Not really, if you look at when Microsoft was actually a decent company (Win 95-XP including the early NTs) they actually innovated quite a bit. If you compared Windows 95 to System 7, Windows 95 pretty much won on -everything- and until OS X came out, Apple was pretty much terribly behind the times in -everything-. Of course once OS X was stable, Mac OS had the edge against Windows. But from the mid-90s until 2002-ish, Apple was a complete joke. Granted, Microsoft was copying parts of VMS, UNIX and the like to make NT better... But when it came to "consumer" operating systems, MS was king both in terms of user base and usability when compared to Apple (and back in 1995, Linux pretty much took a comp science degree to work).
The thing is I simply don't see why I would buy an iPad. For the price of an iPad I could get a decent-ish laptop, a good netbook with a physical keyboard, or a game console and a good phone. I simply don't see the need for something that has 40% of the functionality of a $300 laptop for a large price increase. For $200 or even $300, I could see myself getting one but for $500? I might as well get a decent-ish laptop. Other than perhaps flying, I can't think of a single situation where I'd need something larger than a cell phone but smaller than a laptop, and really, if you needed one, why not get a cheap netbook?
iOS makes sense on an iPod sized device, if you don't mind all the restrictions that come with an iPhone I suppose its good for a phone, but really what use is it to get a tablet? Heck, even an Android tablet really doesn't make sense simply because the idea of a tablet doesn't really make sense outside of a few specialized applications.
Netbooks got fans because they were small and cheap and had all the capabilities of a laptop in that they could run the same software. The tablet is pointless because its more expensive than a laptop and has 40% of the functionality of a laptop.
Exactly, I mean who really cares about "support" anymore? This isn't 1994 anymore, the average person can easily set up and use a computer, same things with IT people. If your IT person can't give support for basic electronic setup (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, etc) you should fire them.
Ballmer seems to be trying to imitate Steve Jobs recently... only instead of having both good ideas and terrible ideas Ballmer just imitates the bad ideas.
On the bright side though, at least Windows 7 with tablet-esque ad-ons would at least have programs and independence without having to sync -everything- like Windows CE does.
Really, MS needs to stop imitating Apple, tablets aren't the "next big thing" unless you can deliver workable software or have an army of fanboys willing to buy anything no matter how overpriced and how many features it lacks.
If MS is to release a tablet it needs to create a UI over-layer over Windows 7 and provide ways to use existing Windows programs and such easy on the device. If MS tries to create -yet- another similar yet incompatible OS, it will fail yet again. Lets see here what are all the OSes that MS has released devices for in the past year or two? We have Windows 7, the OS for the Zune, Windows Mobile, Whatever the kin ran, standard Windows CE, etc. Apple has 2 major OSes, OS X and iOS, and most programs for Linux are open source making porting pretty easy.
Actually he was President of the Continental Congress which bears little resemblance to the powers later conferred to those elected president of the USA. About the only thing they could really do was preside over meetings, in fact Henry Laurens resigned being the president of the continental congress because he lost basically all influence in debates and couldn't do anything.
The difference is that there are only a handful of solutions for the same problem when it comes to computer code and still make sense.
On the other hand there are tons of ways of conveying a simple fact in English, consider the statement that "George Washington was the first president of the US" the same statement might read that The first president of the US was George Washington. George Washington was elected as the first president of the US. The first president in office in the US was George Washington. And so on.
Not really because when was the last time you upgraded your firmware on it? In general "dumb" phones are pretty disposable, if there is a bug like this on a "dumb" phone (and, there are) the chances of getting it fixed are zero. With a smartphone, chances are there will be an update within the next month that corrects the issue.
Any issue in a "dumb" phone never gets fixed, issues in smartphones might though.
Right, and its also theft every-time I go into wal-mart take a look at HDTVs and don't buy one. Its also theft every-time I go to the book store and read a book. Etc.
Why is theft wrong? Theft is wrong because it deprives the person of an object. For example, if someone steals a car, the problem isn't that someone got a free car, the problem is that I don't have my car. If someone had a duplicator and wanted my car to duplicate, I'd let them because I wouldn't be deprived of property.
Theft is depriving someone of a physical, guaranteed good. Copyright infringement is not theft.
Well of course, after all Google is an evil corporation and your government is there to help you! Because Google is a corporation they must be evil right? And because a government is "democratically" elected it is utopian!
All your examples though require extra materials and a lot of time. I don't know of a single wi-fi router, even the ancient ones that don't support at least -some- form of encryption. Yes, it might be terribly weak and can be compromised by a cracker in a matter of seconds, but then the Google "problem" would be moot.
If I'm outside with a megaphone screaming a conversation from a driveway, can you really say that the conversation was private? Yet that is essentially what having an unencrypted wi-fi system is.
Your situations -might- make sense if it wasn't so easy to set up encryption! Soundproofing my house requires a large setback both in time, money and design. Not going near my windows requires a decline in what you can do with a house. What exactly is the drawback of encryption? There isn't any.
Then don't whine if some one records what you say in your house, you can't claim it's private if you don't use the technical tools available to you to protect it.
Soundproofing a house doesn't take 2 minutes and no extra material. If you could soundproof your house by flipping a switch, yeah, you would have some problems with it.
But it isn't even like soundproofing your house, having an unsecured wi-fi connection is akin to standing near an open window with a megaphone having a conversation, something like soundproofing your house is if you use weak encryption or common passwords, things that Google didn't bother to crack (and if I recall correctly, they didn't even intend to use a packet sniffer, it was just some debug code that got left in by mistake)
The problem with darknets is like you said, it requires trust. Networks based on trust can be great when they are small but end up crumbling at larger scales. How do you know that your neighbor isn't working for the government? How do you let someone in who wants to know "secrets" about China? On one hand you can't afford not letting people participate in a revolution because then the revolution will be too tiny and fail, on the other and you can't afford to let a government agent into your darknet and risk the lives of others.
Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr.
So how long till this gets either banned or heavily frowned upon in the "western" world?
Why is it that we are so happy to help Chinese, Iranian, North Korean and other dissidents get the word out and work against their censorship yet we (as in the government of the US and Europe) embrace censorship of our own networks?
One only needs to look at price to see why the N900 never caught on. People don't care that its unlocked too much, what they -do- care about is that a price of $650 was something that no one wants to pay for a phone. $100? People would have bought it. $200? People still might have bought it, $650 not subsidized? The average person doesn't want to pay that much for a phone.
When the average person sees that they can get an iPhone for $200, a BlackBerry for $100, an Android device for $100, a palm device for $100, a Windows Mobile device for $50 or the N900 for $650, people aren't going to buy it. People don't care that it is cheaper because you can use cheaper plans than the iPhone allows, they see an outrageous initial price and won't buy it.
In all honesty, the only people who buy their phones unsubsidized are geeks like you and me. The average person will never pay $650 outright for a phone.
I've heard that Nokia is big in Europe, but at least here in the USA its hard to get a Symbian phone or any Nokia phone save for dumb-phones. What Nokia really needs to do is create a really high-end phone, make it be multi-carrier and release it for all carriers subsidized in the US. Phones like the N900 are nice, but since you can't get them subsidized, it really harms adoption rates. In the US people expect their cell phones to appear to only cost nothing to $50 for a dumb-phone and $100-200 for a smartphone. Paying $650 for a phone is something that few people will do, if it was $200 subsidized, people would pick it up because at the time, the N900 was a really nice phone, but no one wants to pay $650 for it.
Nokia needs to get their act together by flooding the market with their phones. Heck, even abandon Symbian for a while and create Android phones, really, despite how much Nokia seems to love Symbian, it kinda fails when compared to Android, iOS and even WebOS.
You know, if they can make such a wildly successful film as Harry Potter appear to lose money, then suddenly all of the MPAA's statistics about piracy make sense!
It is the good teachers part that is hard. Just think about when you were in high school in a first-world country, how many of the teachers were actually good? How many actually knew much about the subject they were teaching. Now, if we can't even get good teachers in the first world for competitive pay and those teachers are highly educated, then how do you expect the third world to get good, accurate, and native teachers? With the internet, even though a teacher might not be an expert at some subject, the teacher -can- connect to experts and show their students it on their own laptop. Some things can't just be explained with pen and paper, for example, how would one explain the sound of an electric guitar to someone who has never heard it? Videos and the like are very good tools to cater to the uneducated masses, after all one only needs to look at the first world to see that. Books are also very expensive for what you get. The internet is nearly limitless when it comes to scale, if someone really wants to study something like Macroeconomics, you aren't going to get a good book that can walk someone through all stages of expertise from an introduction to advanced studies, but with the internet it is easy.
Each student is different and even the best first-world teachers aren't experts in everything, the internet lets them connect to experts to teach things beyond what they ordinarily could.
Exactly, and further on the point of improvement, I know for me the greatest learning experiences I have had is when technology didn't work out as planned. A screwed up update taught me how to restore a broken bootloader, a broken HDD taught me how to use unconventional methods to recover needed data (and to back up more frequently...) and problems with my wireless router taught me how to use DD-WRT and to configure various settings to help eliminate those problems.
Computers that work flawlessly might be nice, but they don't teach you anything more than how to consume and people don't really need taught that, they need to learn skills to help them make money and cut costs to get ahead.
According to various sources, 1,494,500. While that is a bit low when considering the 3 year span, it still is a pretty large number of kids who wouldn't have gotten any shot at technology otherwise.
So what benefit did that really have on your knowledge of computers? The OLPC isn't designed to be an expensive top of the line computer because how many do you think we could send? For the cheapest "standard" laptop you can buy which is around $300, you could send 2, perhaps 3 OLPCs to the third world. Did you go out and buy a Ferrari for your first car too?
"General" education isn't always needed in the third world, skills however are. Who cares if you can read Virgil in Latin, know all of the kings of England and have the periodic table memorized. However, if you can download a diagram of how to build a simple well and treat the water, that is useful. If you can find organic fertilizers that work to make the crop harvest better. If you can figure out more efficient ways of building huts, learn science to contradict harmful superstitious beliefs of your tribe, etc. you have something valuable.
General education is a luxury really only useful in the third world, for the rest of the world, skills are paramount, "education" doesn't matter.
...Ok, so what do -you- think we should be sending the third world? $999 Macbooks? $300 Celeron 900 cheap laptops? A $1,200 Core i7 notebook?
The OLPC makes -sense- because it is A) Cheap, B) Very readable in sunlight C) Is Linux-Based and puts a high priority on development and D) Has decent-ish specs.
Think of your first computer. Chances are, unless you were relatively wealthy when you got your first PC, it was a generic, low-end system, sometimes not even a compatible model to what was the "standard" of the time. For me, it was a Commodore 64 way after its prime and way after IBM-compatible systems were the standard. It taught me BASIC and the fundamentals of programming and computer use, could I get a job just by knowing that Commodore 64? No, but it set the foundation to make learning MS-DOS, Windows and later *Nix very easy.
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Not really, if you look at when Microsoft was actually a decent company (Win 95-XP including the early NTs) they actually innovated quite a bit. If you compared Windows 95 to System 7, Windows 95 pretty much won on -everything- and until OS X came out, Apple was pretty much terribly behind the times in -everything-. Of course once OS X was stable, Mac OS had the edge against Windows. But from the mid-90s until 2002-ish, Apple was a complete joke. Granted, Microsoft was copying parts of VMS, UNIX and the like to make NT better... But when it came to "consumer" operating systems, MS was king both in terms of user base and usability when compared to Apple (and back in 1995, Linux pretty much took a comp science degree to work).
The thing is I simply don't see why I would buy an iPad. For the price of an iPad I could get a decent-ish laptop, a good netbook with a physical keyboard, or a game console and a good phone. I simply don't see the need for something that has 40% of the functionality of a $300 laptop for a large price increase. For $200 or even $300, I could see myself getting one but for $500? I might as well get a decent-ish laptop. Other than perhaps flying, I can't think of a single situation where I'd need something larger than a cell phone but smaller than a laptop, and really, if you needed one, why not get a cheap netbook?
iOS makes sense on an iPod sized device, if you don't mind all the restrictions that come with an iPhone I suppose its good for a phone, but really what use is it to get a tablet? Heck, even an Android tablet really doesn't make sense simply because the idea of a tablet doesn't really make sense outside of a few specialized applications.
Netbooks got fans because they were small and cheap and had all the capabilities of a laptop in that they could run the same software. The tablet is pointless because its more expensive than a laptop and has 40% of the functionality of a laptop.
Exactly, I mean who really cares about "support" anymore? This isn't 1994 anymore, the average person can easily set up and use a computer, same things with IT people. If your IT person can't give support for basic electronic setup (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, etc) you should fire them.
Ballmer seems to be trying to imitate Steve Jobs recently... only instead of having both good ideas and terrible ideas Ballmer just imitates the bad ideas.
On the bright side though, at least Windows 7 with tablet-esque ad-ons would at least have programs and independence without having to sync -everything- like Windows CE does.
Really, MS needs to stop imitating Apple, tablets aren't the "next big thing" unless you can deliver workable software or have an army of fanboys willing to buy anything no matter how overpriced and how many features it lacks.
If MS is to release a tablet it needs to create a UI over-layer over Windows 7 and provide ways to use existing Windows programs and such easy on the device. If MS tries to create -yet- another similar yet incompatible OS, it will fail yet again. Lets see here what are all the OSes that MS has released devices for in the past year or two? We have Windows 7, the OS for the Zune, Windows Mobile, Whatever the kin ran, standard Windows CE, etc. Apple has 2 major OSes, OS X and iOS, and most programs for Linux are open source making porting pretty easy.
Actually he was President of the Continental Congress which bears little resemblance to the powers later conferred to those elected president of the USA. About the only thing they could really do was preside over meetings, in fact Henry Laurens resigned being the president of the continental congress because he lost basically all influence in debates and couldn't do anything.
But according to TFA, its all header files which are trivial pieces of code which are standardized more or less.
The difference is that there are only a handful of solutions for the same problem when it comes to computer code and still make sense.
On the other hand there are tons of ways of conveying a simple fact in English, consider the statement that "George Washington was the first president of the US" the same statement might read that The first president of the US was George Washington. George Washington was elected as the first president of the US. The first president in office in the US was George Washington. And so on.
Not really because when was the last time you upgraded your firmware on it? In general "dumb" phones are pretty disposable, if there is a bug like this on a "dumb" phone (and, there are) the chances of getting it fixed are zero. With a smartphone, chances are there will be an update within the next month that corrects the issue.
Any issue in a "dumb" phone never gets fixed, issues in smartphones might though.
SVG content makes up just 0.106% of all Web content, by my rough estimation. Flash is almost 5 times as common as SVG. That's pretty grim for SVG.
How is that "grim" for SVG? Flash isn't just used for vector graphics and animations anymore....
Right, and its also theft every-time I go into wal-mart take a look at HDTVs and don't buy one. Its also theft every-time I go to the book store and read a book. Etc.
Why is theft wrong? Theft is wrong because it deprives the person of an object. For example, if someone steals a car, the problem isn't that someone got a free car, the problem is that I don't have my car. If someone had a duplicator and wanted my car to duplicate, I'd let them because I wouldn't be deprived of property.
Theft is depriving someone of a physical, guaranteed good. Copyright infringement is not theft.
Well of course, after all Google is an evil corporation and your government is there to help you! Because Google is a corporation they must be evil right? And because a government is "democratically" elected it is utopian!
All your examples though require extra materials and a lot of time. I don't know of a single wi-fi router, even the ancient ones that don't support at least -some- form of encryption. Yes, it might be terribly weak and can be compromised by a cracker in a matter of seconds, but then the Google "problem" would be moot.
If I'm outside with a megaphone screaming a conversation from a driveway, can you really say that the conversation was private? Yet that is essentially what having an unencrypted wi-fi system is.
Your situations -might- make sense if it wasn't so easy to set up encryption! Soundproofing my house requires a large setback both in time, money and design. Not going near my windows requires a decline in what you can do with a house. What exactly is the drawback of encryption? There isn't any.
Then don't whine if some one records what you say in your house, you can't claim it's private if you don't use the technical tools available to you to protect it.
Soundproofing a house doesn't take 2 minutes and no extra material. If you could soundproof your house by flipping a switch, yeah, you would have some problems with it.
But it isn't even like soundproofing your house, having an unsecured wi-fi connection is akin to standing near an open window with a megaphone having a conversation, something like soundproofing your house is if you use weak encryption or common passwords, things that Google didn't bother to crack (and if I recall correctly, they didn't even intend to use a packet sniffer, it was just some debug code that got left in by mistake)
The problem with darknets is like you said, it requires trust. Networks based on trust can be great when they are small but end up crumbling at larger scales. How do you know that your neighbor isn't working for the government? How do you let someone in who wants to know "secrets" about China? On one hand you can't afford not letting people participate in a revolution because then the revolution will be too tiny and fail, on the other and you can't afford to let a government agent into your darknet and risk the lives of others.
Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr.
So how long till this gets either banned or heavily frowned upon in the "western" world?
Why is it that we are so happy to help Chinese, Iranian, North Korean and other dissidents get the word out and work against their censorship yet we (as in the government of the US and Europe) embrace censorship of our own networks?
One only needs to look at price to see why the N900 never caught on. People don't care that its unlocked too much, what they -do- care about is that a price of $650 was something that no one wants to pay for a phone. $100? People would have bought it. $200? People still might have bought it, $650 not subsidized? The average person doesn't want to pay that much for a phone.
When the average person sees that they can get an iPhone for $200, a BlackBerry for $100, an Android device for $100, a palm device for $100, a Windows Mobile device for $50 or the N900 for $650, people aren't going to buy it. People don't care that it is cheaper because you can use cheaper plans than the iPhone allows, they see an outrageous initial price and won't buy it.
In all honesty, the only people who buy their phones unsubsidized are geeks like you and me. The average person will never pay $650 outright for a phone.
I've heard that Nokia is big in Europe, but at least here in the USA its hard to get a Symbian phone or any Nokia phone save for dumb-phones. What Nokia really needs to do is create a really high-end phone, make it be multi-carrier and release it for all carriers subsidized in the US. Phones like the N900 are nice, but since you can't get them subsidized, it really harms adoption rates. In the US people expect their cell phones to appear to only cost nothing to $50 for a dumb-phone and $100-200 for a smartphone. Paying $650 for a phone is something that few people will do, if it was $200 subsidized, people would pick it up because at the time, the N900 was a really nice phone, but no one wants to pay $650 for it.
Nokia needs to get their act together by flooding the market with their phones. Heck, even abandon Symbian for a while and create Android phones, really, despite how much Nokia seems to love Symbian, it kinda fails when compared to Android, iOS and even WebOS.
Yes it was a typo, stupid /. not letting you edit your posts...
You know, if they can make such a wildly successful film as Harry Potter appear to lose money, then suddenly all of the MPAA's statistics about piracy make sense!
It is the good teachers part that is hard. Just think about when you were in high school in a first-world country, how many of the teachers were actually good? How many actually knew much about the subject they were teaching. Now, if we can't even get good teachers in the first world for competitive pay and those teachers are highly educated, then how do you expect the third world to get good, accurate, and native teachers? With the internet, even though a teacher might not be an expert at some subject, the teacher -can- connect to experts and show their students it on their own laptop. Some things can't just be explained with pen and paper, for example, how would one explain the sound of an electric guitar to someone who has never heard it? Videos and the like are very good tools to cater to the uneducated masses, after all one only needs to look at the first world to see that. Books are also very expensive for what you get. The internet is nearly limitless when it comes to scale, if someone really wants to study something like Macroeconomics, you aren't going to get a good book that can walk someone through all stages of expertise from an introduction to advanced studies, but with the internet it is easy.
Each student is different and even the best first-world teachers aren't experts in everything, the internet lets them connect to experts to teach things beyond what they ordinarily could.
Exactly, and further on the point of improvement, I know for me the greatest learning experiences I have had is when technology didn't work out as planned. A screwed up update taught me how to restore a broken bootloader, a broken HDD taught me how to use unconventional methods to recover needed data (and to back up more frequently...) and problems with my wireless router taught me how to use DD-WRT and to configure various settings to help eliminate those problems.
Computers that work flawlessly might be nice, but they don't teach you anything more than how to consume and people don't really need taught that, they need to learn skills to help them make money and cut costs to get ahead.
According to various sources, 1,494,500. While that is a bit low when considering the 3 year span, it still is a pretty large number of kids who wouldn't have gotten any shot at technology otherwise.
So what benefit did that really have on your knowledge of computers? The OLPC isn't designed to be an expensive top of the line computer because how many do you think we could send? For the cheapest "standard" laptop you can buy which is around $300, you could send 2, perhaps 3 OLPCs to the third world. Did you go out and buy a Ferrari for your first car too?
"General" education isn't always needed in the third world, skills however are. Who cares if you can read Virgil in Latin, know all of the kings of England and have the periodic table memorized. However, if you can download a diagram of how to build a simple well and treat the water, that is useful. If you can find organic fertilizers that work to make the crop harvest better. If you can figure out more efficient ways of building huts, learn science to contradict harmful superstitious beliefs of your tribe, etc. you have something valuable.
General education is a luxury really only useful in the third world, for the rest of the world, skills are paramount, "education" doesn't matter.
...Ok, so what do -you- think we should be sending the third world? $999 Macbooks? $300 Celeron 900 cheap laptops? A $1,200 Core i7 notebook?
The OLPC makes -sense- because it is A) Cheap, B) Very readable in sunlight C) Is Linux-Based and puts a high priority on development and D) Has decent-ish specs.
Think of your first computer. Chances are, unless you were relatively wealthy when you got your first PC, it was a generic, low-end system, sometimes not even a compatible model to what was the "standard" of the time. For me, it was a Commodore 64 way after its prime and way after IBM-compatible systems were the standard. It taught me BASIC and the fundamentals of programming and computer use, could I get a job just by knowing that Commodore 64? No, but it set the foundation to make learning MS-DOS, Windows and later *Nix very easy.