No, that's the Free Market you're thinking of. Not the same thing. Capitalism is also not Democracy.
The goal of the capitalist is monopoly. In that sense, capitalism and the free market are enemies. Now, if you're saying that a market needs to have competition and freedom to be of any benefit to you and I, I fully agree with you. Realize, however, that the only way it is ultimately maintained is by external pressure (through government regulation, for example). left to it's own devices, capitalism moves quickly to destroy competition and freedom, as can be easily observed in any industry that has been deregulated.
And now we are seeing many low cost full size laptops priced right around the netbook range of $400-$500.
And I noted that full sized laptops were available in that price range before netbooks even existed.
I'll also note that you can still buy plenty of netbook models for under $300. Just a few days ago a friend was asking me about one that he was considering for $275 (with HDD and Windows XP, sadly). I agree with your basic point, the price was a major consideration in my netbook purchase. The other considerations were size and weight, pre-installed Linux, and the solid state hard drive, but I probably wouldn't have bought it if it was over $400.
And yes, tablets also serve a particular niche. I'm not part of that niche, so I couldn't tell you what makes them so special; in fact I really can't think of a single reason I would buy one over a normal laptop, but some people seem to love them.
And now we are seeing many low cost full size laptops priced right around the netbook range of $400-$500. If this keeps up, the netbook segment is dead.
No, the segment of the netbook market that was just looking for a cheap laptop is dead. Really, it was dead from the get-go; stillborn, if you will. These are people who thought they were getting a real laptop for dirt cheap, then returned them and complained a bunch about how it wasn't a real laptop.
Besides, full sized laptops have been selling for as low as $450 since before any netbooks hit the market. If that was the real reason a netbook market exists, it would have been a non-starter.
The market that netbooks actually serve is still there, and is not going to be affected by the availability of cheap full-sized laptops. I actually bought a netbook and a full-sized laptop at the same time. They serve different purposes. I'm very happy with my laptop, right up to the point where I have to lug it around school for 12 hours. On the other hand, my netbook runs vim and gcc just great, and is acceptable for Openoffice and Mozilla, but I'm not keen to run either WoW or MATLAB on it.
Now, let me ask YOU this: can YOUR whiny ass carry a pack of shingles up a ladder in 100 degree sun? Have you ever even been ON a roof?
Yup. My dad's a contractor (the kind that actually works, not the well-dressed-sitting-in-the-nice-truck kind, don't trust those guys) and I worked in construction from age 12 to 24.
In my experience, the critique of the construction trade found in this article is not unjust. As a rule, folks don't get into construction by being brainy, and roofers are generally the bottom of the barrel. Yes, there are exceptions, and I'm sure your brother is one of them.
The registration is so you can access the publisher's online course materials. These may include all the quizzes and exams for the class. They usually have a way you can buy a registration in case you got a used book, but it's not cheap.
Well, your professor didn't think about it much then, or didn't bother to do any research on the subject. This guy seems to have figured it out just fine, with free downloads and print-on-demand from Lulu. I've had many other professors who offered just PDFs.
I think you'd be surprised how quickly rounding errors can compound. You might not see it much when doing graphics, but for scientific apps it's a huge problem.
For some reason, people seemed to care about the disabled at one point, and provided wheel-chair access everywhere, at great expense to business. Why is there no outcry for the blind and visually impaired? If Amazon wins this, and they wind up as the only source for many books, many people will be hurt. Fuck them.
Most people "care" because certain individuals have made careers of bringing ADA lawsuits against those who don't provide wheelchair access. If you want Amazon to change its practices, bring an ADA lawsuit against them.
Really? There was an argument in there about why kids should be spending class time learning cursive rather than devoting more time to other subjects? I sure didn't see it. In fact, you seem to have completely avoided the actual topic of this thread, and only tangentially addressed the argument I made.
I'll agree with you about the meat thing, but I think it mostly has to do with poverty. I've been seeing a lady from Kunming, and she certainly eats meat when she has the opportunity. When she brings me food, it's almost entirely meat. She likes vegetables too, but she tells stories about pretending to be sick when she was a kid so she could get a little more (or any) meat with her dinner. She's also quite disturbed by my taste for raw vegetables (I'm a huge fan Vietnamese food in general, but particularly bun, as well as sushi and bi-bim-bap).
I'll agree that the GP is clearly more familiar with Cantonese food than other regional cuisines, but I don't think his general assessment of the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese food is that far off. Kunming is very close to the China-Vietnam border, but the tastes are quite different. Vietnamese incorporate a lot of raw foods, particularly vegetables, and the Chinese are decidedly not into that.
Knowledge has progressed pretty fast in the last few decades, and there's just more information that's considered "basic education" these days. My daughter is expected to perform at a higher level in math than was expected of me at the same age, about three decades ago. The difference is somewhere around 1-2 grade levels, and you don't get that for free. She can do it, certainly, but without spending more classroom time on it, they're sacrificing depth of knowledge for mere exposure. However, they could fix that by taking a little time away from useless penmanship and spend a bit more of that valuable classroom time on something that's actually useful.
And what the fuck is up with the rest of your rant? You realized you didn't have a valid counter-argument, so you decided to go off on an ad hominem attack on the whole of US society? I especially enjoyed the base assertion red herring backed up by the argumentum ad populum. It seems we've found another topic that could be covered instead of wasting time on penmanship: how to construct a valid argument.
The TI-89 is amazing, and I only have the old version. The reason TI can charge so much for their inferior calculators is that most college math teachers know how amazing the TI-89 is and won't allow you to use it. Otherwise, no sane person would spend that amount of money on an 83/84/86.
Seriously, what's the big deal? So kids have to "spend time" learning to write cursive. What are they missing anyway then? What do you have to teach them in that time they're "losing"?
Math... Science... you know, all that stuff we're supposedly falling behind on because our kids aren't getting a decent grounding in them in elementary and middle school. Or hell, you could let them have PE everyday so they're a little less likely to be morbidly obese by the time they hit puberty. in short, there's no end of actually useful things they could be doing with the educational time that's currently being wasted on "proper handwriting".
The California Highway Patrol has required all caps for many years. They drill it into their cadets so hard at the academy that my ex-wife has written everything in all caps since her first week there.
Amen! As a math tutor for several years, I can't tell you how many times I've seen people completely screw up a problem simply because of their own sloppiness (messy handwriting, scratching out/overwriting instead of erasing, arranging their work in a non-linear fashion, etc). These days I write out every single step in painful detail, very neatly arranged for maximum readability.
If I do decide to become a teacher, I will follow the example of my Numerical Analysis professor and tell my students flat out, day one, that I will not waste my time trying to understand what they wrote. The purpose of writing is to communicate. If you can't be bothered to write legibly, don't bother writing at all.
If printing is so good, why don't people use Chinese?
You mean aside from the nearly 2 billion people who use some variant of the Chinese character set? I know a few of them. It doesn't seem to slow them down any.
Since much of this discussion revolves around speed, I see you've also been thinking that the picture-based Chinese alphabet offers superior encoding ratios to phonetic alphabets such as Roman and (also I believe) Japanese. What does this mean? A word that may be six to ten characters in Roman may be three characters in Japanese and just one character in China.
Japan has 4 characters sets that they use regularly:
Kanji is arguably the main one, and is essentially the Chinese character set. As far as number of characters used to express a concept it is exactly the same as Chinese* except for one thing: Chinese doesn't have verb tenses and Japanese does, so a Japanese person might add a couple of hiragana to express that. (There are other reasons Kanji doesn't really fit well with Japanese, but that's the main one relevant to this discussion).
Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic, and thus will still be more space-efficient than a phonetic system like ours. Hiragana and katakana map one-to-one, but hiragana is used for native Japanese words, while katakana is used for foreign words (mostly English).
Romanji I think is just used out of politeness for the benefit of us foreign barbarians. I'm sure you can figure out what it is if you don't already know.
* This assumes they express the concept in the same way, which may not be the case. See the differences between American and British English for examples.
Please explain how manual coordinates are more reliable than GPS and/or laser. I fully appreciate that value of being able to do it manually just in case, but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about here.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism requires competition and freedom.
No, that's the Free Market you're thinking of. Not the same thing. Capitalism is also not Democracy.
The goal of the capitalist is monopoly. In that sense, capitalism and the free market are enemies. Now, if you're saying that a market needs to have competition and freedom to be of any benefit to you and I, I fully agree with you. Realize, however, that the only way it is ultimately maintained is by external pressure (through government regulation, for example). left to it's own devices, capitalism moves quickly to destroy competition and freedom, as can be easily observed in any industry that has been deregulated.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese government can get those problems fixed if they want to.
Yeah, $450. You said:
And now we are seeing many low cost full size laptops priced right around the netbook range of $400-$500.
And I noted that full sized laptops were available in that price range before netbooks even existed.
I'll also note that you can still buy plenty of netbook models for under $300. Just a few days ago a friend was asking me about one that he was considering for $275 (with HDD and Windows XP, sadly). I agree with your basic point, the price was a major consideration in my netbook purchase. The other considerations were size and weight, pre-installed Linux, and the solid state hard drive, but I probably wouldn't have bought it if it was over $400.
And yes, tablets also serve a particular niche. I'm not part of that niche, so I couldn't tell you what makes them so special; in fact I really can't think of a single reason I would buy one over a normal laptop, but some people seem to love them.
And now we are seeing many low cost full size laptops priced right around the netbook range of $400-$500. If this keeps up, the netbook segment is dead.
No, the segment of the netbook market that was just looking for a cheap laptop is dead. Really, it was dead from the get-go; stillborn, if you will. These are people who thought they were getting a real laptop for dirt cheap, then returned them and complained a bunch about how it wasn't a real laptop.
Besides, full sized laptops have been selling for as low as $450 since before any netbooks hit the market. If that was the real reason a netbook market exists, it would have been a non-starter.
The market that netbooks actually serve is still there, and is not going to be affected by the availability of cheap full-sized laptops. I actually bought a netbook and a full-sized laptop at the same time. They serve different purposes. I'm very happy with my laptop, right up to the point where I have to lug it around school for 12 hours. On the other hand, my netbook runs vim and gcc just great, and is acceptable for Openoffice and Mozilla, but I'm not keen to run either WoW or MATLAB on it.
Now, let me ask YOU this: can YOUR whiny ass carry a pack of shingles up a ladder in 100 degree sun? Have you ever even been ON a roof?
Yup. My dad's a contractor (the kind that actually works, not the well-dressed-sitting-in-the-nice-truck kind, don't trust those guys) and I worked in construction from age 12 to 24.
In my experience, the critique of the construction trade found in this article is not unjust. As a rule, folks don't get into construction by being brainy, and roofers are generally the bottom of the barrel. Yes, there are exceptions, and I'm sure your brother is one of them.
The registration is so you can access the publisher's online course materials. These may include all the quizzes and exams for the class. They usually have a way you can buy a registration in case you got a used book, but it's not cheap.
Well, your professor didn't think about it much then, or didn't bother to do any research on the subject. This guy seems to have figured it out just fine, with free downloads and print-on-demand from Lulu. I've had many other professors who offered just PDFs.
So he did, I missed that.
I don't know enough about graphics to know how often floats are used, but you'll have the same issues anytime you have numbers that are close to zero.
I think you'd be surprised how quickly rounding errors can compound. You might not see it much when doing graphics, but for scientific apps it's a huge problem.
For some reason, people seemed to care about the disabled at one point, and provided wheel-chair access everywhere, at great expense to business. Why is there no outcry for the blind and visually impaired? If Amazon wins this, and they wind up as the only source for many books, many people will be hurt. Fuck them.
Most people "care" because certain individuals have made careers of bringing ADA lawsuits against those who don't provide wheelchair access. If you want Amazon to change its practices, bring an ADA lawsuit against them.
Really? There was an argument in there about why kids should be spending class time learning cursive rather than devoting more time to other subjects? I sure didn't see it. In fact, you seem to have completely avoided the actual topic of this thread, and only tangentially addressed the argument I made.
I'll agree with you about the meat thing, but I think it mostly has to do with poverty. I've been seeing a lady from Kunming, and she certainly eats meat when she has the opportunity. When she brings me food, it's almost entirely meat. She likes vegetables too, but she tells stories about pretending to be sick when she was a kid so she could get a little more (or any) meat with her dinner. She's also quite disturbed by my taste for raw vegetables (I'm a huge fan Vietnamese food in general, but particularly bun, as well as sushi and bi-bim-bap).
I'll agree that the GP is clearly more familiar with Cantonese food than other regional cuisines, but I don't think his general assessment of the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese food is that far off. Kunming is very close to the China-Vietnam border, but the tastes are quite different. Vietnamese incorporate a lot of raw foods, particularly vegetables, and the Chinese are decidedly not into that.
Knowledge has progressed pretty fast in the last few decades, and there's just more information that's considered "basic education" these days. My daughter is expected to perform at a higher level in math than was expected of me at the same age, about three decades ago. The difference is somewhere around 1-2 grade levels, and you don't get that for free. She can do it, certainly, but without spending more classroom time on it, they're sacrificing depth of knowledge for mere exposure. However, they could fix that by taking a little time away from useless penmanship and spend a bit more of that valuable classroom time on something that's actually useful.
And what the fuck is up with the rest of your rant? You realized you didn't have a valid counter-argument, so you decided to go off on an ad hominem attack on the whole of US society? I especially enjoyed the base assertion red herring backed up by the argumentum ad populum. It seems we've found another topic that could be covered instead of wasting time on penmanship: how to construct a valid argument.
The TI-89 is amazing, and I only have the old version. The reason TI can charge so much for their inferior calculators is that most college math teachers know how amazing the TI-89 is and won't allow you to use it. Otherwise, no sane person would spend that amount of money on an 83/84/86.
I take extensive notes and have always printed while doing so. I fail to see any advantage of cursive in this situation.
That was the whole appeal to cursive: adding unnecessary pen strokes to make the letters look nice.
No, the idea of cursive script is that it's faster to write than disconnected block letters.
-jcr
No, it's faster if you happen to be using certain writing implements that almost no one even owns anymore, let alone actually uses.
Seriously, what's the big deal? So kids have to "spend time" learning to write cursive. What are they missing anyway then? What do you have to teach them in that time they're "losing"?
Math... Science... you know, all that stuff we're supposedly falling behind on because our kids aren't getting a decent grounding in them in elementary and middle school. Or hell, you could let them have PE everyday so they're a little less likely to be morbidly obese by the time they hit puberty. in short, there's no end of actually useful things they could be doing with the educational time that's currently being wasted on "proper handwriting".
The California Highway Patrol has required all caps for many years. They drill it into their cadets so hard at the academy that my ex-wife has written everything in all caps since her first week there.
Amen! As a math tutor for several years, I can't tell you how many times I've seen people completely screw up a problem simply because of their own sloppiness (messy handwriting, scratching out/overwriting instead of erasing, arranging their work in a non-linear fashion, etc). These days I write out every single step in painful detail, very neatly arranged for maximum readability.
If I do decide to become a teacher, I will follow the example of my Numerical Analysis professor and tell my students flat out, day one, that I will not waste my time trying to understand what they wrote. The purpose of writing is to communicate. If you can't be bothered to write legibly, don't bother writing at all.
If printing is so good, why don't people use Chinese?
You mean aside from the nearly 2 billion people who use some variant of the Chinese character set? I know a few of them. It doesn't seem to slow them down any.
Since much of this discussion revolves around speed, I see you've also been thinking that the picture-based Chinese alphabet offers superior encoding ratios to phonetic alphabets such as Roman and (also I believe) Japanese. What does this mean? A word that may be six to ten characters in Roman may be three characters in Japanese and just one character in China.
Japan has 4 characters sets that they use regularly:
Kanji is arguably the main one, and is essentially the Chinese character set. As far as number of characters used to express a concept it is exactly the same as Chinese* except for one thing: Chinese doesn't have verb tenses and Japanese does, so a Japanese person might add a couple of hiragana to express that. (There are other reasons Kanji doesn't really fit well with Japanese, but that's the main one relevant to this discussion).
Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic, and thus will still be more space-efficient than a phonetic system like ours. Hiragana and katakana map one-to-one, but hiragana is used for native Japanese words, while katakana is used for foreign words (mostly English).
Romanji I think is just used out of politeness for the benefit of us foreign barbarians. I'm sure you can figure out what it is if you don't already know.
* This assumes they express the concept in the same way, which may not be the case. See the differences between American and British English for examples.
If compact writing is so important to you, learn Chinese.It's much more compact than English, regardless of handwriting style.
As for your claims about the advantages of cursive: prove it. I deny them both.
That level of accuracy is a pretty compelling argument. Thank you, it's always a good day when I learn something cool.
Please explain how manual coordinates are more reliable than GPS and/or laser. I fully appreciate that value of being able to do it manually just in case, but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about here.
Cursive writing is NOT faster than printing. See what I did there? I defy you to prove otherwise.
Also, it IS less legible. That's why we don't teach people to read using cursive.