It's not removing any more pixels than normal resizing or cropping would, it's just doing it such that the least important ones are removed first. Instead of:
he uic bownfoxjumed verthelaz yelowdog
You get:
Th qik brwn fx jmpd ovr th lzy ylo dog
Which reduces the total size by the same amount, but retains more information than treating every bit of information the same.
Not at the moment, but I'm saying that if this really catches on and a lot of people end up buying the iPhone without the contract (and it should be pretty easy to count the number of sales vs. activations), they'll change their standard operating procedure to make you to sign the contract in store. AT&T has some standard paperwork that they give to authorized resellers for new customers to sign. Apple might not like the "experience" of signing paper (how 20th century!), but I doubt either company likes "losing money" very much.
Moral of the story: if you want to get an unlocked iPhone without a contract, get one now before they close the loophole.
A lot of people want to split hairs in regards to what "subsidizing" really means and whether it applies to the iPhone. They like to make a lot of hay about how the iPhone's initial price tag is more than the cost to manufacture the phone, but really all that proves is that Apple has a hefty profit margin. Rest assured, just like every other phone sold with a contract, a portion of your monthly bill is allocated to pay for the phone and ends up in Apple's pocket.
On your other point, you can indeed walk out of a Apple store with an iPhone without signing up for a contract with AT&T. However it's dead until you activate it and activation is supposed to require you to sign up for the 2-year contract. There are a few hacks around that, apparently. My estimation is that if any of this actually catches on, they'll soon make it so you have to sign up for the contract in store.
Metered bandwidth would be like going back to the X.25 connections of old (and similar old tech), where you'd pay depending on how much data you sent. We're on the same page. That's what I want.
Let's just say bandwidth bills could easily get outrageous if they decide that 2 GiB is a reasonable "average" monthly transfer amount and that $60 is what the "average" customer is paying now... Some quick greedy-telco-math and you now have to pay 3 cents/MiB. Which doesn't sound much until you transfer 20 gigs one month and have to pay $600 for it. Your ISP gets charged by their upstream provider for the bandwidth you use, so somebody has to pay that $600. The current situation merely spreads the cost over time and to other customers. Why is that any better?
Let me just say, as a european who suffered under pay-per-minute modem connections until 1998, don't let them meter you, they will abuse it and hang on to it because it's more profitable than flat fees. If we had healthy competition, they'd only get away with charging you a fair market price for the service you receive. Without healthy competition, they can screw you over no matter how your bill is calculated.
Am I the only one who thinks metered bandwidth would be a good idea? It would put an end to all the games they play with bandwidth caps and traffic shaping to keep you from actually using the service. They'd be tripping over themselves to make enough bandwidth available so you'd never see a slowdown. If you normally only do some light browsing, you'd normally pay very little, but the raw speed would be there on the rare occasion that you needed it. If you're a heavy user, you'd pay more, but the ISP would do everything they could to make you happy and give you as much bandwidth as you could handle. And somewhere in the middle is the average user who winds up paying effectively the same price. As a final side benefit, trojans and zombie botnets would fall off if users actually had an incentive to police their own traffic.
You pay for what you use with practically every other utility. I don't see why Internet access should be any different.
If you have a magic crystal ball to say that Johnny is going to grow up to be a truck driver or a painter or marketing executive, then fine, by all means take him out of higher math classes. The problem is "Johnny sucks at math" is not really a statement of fact, but rather a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's reinforced by a succession of math classes where Johnny didn't quite understand the concepts, so he has trouble with further concepts that use the earlier ones as a foundation, which are in turn the foundation for other concepts, and so on. If the schools did a better job of putting a stop to that downward spiral, I expect you'd see far fewer people complaining about not being "a Math person".
I have no qualms with the notion that a student has to make a decision about what kind of life they want and what kind of education they need to get there at some point. The only issue is when they make that decision. Some students have a very clear idea of what they want very early on. Some think they do, only to change their minds later (and many times over). Most have no idea whatsoever. They only know that math class is hard and boring and they'd rather not do it. So the question becomes: if you give them the option now, what options are you taking from them in the future?
Local advertising is the reason a-la-carte cable will never happen. Your local cable co can sell advertising on all those channels you'd rather not pay for. If you can't shut it off, chances are you'll watch them every once in a while rather than never. Some channels are paid for almost entirely by ad revenue, so there's no reason not to give them to you.
And why should a student weak in math be encouraged to pursue it? So that maybe they'll get better at it? It's true that not everyone will become a scientist or an engineer (or an artist, or a writer), but if you focus too narrowly too early, you end up limiting their options later in life.
My impression of the NetFlix service is that it tracked how much of each movie you actually watched. That is, if you only watch the first 5 minutes of a movie and decide it's crap, only 5 minutes of your 18 hours gets deducted. And if you watch the movie twice, you get charged twice.
So the question is how much time do you get charged with this scheme? Can you download the entire movie without "watching" it?
Again, you're disregarding the monetary value of design. You are psychologically prone to a continuing failure to see the distinction. And you are psychologically prone not to read the sentence you've quoted back to me. Here, I'll repeat it for you: They simply care more about getting a product that has the functionality they want at a price they can afford. Did you notice that I said they cared more about functionality than aesthetics, rather than not at all?
You gave it away when you said "a computer, not a fashion accessory," as if there should be a distinction between the two--and now you're trying to backpedal from it. There's little difference between appliances and fashion accessories. There is a distinction. A computer in a cardboard box is still a computer. If you wanted to cut costs to make the cheapest computer you can, you could completely eliminate aesthetic design for the sake of lowering the price. On the other hand, if you strip away all the functionality and leave only the design, what you are left with is a fashion accessory, not a computer. If you are buying a computer and the most important feature for you is the design, then you buying a fashion accessory that happens to be a computer as well.
That's a really silly question to ask the user at install. If you had to answer all questions of that level of significance, it would take forever. ("Do you want version 0.8.5 of this library or 0.9.1? 0.9.1 has more features but is less compatible...") Let the distro pick a sensible default and have users who know or care about it change it later for themselves.
The only real question is whether noatime or relatime make for a more sensible default.
Again I see you're taking issue with things I didn't say. Did I say that economy PC users don't care at all about aesthetics? They simply care more about getting a product that has the functionality they want at a price they can afford. That's how I define the "economy PC market". If you still don't get what I mean, look up the word "economical".
As for nit-picking the difference between "huge" and "probably most", I really don't care. It suffices it to say that it's a significant portion of the market. You are simply manufacturing a debate where none exists.
This time it was more or less deliberate. I used "your personal expectations" as a way of rephrasing "all the skills that the workforce needs them to in order to hit the ground running". I said that because there is no universal set of "basics" that all people can agree upon. You can better prepare a student if you're willing to limit the scope and cut out some breadth for the sake of depth, but obviously there are problems with that. Universities have to walk a tight rope in this regard, which is not easy.
No, it represents most of the economy PC market. It's a huge market segment and Apple doesn't care about them. What an odd thing to say. It represents the entirety of the economy PC market by definition. As you admit, it's huge portion of the PC market as a whole, which is not far off from saying that it's probably most of the market. So you've basically added the word "No" and repeated what I said back to me. I don't see how you think that contradicts anything I've said.
Quite obviously Apple is targeting people who care more about appearance than price and I don't have any problem with that. My point was only to rephrase the GP's spin to counter this notion that who buy non-Apple PCs are hillbilly troglodytes who want something to "match my velvet Elvis poster."
No offense, but I didn't misinterpret your statement. You may have meant to say that college graduates don't meet your personal expectations, but it came out as college students are below-average programmers.
Regardless, the average programmer, the seasoned veteran, and even the god-like expert all started as new programmers at some point. There's nothing wrong with hiring a recent grad as long as you understand what you're getting and you're willing to be patient. Quite obviously, that's not going to work in some environments and you wouldn't pay the same as you would for a more experienced programmer. If the grad wants too much money for the skills he brings to the table, go hire someone else. It's that simple really.
Option two might be better expressed as "I want something that does what I need at a reasonable price because I'm buying a computer not a fashion accessory" and it probably represents most of the home PC market.
I think the writing on the wall is apparent -- the average graduate is a below-average programmer. Are there other disciplines where college graduates can realistically be expected to contribute on par with a seasoned veteran? Your statement strikes me as flatly absurd: of course new programmers are going to be below average, because we all acknowledge that the quality of a programmer is highly correlated with his experience. The average programmer has experience that the average college graduate doesn't. Even if we changed the system to better prepare college students, they're always going to be lagging behind someone who's been doing it for several years. To expect anything else is ludicrous.
In my street, at least two out of every three mailboxes carry a "no advertisement, please" label. Wait, does that work? I get a packet of advertisements twice a week from two different mass mailers. I'm not sure the postman is allowed to discriminate based on the type of mail. The post office surely makes a bunch of money on it.
I'm sure that if DIVX had survived for much longer, it would have been cracked eventually. Using Triple DES was surely smarter than using CSS, but DIVX ultimately has the same problem as every other form of DRM: in order to access the content legitimately, they have to give you the key. Once you have the key, you can do whatever you want with it.
SACD has likely also benefited from its lack of popularity, but probably more so because it can't be read by a PC optical drive. And as you said, it appears that the digital audio stream is not encrypted prior to conversion. That may be beyond the capabilities of most users, but if content of any value were released exclusively on SACD, you would only need one person to release it to everyone else.
This could not be done in a timely enough manner (i.e. in real time) to make it worthwhile, though, which is why no one does it. Sure they do. Grab a DirecTiVo unit off of eBay, hack it and you can download recorded shows in a DRM-free format. You'll still have to pay DirecTV to access the video in the first place, but as you rightly point out that really isn't DRM.
DRM is about letting you have the content while preventing you from doing anything with it. DirecTV is a pretty good example that even though they can prevent you from getting the content, they can't control what you do with it once you have it.
You see, the thing is NOT that Vista is broken but that other software breaks on Vista. You see the difference? The exact same thing happened when companies started to migrate to 2000 and XP. Perfect backwards compatibility is rare.
Over time, the legacy applications will be updated to support Vista and new applications will be developed that only work on Vista. (Even if it's some silly dependency that isn't really necessary.) Perfect forward compatibility is even rarer.
After a while, businesses will switch. We've heard all of these complaints before with each Windows release, yet strangely Windows 95 machines are nowhere to be found.
I believe that students and parents are being deceived when they sign up for academic education and get a curriculum driven by industry. Like I was getting at with the steak/hamburger analogy, the only reason to be concerned about being deceived is if you end up with the short end of the stick. No one complains when the bank gives them extra money, so the fact that you're complaining clearly indicates that you feel these hypothetical students are getting the short end.
The reason is self-evident: those that do use the words interchangeably are either confused themselves, or intend to confuse others. Why else would there be such active efforts to perpetuate the confusion? I deny that there are any such active efforts. As I pointed out, my university actively promotes itself as a "hands-on" school, though they clearly avoid the term "vocational" because it has negative connotations. They are not attempting to mislead anyone about the nature of the education they offer and I deny that anyone is really being misled. If students are driving the change to more practical education, as you conceded, then how could they be misled?
As for the meaning of "academic", yeah, I do have a hard time getting worked up about a word. Words are how we use them, so if people use it to mean "relating to a school" in general, then that's what it means. It also means "relating to studies that are liberal or classical rather than technical or vocational", in the context of contrasting it with technical or vocational education. But getting upset over whether or not people use it "correctly" is just silly.
Associating the two is not wrong, but calling vocational training (no matter how advanced) "academic" is deceptive and wrong. This is what I'm talking about. Filling in a car's body with bondo, adding a fresh coat of paint and selling it as "lighty used" is deceptive and wrong. On the other hand, if I order a hamburger and the waiter accidentally brings me a steak for the same price, I'm probably not going to complain. It's hard not to take from statements like this that you think (1) that some students are being deceived about the nature of the education they're receiving and (2) that receiving vocational training instead of a purely academic education is somehow inferior. I don't buy that #1 is happening at all and you've ostensibly gone out of your way to stress the importance of vocational education in contrast to #2. So I'm a bit confused.
It doesn't erode the institution, it erodes the concept of academic education in general. I'm fine if the two are associated, and I'm fine if they even happen at the same place. But let's call things what they are: if you are training for a job, don't call it "academic". Here you seem to be arguing for to preserve what you think the word means, in contrast to what others mean when they use. That's a pretty weak semantic argument. If the definition of "academic" has changed, then what of it? Further, it's not really clear to me that universities are really abusing the term the way you claim. The university I attended was very upfront and in fact proud of the hands-on rather than theoretical education they offered. They never made a big deal about being an "academic institution", whereas "Learn by Doing" is literally the school's motto.
What's happening to erode academia is that we're reintroducing those external pressures: companies, fads, products, and technologies driving the curriculum which destroys the academic aspect of the education. Students no doubt like having a curriculum that tries to prepare them for the work they'll actually be doing. They seek out the schools that offer that, with full knowledge of what they're getting. If there is a change in that regard, it's because the students are driving it.
You said that a vocational school sounds less impressive. I inferred that you thought this was how things should be, that vocational schools are less impressive. Referring to the conflation as a "fraud" also implies that some great wrong is being done by associating the two. Why should we stress the difference between an engineering student and an art student?
You also keep implying that vocational education erodes academic institutions, but I don't see and clear reasoning why it would. It reminds me of the common argument against gay marriage: if gay people are allowed to marry, then traditional marriage is somehow threatened. As if people are somehow being "tricked" into being gay or going to a vocational school. But I think everybody knows what they're getting into when they check the Engineering box instead of the Liberal Arts box.
On top of that, I don't quite buy that there's a significant distinction between the majors anyway. Some people major in art hoping to become a painter or graphic artist, literature to become writers, or biology to become doctors. I don't think many people are going to university for the fun of it. They're looking for tools they can use in their lives.
Universities are for academic education. In all honesty, the world needs a lot more people with vocational training than "pure" academics. Not all of us can be research scientists or university professors.
I'm guess I'm asking why you think going to school to start a career in the business world is any less important than going to school to a start a career in academia.
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It's not removing any more pixels than normal resizing or cropping would, it's just doing it such that the least important ones are removed first. Instead of:
he uic bownfoxjumed verthelaz yelowdog
You get:
Th qik brwn fx jmpd ovr th lzy ylo dog
Which reduces the total size by the same amount, but retains more information than treating every bit of information the same.
Not at the moment, but I'm saying that if this really catches on and a lot of people end up buying the iPhone without the contract (and it should be pretty easy to count the number of sales vs. activations), they'll change their standard operating procedure to make you to sign the contract in store. AT&T has some standard paperwork that they give to authorized resellers for new customers to sign. Apple might not like the "experience" of signing paper (how 20th century!), but I doubt either company likes "losing money" very much.
Moral of the story: if you want to get an unlocked iPhone without a contract, get one now before they close the loophole.
A lot of people want to split hairs in regards to what "subsidizing" really means and whether it applies to the iPhone. They like to make a lot of hay about how the iPhone's initial price tag is more than the cost to manufacture the phone, but really all that proves is that Apple has a hefty profit margin. Rest assured, just like every other phone sold with a contract, a portion of your monthly bill is allocated to pay for the phone and ends up in Apple's pocket.
On your other point, you can indeed walk out of a Apple store with an iPhone without signing up for a contract with AT&T. However it's dead until you activate it and activation is supposed to require you to sign up for the 2-year contract. There are a few hacks around that, apparently. My estimation is that if any of this actually catches on, they'll soon make it so you have to sign up for the contract in store.
Am I the only one who thinks metered bandwidth would be a good idea? It would put an end to all the games they play with bandwidth caps and traffic shaping to keep you from actually using the service. They'd be tripping over themselves to make enough bandwidth available so you'd never see a slowdown. If you normally only do some light browsing, you'd normally pay very little, but the raw speed would be there on the rare occasion that you needed it. If you're a heavy user, you'd pay more, but the ISP would do everything they could to make you happy and give you as much bandwidth as you could handle. And somewhere in the middle is the average user who winds up paying effectively the same price. As a final side benefit, trojans and zombie botnets would fall off if users actually had an incentive to police their own traffic.
You pay for what you use with practically every other utility. I don't see why Internet access should be any different.
If you have a magic crystal ball to say that Johnny is going to grow up to be a truck driver or a painter or marketing executive, then fine, by all means take him out of higher math classes. The problem is "Johnny sucks at math" is not really a statement of fact, but rather a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's reinforced by a succession of math classes where Johnny didn't quite understand the concepts, so he has trouble with further concepts that use the earlier ones as a foundation, which are in turn the foundation for other concepts, and so on. If the schools did a better job of putting a stop to that downward spiral, I expect you'd see far fewer people complaining about not being "a Math person".
I have no qualms with the notion that a student has to make a decision about what kind of life they want and what kind of education they need to get there at some point. The only issue is when they make that decision. Some students have a very clear idea of what they want very early on. Some think they do, only to change their minds later (and many times over). Most have no idea whatsoever. They only know that math class is hard and boring and they'd rather not do it. So the question becomes: if you give them the option now, what options are you taking from them in the future?
Local advertising is the reason a-la-carte cable will never happen. Your local cable co can sell advertising on all those channels you'd rather not pay for. If you can't shut it off, chances are you'll watch them every once in a while rather than never. Some channels are paid for almost entirely by ad revenue, so there's no reason not to give them to you.
My impression of the NetFlix service is that it tracked how much of each movie you actually watched. That is, if you only watch the first 5 minutes of a movie and decide it's crap, only 5 minutes of your 18 hours gets deducted. And if you watch the movie twice, you get charged twice.
So the question is how much time do you get charged with this scheme? Can you download the entire movie without "watching" it?
That's a really silly question to ask the user at install. If you had to answer all questions of that level of significance, it would take forever. ("Do you want version 0.8.5 of this library or 0.9.1? 0.9.1 has more features but is less compatible...") Let the distro pick a sensible default and have users who know or care about it change it later for themselves.
The only real question is whether noatime or relatime make for a more sensible default.
Again I see you're taking issue with things I didn't say. Did I say that economy PC users don't care at all about aesthetics? They simply care more about getting a product that has the functionality they want at a price they can afford. That's how I define the "economy PC market". If you still don't get what I mean, look up the word "economical".
As for nit-picking the difference between "huge" and "probably most", I really don't care. It suffices it to say that it's a significant portion of the market. You are simply manufacturing a debate where none exists.
This time it was more or less deliberate. I used "your personal expectations" as a way of rephrasing "all the skills that the workforce needs them to in order to hit the ground running". I said that because there is no universal set of "basics" that all people can agree upon. You can better prepare a student if you're willing to limit the scope and cut out some breadth for the sake of depth, but obviously there are problems with that. Universities have to walk a tight rope in this regard, which is not easy.
Quite obviously Apple is targeting people who care more about appearance than price and I don't have any problem with that. My point was only to rephrase the GP's spin to counter this notion that who buy non-Apple PCs are hillbilly troglodytes who want something to "match my velvet Elvis poster."
No offense, but I didn't misinterpret your statement. You may have meant to say that college graduates don't meet your personal expectations, but it came out as college students are below-average programmers.
Regardless, the average programmer, the seasoned veteran, and even the god-like expert all started as new programmers at some point. There's nothing wrong with hiring a recent grad as long as you understand what you're getting and you're willing to be patient. Quite obviously, that's not going to work in some environments and you wouldn't pay the same as you would for a more experienced programmer. If the grad wants too much money for the skills he brings to the table, go hire someone else. It's that simple really.
Option two might be better expressed as "I want something that does what I need at a reasonable price because I'm buying a computer not a fashion accessory" and it probably represents most of the home PC market.
I'm sure that if DIVX had survived for much longer, it would have been cracked eventually. Using Triple DES was surely smarter than using CSS, but DIVX ultimately has the same problem as every other form of DRM: in order to access the content legitimately, they have to give you the key. Once you have the key, you can do whatever you want with it.
SACD has likely also benefited from its lack of popularity, but probably more so because it can't be read by a PC optical drive. And as you said, it appears that the digital audio stream is not encrypted prior to conversion. That may be beyond the capabilities of most users, but if content of any value were released exclusively on SACD, you would only need one person to release it to everyone else.
DRM is about letting you have the content while preventing you from doing anything with it. DirecTV is a pretty good example that even though they can prevent you from getting the content, they can't control what you do with it once you have it.
Over time, the legacy applications will be updated to support Vista and new applications will be developed that only work on Vista. (Even if it's some silly dependency that isn't really necessary.) Perfect forward compatibility is even rarer.
After a while, businesses will switch. We've heard all of these complaints before with each Windows release, yet strangely Windows 95 machines are nowhere to be found.
As for the meaning of "academic", yeah, I do have a hard time getting worked up about a word. Words are how we use them, so if people use it to mean "relating to a school" in general, then that's what it means. It also means "relating to studies that are liberal or classical rather than technical or vocational", in the context of contrasting it with technical or vocational education. But getting upset over whether or not people use it "correctly" is just silly.
You said that a vocational school sounds less impressive. I inferred that you thought this was how things should be, that vocational schools are less impressive. Referring to the conflation as a "fraud" also implies that some great wrong is being done by associating the two. Why should we stress the difference between an engineering student and an art student?
You also keep implying that vocational education erodes academic institutions, but I don't see and clear reasoning why it would. It reminds me of the common argument against gay marriage: if gay people are allowed to marry, then traditional marriage is somehow threatened. As if people are somehow being "tricked" into being gay or going to a vocational school. But I think everybody knows what they're getting into when they check the Engineering box instead of the Liberal Arts box.
On top of that, I don't quite buy that there's a significant distinction between the majors anyway. Some people major in art hoping to become a painter or graphic artist, literature to become writers, or biology to become doctors. I don't think many people are going to university for the fun of it. They're looking for tools they can use in their lives.
I'm guess I'm asking why you think going to school to start a career in the business world is any less important than going to school to a start a career in academia.