's seriosly behind, it's being dropped. Redundant individuals are being removed. They've spent a few years figuring out exactly who knows what they're doing and who doesn't, and now they're acting on it.
All in all, cutting 10% of your work force as chaff after the effective merger of Compaq, HP, DEC is quite good.
management FUCKED UP.
Let's see. Management isn't effective, so they want new managers. No, that doesn't make any sense at all. (cough)
I guess those 120 days on the job does give him the right to slash the pensions on engineers who have been their for 20+ years.
As the head of the company, the first day on the job not only gives him that right, but in fact that obligation. The specific purpose of a CEO is to increase the profits of the corporation. If, when getting this job, they spent four months looking for changes to make, and this is the first one, yes, I think that's perfectly reasonable.
In fact, 10% is relatively common for CEOs entering a company on the downslide. Would you rather they tank one in ten jobs based on merit and need now, or all of them based on inability later?
And they certainly won't celebrate the 150,000 people who still *do* have jobs created by the likes of HP.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, based on the presumption that the absence of a second deleterious effect - another rape - is equivalent to the loss of a positive effect - the jobs.
This is, no offense, absurdism in its most literal sense. If, for example, I were to offer a scholarship from personal funds to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars a year, and then business realities forced me in later years to scale back to eighty thousand dollars a year, your analogy would read like this:
[fake quote]
And you certainly aren't celebrating the eighty thousand dollars I'm still giving away annually.
My question is simply this: If I refuse to waive this right for my child
This is only a valid question if that right exists, which it does not; therefore the question is as moot as a question hinged on the requirement for your child to fly.
1) The Supreme Court has held that in balancing the limited but legitimate expectation of privacy on the part of students with the interest on the part of the school to maintain a safe and secure environment, searches by school administrators need only show "reasonable suspicion" rather than "probable cause." In other words, arbitrary and random locker searches are still prohibited.
Nobody made any claim whatsoever about unwarranted suspicion. This is a straw man. In fact, I've already discussed this issue.
Not a ringing endorsement of total surveilance of students, is it?
It most certainly is not. Fortunately, you are the only person which sees things in these immoderate terms. I have repeatedly insisted that I do not find this a reasonable view of the situation discussed.
Furthermore, this case has aparently formed the foundation of the law involving locker searches, despite the fact that in this case, the subject of the search was the student's purse (see Commonwelth of Pennsylvania v. Vincent Francis Case) and the fact that the school holds clear title of ownership to the locker.
If you take the time to match Vincent Francais to the school I told you I attended and the year of the event, you may be in for a surprise. I really don't understand what you're failing to grasp.
A mall cop can search you at the mall, and the mall cop is not responsible for the safety of a thousand kids with ongoing relationships on a daily basis. The security staff at a concert in the park can do this. Hell, the seventeen year old at the gas station can search you.
You are injecting a lot of presupposed rights which do not in fact exist. You can make all the arguments you want about the reasonable expectation of privacy, but there's a reason it's called public land. None of these supposed violations are actually violations.
Maybe you live in a wonderful world where nobody ever does anything wrong. Down here on the ground, people steal, carry illegal weapons and substances, commit crimes, and hurt one another. There are times at which, in a public setting, you just have to submit to a search, for the safety of the public good.
There is nothing forcing you to send your child to school. If you don't like it, get your home schooling certification. A nation which cannot check for scumbags is a nation which falls apart.
Please stop pretending the entire world is your home. These rights do not exist off of your personal property. I've explained this to you now three messages in a row. That you continue to argue as were it not the case is getting troubling.
I am not at all clear why schools should have the automatic and unlimited right to search/monitor property which is provided to the student for the purpose of participating in this fundamental public good.
1) You already found one of the limits, specifically that of the authority in question being required to provide a chain of belief to support the action. There are many others. Ignorance does not equate to absence, and wandering around google for half an hour, no offense, simply isn't research.
2)
And I am even less sure that waiving this right can be an acceptable condition to participating in the public school system.
There is no right being waved. Please focus on that all of your arguments are based on rights which have never existed in any major nation in the history of humanity. It doesn't matter if I claim that my child's right to search the school for vampires is not being upheld; that right does not exist, and therefore every argument based on it does not exist.
I will tell you this one more time, and hopefully this time
Thanks for the terrific suggestion to switch to a wiki.
Hey, no problem. For what it's worth, my personal preference is MediaWiki, because it has a number of top-down and bottom-up organizational tools, such as [[Category:]]. There are some other good ones out there, though. Don't be discouraged by the number of rudimentary wikis out there; they're very easy to write and somewhat entertaining to make, so lots of simple ones exist. Take the time to look for alternatives, if MediaWiki doesn't suit you; there are some other, very different, very high quality wiki suites out there.
Oversight should include a representative from the target grade level, to avoid ivory tower-ism.
I dunno. If they write textbooks, it's because they know how to write textbooks. Kids aren't writers. It's been my (admittedly limited) experience that allowing a client to design reduces the quality of the object, whereas allowing a client to specify constraints results in a high quality object.
Sure, but what about such a paper in, say, English class? Or published in a school newspaper?
The English class is subject to the same stictures as the history class - it's legitimate if and only if it's within the scope of the assignment, which is unlikely. The school newspaper is a much better avenue; that's what it's for.
Or what if the student wears a shirt to school which says "Sanctions against North Korea Kills Babies?"
You know, that's a difficult case. That really walks the line. Were I a principal I would allow it, but I can see the case for the alternative.
Those are all protected forms of expression which exist in school.
Yes, but they're not useful in the context of discussing the use of school property for personal ends, such as a laptop.
IANAL. But my understanding of the legal standard is that the government must show both compelling interest and that the means chosen infringe against constitutional rights in the least possible way.
The error here is that you're presuming some right is being violated. As many people have pointed out, a school child has no rights with regards to the use of public property on loan.
The laptop does not belong to the child. Therefore, the child has no expectation of privacy, which is the only right presented which is contextually useful.
A computer lab is not likely to be something that is used every hour of school the way that this school district is talking about laptops being used.
That really doesn't matter. The issue here is what right is being violated, not how much time the student spends with the device. Again, the student should use personal property for personal projects.
Even in school, they could set up some sort of centralized filtering of content (say on a proxy server). This would be less intrusive.
They could, and should. Why stop there, though? That leaves a dozen avenues of danger open to that child and others.
My concerns are also predicated on the idea that there have already been cases (previously mentioned on Slashdot) where students have been charged with felonies for altering the software on their school-issued laptops. I assume that my son will likely understand enough about computers to figure things out like this and I will *not* expose him to such risk.
Well, that's just silly, and I admit, I had missed those articles. I'm all for the child not being allowed to alter the software, but a felony? (Well, maybe for wardriving tools, or something.)
That said, that is a good reason to take the laptop away from the child for two weeks on the first offense, and totally on the second.
Yes, some people can go too far. I still don't see what that has to do with the principle that telling a student they can't use their school laptop to waste time on school grounds being some kind of rights violation.
And you'd be laughed out of court, just like the fifteen hundred parents that try that over lockers and computer labs every year.
This is different. If I supply and own the computer, then this is different than a locker or a computer that the school owns.
But you're not supplying or paying for the laptop, so this argument is stillborn. I still don't see what you're reacting to so badly. In the four years I was in highschool, three people were searched. Two had weed and one had a gun. That's a reasonable group of people to search. Certainly you don't think school officials are going to waste their time big brothering your kid?
And for that matter, if you're such a concerned parent, why are you so worried? As a concerned parent, surely you've been watching how your child is using state property, and as such there's nothing to worry about on that laptop, right?
You seem to be arguing that the school owns the computer, but I am suggesting that I would give my son a laptop that I would have clear title to, and th
This is hardly new. I first picked up the technique of plopping down two images and styling one of them to invisibility to simulate radio buttons and check boxes something like four years ago. When I had to make a DHTML application for work, I got them right on the first try.
If this is a big enough deal to hit the slashdot front page, perhaps someone could list the other things that are supposedly hard? This one took me ten minutes; maybe I can solve some others, and get some front page traffic of my own.
That's almost enough space for seventy thousand books,
:) Or, if you include the entire English text of Wikipedia (um, I'll call its browser 100k, since we wouldn't need HTML), enough space left over for 87,745 books.
I did that math wrong. 93,206 books, assuming 4 gig and 45k each (300k at 85% compression.) If the books are ROM, the "filesystem" can be one really long string and a block of pointers; assuming 32=bit pointers, that block would be 372k uncompressed, which is close enough to the size of one book that I'm happy to declare it totally unimportant.
So, 93,200 books, or about 15,000 if you put Ulysses in there.
Huhuhu. Which means that my previous calculation was off by roughly two Wikipediae.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on nearly every point. I believe that you've misunderstood the cost issue, however, and that's a fairly significant one, so:
The cost of steel wasn't the limiting factor; shock resistant hard drives tended to be, though.
PDAs almost never have had hard drives. The cost isn't the presence of flash but rather its size; however, for an eBook, this is a non-issue, as the cost of the ROM (which incidentally is much cheaper than flash - see Matrix Semiconductor's 3dFRAM for examples - half a gig for about six bucks) could easily be folded into the cost of the book, if the books were distributed individually on carts. The manufacture cost of a 16-megabyte Nintendo GBA cart with 512bytes of EEPROM is $1.18, and that's including any profiteering the actual fabrication firm is doing (Nintendo profits on the license, not the carts.) The smaller ones should be cheaper - the 4 megabyte cart was $0.91 two years ago, and should have dropped by now, though god knows to what.
That means that a 16 megabyte ROM cart at two year old prices is significantly cheaper to manufacture than a paperback, and since Gutenberg HTML-marked (uncompressed) books tend to be in the neighborhood of 300k, that means that you could stuff almost 55 books onto a cart. Considering that PAQ6 gets 82.8% compression on the Calgary corpus, it seems not unlikely that a single-case neural network compressor trained to one specific batch of data could hit 85%, which would allow you to stuff 365 books onto a cart that cost less than a dollar to manufacture. (Amusingly, enough for one a day for a year. Coincidence, but still.)
It should be noted that the theoretical capacity limit of the Nintendo DS MS3dFRAM cart, if the amateur community understands the block addressing correctly, is four gigabytes. (We're pretty certain.) That's almost enough space for seventy thousand books, though the cart would probably cost upwards of twenty dollars to manufacture. For comparison, the total size of the text portion of the current state of English Wikipedia, uncompressed, is about 1.5g; for all languages combined, 4.5g. That doesn't include images and other media; I'm having hard time finding statistics on those. Still, assuming 85% compression on the text, that's 720meg for all languages, or 240 meg for english; that leaves something like 3.25-3.75gig for media, much of which would need to be reduced to fit the smaller screen anyway.
You want "cheap" and "good" at the same time? Well, then, like the engineering rule says, you've ruled out "fast".
I agree. Luckily, Nintendo started in 1991. The thing they released last september is, in my opinion, the first one which would be pleasant in the role of an e-book reader.
I wish you weren't AC. I'd hit "friend" now, otherwise.
I don't think that the question is so much reluctance as it is trust and ignorance. Most teachers don't realize that sort of material is available online, and of those which do, most don't trust the quality of the material. (For fields outside programming, logic and mathematics, it is my belief that such a fear would be justified; Wikipedia, though more complete than any other encyclopedia, is also rife with error.)
And, as someone which has worked on a textbook, it is my belief that the suggestion that you only need a few good people is direly underestimated. I was part of the authoring group of a small, unimportant C++ textbook for high schools (Pennsylvania state advanced placement curriculum.) It took nine authors and eleven editors almost two years to turn out a high-quality book.
Yes, as Apache and Linux and so on show, high quality material can come from small individual pieces of work from the community. I just think it's a lot harder than you expect for it to be.
I applaud your effort: it's bright, and it's socially and ethically beautiful. I just hope that you realize that in order for you to produce works which can compete with the current commercially available offering, you're going to have to get a hell of a lot of work done.
If you have the resources, I have a recommendation. If you have a small group of high caliber individuals whose focuses are similar, attempt to get them to generate a single textbook of commercial quality and size, on a high-school single year class (say, a calc textbook, or physics, or something.) Once you have such a book, you have something to display as evidence that This Could Work (tm), which will convince a great many people which otherwise would not have participated that there is some useful good involved.
Another suggestion I have is for you to step away from sourceforge, at least superficially. Whereas it's comfortable for software people, it's really quite complex and foreboding, and is fantastically difficult for a non-technical person to approach. The simple front page from sourceforge would be enough to scare away virtually every teacher I had in highschool. It's my opinion that a wiki, open but registration required, would be your best bet - they're very easy to use, especially for nontechnical people, very approachable, and it's quite easy for someone to verify the changes made to a page, which helps with the trust issue quite significantly.
Don't force a history teacher to use CVS, or even to find the download link. Switch media, for the sake of the people on whom you will rely.
Amusingly, it's been economically feasable for 20 years, by this estimation.
Then again, the original Gameboy from 1991 would have done the job, if a publisher had just taken the risk.
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall.
... Laptops are simply Microsoft and Intel's way of locking in customers forever.
... lawsuits from publishers?
... lawsuits from publishers?
It's called the Nintendo DS, and it has a replacable rechargable, which is much cheaper than AAAs in the long run. Its introduction single-unit price to the public was $150; it'll be $100 inside of a year and a half, and Nintendo would drop that price in the meantime for educational bulk users, possibly to below-manufacture costs, in order to get that familiarity with kids. Some would say the Sony PSP, except that touchscreen as an input panel is critically important.
like a larger palm
Amusingly, the companies which have all but put Palm out of business are Intel and Microsoft.
Steel is cheap.
Acrylic is cheaper and more able to absorb the shock of falling damage. Same reason you have crumple zones in a car - protect the human - is why you want acrylic, which will soak the damage which otherwise will transfer to the internal components.
I'd imagine the publishers love the new hardware DRM being built into the laptops' chipsets by Intel.
Nintendo's "DRM" would be stronger - no opportunity to load secondary software for cracking or screen capture, and you need specialty equipment just to dump the application, much less crack it.
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?
The scale of manufacture is too big a problem to make them price-competitive with laptops. A device which costs $100 to make at mass scale would cost something like $400 to make at introductory scale, and none of the major manufacturers seem to believe that the crowd which would buy book devices doesn't already have some form of palmtop. (I suspect they're correct.) Those are three reasons reason that the DS and PSP have a huge advantage - the production scale is already massive, they're already very cheap, and the applicable demographic is totally different.
Nah: an eBook reader would get most of its desirable material from out-of-protection books. No book since before 1923 is still under copyright (though the copyright extensions would apply to older works, some of them came too late for works which would otherwise be protected now.) Whereas this excludes most modern material, this includes literally the entire catalog of classics by definition.
Consider the amount of work that Project Gutenberg, the Google E-Book Initiative, the Bodleian Library, and various commercial groups have already legally released.
I still have a functional 386 laptop. Most things survive if you're good to them. (Granted the battery is for shit these days, but since we're talking about a likely hardware cycle of 4-5y, batteries should still be available.)
When was the last time a school could keep a student from voicing a political opinion?
I've always seem this as an absurdist stance. Nobody would tell a student that they had the right to talk politics in, say, math class - they're there to do algebra. So, the teacher assigns the students to do a paper about the political drive in America which allowed the invasion to happen.
Instead, the student chooses to write a diatribe about how awful the President is, how he's corrupt, whatever. (Mind you, I believe those things myself.) Is the teacher in the right to say that the student cannot read that paper aloud to class?
My opinion is emphatically yes. This isn't a question of censorship: the student should be welcome to discuss this before or after school, at lunch, during any recess that may be available, study break if it's not silent, et cetera.
If the student attempted to read such a paper aloud in Physics, nobody would bat an eyelash when the teacher said "this is neither the place nor the time." Should the child attempt to turn that in as Biology homework, they would be failed, and nobody would say anything. When it may happen in a class which has a tiny corrolary, why would this be any different?
(i.e. a grade school student can't be disciplined because he/she wrote a paper on why it was wrong to invade Iraq, or why Bush should fire Rove).
Students' homework are called "assignments" for a reason. If the teacher says "write me a paper about American politics," that topic would be reasonable. If the teacher says "write me a paper about the American military logistics system," it would not. The phrase "last I checked" should not have been used here; you have not checked. Schools are well within their rights to discipline students which fail to do assignments, and are well within their rights to control the topic of discussion during class, and to reprimand those who refuse to behave. If a student stood up and began reciting Monty Python in the middle of Physics, nobody would complain when they were sent to detention. Why should it be any different if they choose to recite their political views?
I'm all for protecting our constitutional rights, but I'm also for protecting a student's right to learn in school, even be there a politically active person with little self control who waves political documents around at any opportunity.
Telling little Timmy to sit down and shut up so that the rest of the class can learn isn't censorship, it's simple school behavior. Pretending to be well informed on politics and wars and our legal rights is no different than being a class clown - it's hollow, meaningless diatribe with no social value, distributed for attention and self esteem. If the student wants to make a difference, they can talk to the news, to their politicians, or to other students on their own time.
Math is for math, and whether or not you like it, history is for history, and civics is for civics. Schools are not soapboxes. Grow up, please. There is no amendmental question here because the students have no behaviors which are protectable or private. There is no expectation of privacy and there is no venue for censorship.
By the way, censorship is by definition an issuance of government that a particular individual may not voice a particular opinion. It is not an issuance of a governmental body that during hours spent in a public institution during the day, a child may not change the topic the institution chooses to teach.
One might argue that this is acceptable where the laptop computers are not really necessary for the student's studies, but where they are central, one is essentially stating that basic constitutional rights must be waived in order to participate in school which sets a dangerous precident.
It's really easy to say things like that if you fail to explain where the challenge actually is. What specific constitutional privilege is threatened, and how?
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