Best quote out of that: "And for the record, this is what praying to Budda will get you. Let the record show that God did not put any earthquakes or tsunamis in America."
Apparently, California, Oregon and Washington (state) do not exist to these lunatics? Those areas are capable of matching anywhere in the world when it comes to massive earthquake potential.
Indeed. I think the rest of the developed world looked at what happened with Katrina and scratched their heads. I have to admit I was surprised, having grown up knowing that the US was the world's richest country and all. But compare the recovery effort after Katrina with recovery efforts in other recent disasters affecting affluent developed nations.
I particularly think of the recent flooding (and category 5 cyclone/hurricane) in Australia, which inundated a stupendously large area (larger than Texas) including a major city with a population greater than that of New Orleans. As the disaster unfolded, teams from around the country were immediately working around the clock to ship food and supplies to the affected areas. The Army evacuated areas cut off by the water. Random people who happened to own private helicopters used them to help airdrop food. Police cracked down early on any reports of looting. Virtually every citizen in the affected areas took to the streets the next day and started cleaning debris around the city - not just in their own streets but anywhere in the city, often helping complete strangers. A lot of houses will have to be condemned and destroyed in Brisbane, but I guarantee that after 2 years everything will be rebuilt, looking shiny, new and better than ever. Yet years after Katrina there are still areas of Louisiana that look like a bomb just hit them. And a death toll of over ~1600 people~ in a developed country for a foreseeable event where adequate warning was available is still unbelievable to me to this day.
I also think of the recent New Zealand earthquake, which while much smaller than today's quake in Japan, still showed that the NZ Govt. was well prepared and the plans kicked in and did their job well. Red tape was cleared for aid and quake experts from other countries in the area (interestingly enough, including Japan) to be immediately shipped into NZ and they were on the ground within 24 hours. Etc.
In comparison the response in the US to Katrina seemed flat footed, as if they were caught off-guard in the aftermath of the storm and didn't quite know who was in charge. Help eventually came but it took far longer than you would expect. In fact, many other countries offered their own expertise and people and were willing and able to get their resources deployed immediately... but the US refused international assistance.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who seeks to criticise the US at every opportunity like some on here. But I genuinely think this was not one of America's finest hours and the critical comparison with other developed nations' response to things like this is warranted.
Not everyone is on a plan that costs a set minimum amount per month. Generally these kind of 'minimum cost' plans exist for people who didn't buy their phone outright up front, and are thus paying it off in monthly fees over a 2-year (or whatever) contract. These kind of plans are the norm in the US as I understand it, but the exception in many other places. The answers in this Ask Slashdot could thus prove useful for many people.
I'm reading this thread with interest, because if I make zero calls in a month, my bill that month will be zero. I also pay for the data I use...but I can assure you that the cost of the x MB of data for a call of given length over VoIP is an order of magnitude less expensive than placing the call directly over the cell network.
So provided I make at least 1 second worth of calls, I would save money.
Interesting that SIP would be so bad over cellular data. I use Skype over cellular data (even with video!) quite regularly and it seems fine to me. Obviously Skype is a different protocol but I generally thought that SIP was THE de facto standard for VoIP and Skype was a crappy proprietary protocol (which makes it less attractive to me).
Yeah 7 is pretty good. I use it at home and have been very happy with it. Most of my comments relate to XP, since the last time my parents bought a computer was when 7 had only just been released and I was replacing a previous XP machine.
However the crapware argument still applies. 7 comes loaded down with as much as ever, if you buy from one of the big manufacturers. This doesn't apply to my personal machines because I buld them myself, but my parents live a long way away and it wasn't practical for me to build one for them.
The other thing is that, even with no stability or virus problems at all, Windows generally gets more 'random looking popups' than Mac OS. Just a few a days ago my mother-in-law emailed us freaking out about 'some message about protection and viruses OMG'. Upon further investigation, it was just the AV software wanting its definitions updated. But Flash, Java, and many other pieces of software pop up 'please upgrade me' boxes at random times too. Whereas on a Mac things never pop up randomly, and updates are done through a single central update manager.
Again, I have no personal love of Macs and still buy PCs myself. But buying Macs for my tech-incompetent family has objectively (and massively) reduced the amount of my time taken up with investigating or fixing things (I won't say 'problems', because 75% of the time it isn't actually a problem, just them not knowing what some random dialog box means).
I'm under no illusions that Mac is any more secure than any other OS. It's simply that it's less targeted and the software is generally more stable. I made sure my parents and my sister got Macbooks last time they got a computer. Not because I'm a particular Apple fan (I don't own any Apple computers myself), but because it's basically set and forget as far as support is concerned. I haven't had to fix anything on them yet, whereas with Windows something would happen fairly regularly.
On top of that most brand name PCs ship loaded up with crapware. I always remove it obviously, but making sure my family got Macs meant less work for me. Didn't need anything other than a quick system update out of the box, and no crapware in sight. That alone is worth good money to me.
I go with a whitelist approach. My browser is set to deny all cookies except those specifically allowed.
The way I identified which ones to allow is by turning cookies on to 'accept all except third party', using the web as normal for a few days, then observing which cookies had been written. After filtering out the obvious ones that I didn't need, I added the rest to the whitelist. These are all from sites that I have to log into obviously, so I have [*.]slashdot.org, mail.google.com, etc.
Only downside is if I register for a new forum or something I have to remember to add it to the whitelist, but that's OK. Means I can browse the web knowing I'm not accepting cookies except for those I explicitly need to remain logged into stuff.
Sounds like you've had a bad run with hardware in the past. I honestly can't remember the last time I had any form of driver problem on a PC... would probably have been the early XP era. Provided you are buying even vaguely well known brands of hardware you shouldn't have a problem. Particularly for graphics cards you can always just go to nvidia.com or ati.com and download the reference drivers that work with everything. And I'm yet to have Win 7 (or later revisions of Win XP) fail to correctly recognise a mobo, sound card or other bit of hardware.
I haven't had a game (or anything else) hard crash on me either, for a long time. In fact I've had console games freeze up on me more than PC games in the last 5 years. Again, it mostly comes down to buying quality hardware. Freezes and bluescreens are almost always a hardware problem: overheating, dodgy RAM, insufficient voltage being supplied to your AGP slot (that one took me a while to diagnose! wasn't on my machine though, it was on some cheap POS). I will admit that if you're only going to spend console amounts of money, PC gaming is going to suck pretty hard. But build your own mid or high-range system using good, well-reviewed products, and you honestly shouldn't have any issues at all.
I'm pretty platform agnostic: I have both a gaming PC and a console or two. Certain genres of games work better on one platform than the other... I certainly wouldn't say the PC platform flat out sucks (it's the only serious platform for MMOs, RTSes, and some other genres). Yes it has its drawbacks but those drawbacks are far less than they used to be (in terms of constant need to upgrade, stability etc.).
Platformer, racing, fighting, simpler or single-player RPGs: console.
Some genres are strong on one platform and comparatively weak on the other. FPSes are better on PC but still perfectly playable on consoles. Some games though really ONLY work on one or the other: RTS springs to mind. As do platformers and arcade-style fighting games (these can work on PC if you use a gamepad obviously, but on a keyboard they are ridiculous).
RPGs are an interesting bunch because it really depends on the complexity of the game. MMOs only really work well on PCs because you need to be able to communicate via typing to other players and you generally have a LOT of interface buttons/skills to press. But more traditional RPGs/adventure games where you have less to control work better on consoles (think FF, Zelda, etc. type games). Something like Diablo could work well on a console I think with a few UI tweaks. I wonder if Blizzard is thinking of releasing D3 for consoles as well as PC?
Thing is, I don't think you do need to be constantly on the upgrade treadmill anymore in PC-land. The rate of improvement in hardware has levelled off dramatically (and is mostly GPU-bound these days rather than CPU or IO-bound).
This is a far cry from when I started PC gaming in the 90s, and every single new game that was released needed a huge upgrade to get it to perform well. An example most people would be familiar with:
Wolf3D (1992): ran well on a 386 or low end 486 (25 or 33 Mhz). 4 MB of RAM was fine. Doom/Heretic/Hexen series (1993-1995): by now you were really needing a 486 and preferably a DX2/66 or DX4/100 (I had the latter). 8MB of RAM was plenty. Quake (1996): though this would run on a high end 486, you only got ~10 fps out of it which wasn't very playable. An upgrade to a Pentium 150 or so did the trick here. You also needed 16, and preferably 32 or more MB of RAM.
All these games released within a four year period. So if you bought a mid-high end PC each time, you probably needed 2 or 3 PC upgrades during this period to play the latest games. Not cheap ones either: full mobo and CPU replacements in most cases, and additional RAM. RAM particularly was hellishly expensive in that era.
By comparison my current PC is 4 years old now. It still runs new releases fine on decent (if not maximum) detail settings. And if I need to upgrade, since things are so GPU-bound now I could spend only $200-$300 on a newer graphics card and be good for another few years. So I would definitely say the gaming PC upgrade cycle is nowhere, nowhere near as bad as it used to be. You now only need to do a major PC upgrade probably as frequently as you'd buy a new console anyway.
Aren't those figures completely meaningless since you are talking absolutes, not 'per capita'? Of course you spend more on social programs than any other country on earth: with over 300 million people you have ~by far~ the largest population of any developed country, and the largest economy.
There is also the matter of actual net benefit or result for that expenditure. You may spend more on social programs, but are they actually as effective as elsewhere? How efficient are your social programs? Does that increased expenditure actually manifest itself as increased social benefit (i.e. how much of that money is actually getting into the hands of people, and how much is tied up in administration, middlemen, etc.)
Neither US political party has a moral high ground on this one, that's for sure. Frankly, the rest of the world is rather baffled by the lack of laws in America against corporate lobbying, donations and other corporate influence in your elections and lawmaking process. That kind of behaviour simply wouldn't fly in most other countries.
That's simply not true. Many (actually, most) governments in the world are nowhere near as influenced by corporations as in the US. Not even close. Indeed, many countries have very strict rules that severely restrict or prohibit lobbying, donations to political parties, etc. In these countries corporations honestly have very little real influence. Not none, but far, far less than in the US. After all, companies can't vote for you. People can. So if companies are forbidden from donating to you or providing you with any other benefits, you have no real reason to favour them over people who can actually vote for you.
I could point to many examples even from my own country where political reforms demanded by the people but hated by companies have been pushed into law successfully, even though the corporate world has resisted, whined and complained about it every step of the way.
I agree that paying the carrier for a software feature is ridiculous. But it does appear to be a practice mostly limited to the US and a few other countries. In most places they don't (and can't) charge you for such a thing.
Actually it sorta fits with the whole way the cellular industry works in the US though. It has always been way more carrier-controlled than any other market. To some extent that's a learned behaviour that has derived from the fact that the US has had various incompatible phone networks for most of its history (CDMA, TDMA, analog, GSM etc.). The result was that 'handsets tied to particular carriers/plans' became the norm in the US (because in most cases, it wouldn't work on other networks even if you tried), whereas in the rest of the world it's quite normal to buy a phone from a store completely independently of a carrier, then just whack your SIM card in it from your carrier of choice and off you go. The carrier doesn't even know or care what phone you're using. This was made possible of course by the fact that most other countries have been standardised on GSM since the start.
Frankly to an outsider's perspective, it seems like the carriers have you by the balls in the US. I'd hate it. But there are benefits to such a system too I suppose ('free' phones paid off over compulsory 2 year contracts for instance: these don't work out any cheaper than the 'buy phone outright up front for $600 then pay provider for cheaper plan without included phone repayments' model over the contract period, but it does reduce the up front cost and potentially make things more affordable for some people).
I fully agree with everything you wrote. Where I differ is that I'm prepared to accept that certain devices in my life: my phone, my music player, my camera, my microwave, and yes, my web-browsing coffee-table-sitting tablet (iPad), are not 'computers' (in that you do not have full control or flexibility to run code of your choosing on them).
The way I see it is that I have an actual computer (desktop or laptop, PC or Mac) for doing such things. And I will always want such a device. But I consider something like an iPad or an iPhone an appliance, not a computer. I honestly have no desire to install my own software and stuff. I just want it to make calls/browse the web/play some games/listen to some music. Same with things like game consoles etc: you can mod them but I can't be bothered doing so.
OTOH, you disagree with this, and would prefer to see your phone and tablet as full computing devices. That is perfectly fine by me.
What I don't understand are the zealots who will insist that such a thing is so evil: yes it's a locked down appliance but frankly, that's what I want, and I buy it in the full knowledge of its limitations. If you don't want that, don't buy it (e.g. you bought a HTC Desire instead). But don't judge me on the basis of my different choice - it's not that all iPhone/iPad users are idiots, we're just happy to leave the 'real computing work' to actual PCs and are content with an appliance for some purposes.
DSL connections are generally always PPPoE/oA, I thought? They certainly are in this country. How is it done elsewhere?
Either way, the protocols used to connect aren't really relevant. The point I was making was ISPs here generally provide a dialup access as a bonus extra with broadband plans. You dial a number and authenticate using the same credentials as the 'main' account.
Good point. I shouldn't have added the "(and the UK)". We have Halls of Residence in Australia too and they are generally considered to be alternatives to a university College: Generally less in the way of extra-curricular stuff and less prestigous: closer to being a purely residential facility like US dorms I suppose you could say, although some of them still have fairly hefty fees attached. The distinction isn't always clear though: I went to a Hall of Residence at an Australian uni that was rather College-like. But it wasn't a college. It was just housing owned by the university still, not a separate entity.
I'm not confused on my use of the word. I simply meant that 'college' refers not to the actual educational institution (the university itself, either as a whole or particular parts of it, e.g. 'College of Engineering at the University of blah"), but to a place whose ~primary~ function is residential.
I then said 'not merely a place to sleep' to clarify that they aren't just a glorified hotel. They offer pastoral care, extra-curricular activities and have a strong identity. They have competitions with other colleges (e.g. sporting) etc. That is, they ARE residential institutions first and foremost, but there's a bit more to it than that.
Note that some Aussie universities also have Halls of Residence, which are generally a bit more 'pure residential' and a bit less 'extra activities'. They have less prestige, but it's generally easier to get a place in them compared to a top College.
THanks for the info about the UK. I admittedly made a big assumption there that it was similar to Australia, but had forgotten about the 'extra uses' of the word (now that you mention it, I did actually know that the UK calls some institutions 'colleges' that are kind of like alternative tertiary education, or places that are preparation for university... sorta like tech schools in the US or TAFEs in Australia).
The whole mess is rather confusing though:) I guess the point of my post was mostly to indicate to readers who might think TFA was talking about a university giving iPads to its students, that that's false. It's a residential college, hall of residence, whatever you want to call it, doing it. A privately owned one that has pretty hefty fees to boot - so an extra iPad won't make much difference.
Notwithstanding the fact that every iOS device ever sold ships with the YouTube app, and has from day one, the YouTube ~site~ itself has allowed you to view stuff using HTML5 rather than Flash for quite a while now, which works just fine on standard iOS browsers.
Yes there are plenty of Flash-based sites out there that you CAN'T use with an Apple product, and yes that sucks. But you picked a terrible example to make your point, considering YouTube is one of the few sites that DOES actually work perfectly.:)
Yes I feel that the meaning of the article is getting 'lost in translation' by many Americans reading it. Americans use the word 'college' to refer to the ~entire university~. They say 'I went to college' to indicate that they went to university. This has resulted in many confusing conversations about tertiary education between Americans and other English speakers in my experience (which is extensive as I'm a dual US-Australian citizen and spend a lot of time in both countries).
In Australia (and the UK and other Commonwealth countries), a 'college' is a ~residential~ institution, typically situated on campus (but perhaps also elsewhere in the city). That is, where the students go to eat and sleep at the end of the day. Many also offer out of hours tuition services and other extra-curricular stuff. They may be indirectly owned by the university itself, or they may be completely private institutions. But they are not 'the university' (i.e. the entity you pay your tuition to). They are separate entities who you pay for food and lodging.
American students often live in 'the dorms', which fills the same need as colleges but in reality is quite a different experience. As mentioned, colleges are often private, completely separate institutions from the universities themselves. They have various levels of prestige in their own right (Trinity, mentioned in TFA, is a pretty high end one and doesn't come cheap). They aren't merely a place to sleep but are a big part of your university life and experience.
"recommended that iPads be rolled out in 2011 to all staff involved in Trinity’s Foundation Studies course, which prepares overseas students for undergraduate university entry.
In addition, the quartet recommended iPads be rolled out to all staff and students at the college in time for the August 2011 student entry"
So the initial rollout is just to foreign students, followed by a wider rollout. My bad. Point #1 above still applies though: the university won't be getting any more of taxpayers money, simply because they decided to give people an iPad.
No they don't. Firstly, the school would get a set amount from the government. If it wants to spend some of this on iPads, then sure... but they will have to make savings elsewhere to compensate. They don't just get this unlimited bucket of money from the government. Taxpayers wouldn't pay any more. But this is a moot point regardless, because...
Secondly the TFA mentions that this university is for FOREIGN students, not Australian residents. I.e. the students are not Australian taxpayers and are paying full, unsubsidised fees. So in this particular case, the impact on taxpayers is zero regardless of how the government funding system might work.
Not really. University tuition fees (for Australian residents) are heavily subsidised by the government (to the tune of 75%+ of the real fee) and regulated/standardised across the country. So what the students pay is predictable and set in stone by legislation for several years into the future. They can't be arbitrarily adjusted.
Having said this, TFA mentions that this particular university is mostly for foreign students, not Australian residents. These students are unsubsidised. They are referred to as 'full fee-paying students', due to the fact that they get into the university simply by paying the (huge) fees to do so, rather than based on academic merit and high school performance (like subsidised Australian residents would be). Statistically speaking, most will be from fairly well-off families in places like China, Singapore, India, and other Asian countries. They are already paying (or more likely, their parents are already paying) huge amounts of money to study abroad in Australia. A few hundred extra for an iPad wouldn't be noticed (if it's even actually coming out of their tutition fees in the first place, which I doubt). Indeed, it may even be perceived as a desirable reason for these students to pick this university over others: competition for these students among the universities is high, as they are full fee-paying and hence pure profit as far as the universities are concerned.
If the university was giving the Motorola Xoom instead, I'd be very impressed, considering they are essentially vapourware in this country (and virtually everywhere else outside the US). I've heard all kinds of hype about them... but has anyone actually ever seen one? At least the iPad is a real, shipping product in Australia:)
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Best quote out of that: "And for the record, this is what praying to Budda will get you. Let the record show that God did not put any earthquakes or tsunamis in America."
Apparently, California, Oregon and Washington (state) do not exist to these lunatics? Those areas are capable of matching anywhere in the world when it comes to massive earthquake potential.
Indeed. I think the rest of the developed world looked at what happened with Katrina and scratched their heads. I have to admit I was surprised, having grown up knowing that the US was the world's richest country and all. But compare the recovery effort after Katrina with recovery efforts in other recent disasters affecting affluent developed nations.
I particularly think of the recent flooding (and category 5 cyclone/hurricane) in Australia, which inundated a stupendously large area (larger than Texas) including a major city with a population greater than that of New Orleans. As the disaster unfolded, teams from around the country were immediately working around the clock to ship food and supplies to the affected areas. The Army evacuated areas cut off by the water. Random people who happened to own private helicopters used them to help airdrop food. Police cracked down early on any reports of looting. Virtually every citizen in the affected areas took to the streets the next day and started cleaning debris around the city - not just in their own streets but anywhere in the city, often helping complete strangers. A lot of houses will have to be condemned and destroyed in Brisbane, but I guarantee that after 2 years everything will be rebuilt, looking shiny, new and better than ever. Yet years after Katrina there are still areas of Louisiana that look like a bomb just hit them. And a death toll of over ~1600 people~ in a developed country for a foreseeable event where adequate warning was available is still unbelievable to me to this day.
I also think of the recent New Zealand earthquake, which while much smaller than today's quake in Japan, still showed that the NZ Govt. was well prepared and the plans kicked in and did their job well. Red tape was cleared for aid and quake experts from other countries in the area (interestingly enough, including Japan) to be immediately shipped into NZ and they were on the ground within 24 hours. Etc.
In comparison the response in the US to Katrina seemed flat footed, as if they were caught off-guard in the aftermath of the storm and didn't quite know who was in charge. Help eventually came but it took far longer than you would expect. In fact, many other countries offered their own expertise and people and were willing and able to get their resources deployed immediately ... but the US refused international assistance.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who seeks to criticise the US at every opportunity like some on here. But I genuinely think this was not one of America's finest hours and the critical comparison with other developed nations' response to things like this is warranted.
Not everyone is on a plan that costs a set minimum amount per month. Generally these kind of 'minimum cost' plans exist for people who didn't buy their phone outright up front, and are thus paying it off in monthly fees over a 2-year (or whatever) contract. These kind of plans are the norm in the US as I understand it, but the exception in many other places. The answers in this Ask Slashdot could thus prove useful for many people.
I'm reading this thread with interest, because if I make zero calls in a month, my bill that month will be zero. I also pay for the data I use...but I can assure you that the cost of the x MB of data for a call of given length over VoIP is an order of magnitude less expensive than placing the call directly over the cell network.
So provided I make at least 1 second worth of calls, I would save money.
Interesting that SIP would be so bad over cellular data. I use Skype over cellular data (even with video!) quite regularly and it seems fine to me. Obviously Skype is a different protocol but I generally thought that SIP was THE de facto standard for VoIP and Skype was a crappy proprietary protocol (which makes it less attractive to me).
Yeah 7 is pretty good. I use it at home and have been very happy with it. Most of my comments relate to XP, since the last time my parents bought a computer was when 7 had only just been released and I was replacing a previous XP machine.
However the crapware argument still applies. 7 comes loaded down with as much as ever, if you buy from one of the big manufacturers. This doesn't apply to my personal machines because I buld them myself, but my parents live a long way away and it wasn't practical for me to build one for them.
The other thing is that, even with no stability or virus problems at all, Windows generally gets more 'random looking popups' than Mac OS. Just a few a days ago my mother-in-law emailed us freaking out about 'some message about protection and viruses OMG'. Upon further investigation, it was just the AV software wanting its definitions updated. But Flash, Java, and many other pieces of software pop up 'please upgrade me' boxes at random times too. Whereas on a Mac things never pop up randomly, and updates are done through a single central update manager.
Again, I have no personal love of Macs and still buy PCs myself. But buying Macs for my tech-incompetent family has objectively (and massively) reduced the amount of my time taken up with investigating or fixing things (I won't say 'problems', because 75% of the time it isn't actually a problem, just them not knowing what some random dialog box means).
This. A hundred times this.
I'm under no illusions that Mac is any more secure than any other OS. It's simply that it's less targeted and the software is generally more stable. I made sure my parents and my sister got Macbooks last time they got a computer. Not because I'm a particular Apple fan (I don't own any Apple computers myself), but because it's basically set and forget as far as support is concerned. I haven't had to fix anything on them yet, whereas with Windows something would happen fairly regularly.
On top of that most brand name PCs ship loaded up with crapware. I always remove it obviously, but making sure my family got Macs meant less work for me. Didn't need anything other than a quick system update out of the box, and no crapware in sight. That alone is worth good money to me.
I go with a whitelist approach. My browser is set to deny all cookies except those specifically allowed.
The way I identified which ones to allow is by turning cookies on to 'accept all except third party', using the web as normal for a few days, then observing which cookies had been written. After filtering out the obvious ones that I didn't need, I added the rest to the whitelist. These are all from sites that I have to log into obviously, so I have [*.]slashdot.org, mail.google.com, etc.
Only downside is if I register for a new forum or something I have to remember to add it to the whitelist, but that's OK. Means I can browse the web knowing I'm not accepting cookies except for those I explicitly need to remain logged into stuff.
Huh? There are hackers aplenty on console games, just as with PC games.
Not just in multiplayer games either: so many console games have hacked leaderboards with people posting obviously impossible scores/times etc...
Sounds like you've had a bad run with hardware in the past. I honestly can't remember the last time I had any form of driver problem on a PC ... would probably have been the early XP era. Provided you are buying even vaguely well known brands of hardware you shouldn't have a problem. Particularly for graphics cards you can always just go to nvidia.com or ati.com and download the reference drivers that work with everything. And I'm yet to have Win 7 (or later revisions of Win XP) fail to correctly recognise a mobo, sound card or other bit of hardware.
I haven't had a game (or anything else) hard crash on me either, for a long time. In fact I've had console games freeze up on me more than PC games in the last 5 years. Again, it mostly comes down to buying quality hardware. Freezes and bluescreens are almost always a hardware problem: overheating, dodgy RAM, insufficient voltage being supplied to your AGP slot (that one took me a while to diagnose! wasn't on my machine though, it was on some cheap POS). I will admit that if you're only going to spend console amounts of money, PC gaming is going to suck pretty hard. But build your own mid or high-range system using good, well-reviewed products, and you honestly shouldn't have any issues at all.
I'm pretty platform agnostic: I have both a gaming PC and a console or two. Certain genres of games work better on one platform than the other ... I certainly wouldn't say the PC platform flat out sucks (it's the only serious platform for MMOs, RTSes, and some other genres). Yes it has its drawbacks but those drawbacks are far less than they used to be (in terms of constant need to upgrade, stability etc.).
FPS, RTS, (MMO)RPG: PC.
Platformer, racing, fighting, simpler or single-player RPGs: console.
Some genres are strong on one platform and comparatively weak on the other. FPSes are better on PC but still perfectly playable on consoles. Some games though really ONLY work on one or the other: RTS springs to mind. As do platformers and arcade-style fighting games (these can work on PC if you use a gamepad obviously, but on a keyboard they are ridiculous).
RPGs are an interesting bunch because it really depends on the complexity of the game. MMOs only really work well on PCs because you need to be able to communicate via typing to other players and you generally have a LOT of interface buttons/skills to press. But more traditional RPGs/adventure games where you have less to control work better on consoles (think FF, Zelda, etc. type games). Something like Diablo could work well on a console I think with a few UI tweaks. I wonder if Blizzard is thinking of releasing D3 for consoles as well as PC?
Thing is, I don't think you do need to be constantly on the upgrade treadmill anymore in PC-land. The rate of improvement in hardware has levelled off dramatically (and is mostly GPU-bound these days rather than CPU or IO-bound).
This is a far cry from when I started PC gaming in the 90s, and every single new game that was released needed a huge upgrade to get it to perform well. An example most people would be familiar with:
Wolf3D (1992): ran well on a 386 or low end 486 (25 or 33 Mhz). 4 MB of RAM was fine.
Doom/Heretic/Hexen series (1993-1995): by now you were really needing a 486 and preferably a DX2/66 or DX4/100 (I had the latter). 8MB of RAM was plenty.
Quake (1996): though this would run on a high end 486, you only got ~10 fps out of it which wasn't very playable. An upgrade to a Pentium 150 or so did the trick here. You also needed 16, and preferably 32 or more MB of RAM.
All these games released within a four year period. So if you bought a mid-high end PC each time, you probably needed 2 or 3 PC upgrades during this period to play the latest games. Not cheap ones either: full mobo and CPU replacements in most cases, and additional RAM. RAM particularly was hellishly expensive in that era.
By comparison my current PC is 4 years old now. It still runs new releases fine on decent (if not maximum) detail settings. And if I need to upgrade, since things are so GPU-bound now I could spend only $200-$300 on a newer graphics card and be good for another few years. So I would definitely say the gaming PC upgrade cycle is nowhere, nowhere near as bad as it used to be. You now only need to do a major PC upgrade probably as frequently as you'd buy a new console anyway.
Aren't those figures completely meaningless since you are talking absolutes, not 'per capita'? Of course you spend more on social programs than any other country on earth: with over 300 million people you have ~by far~ the largest population of any developed country, and the largest economy.
There is also the matter of actual net benefit or result for that expenditure. You may spend more on social programs, but are they actually as effective as elsewhere? How efficient are your social programs? Does that increased expenditure actually manifest itself as increased social benefit (i.e. how much of that money is actually getting into the hands of people, and how much is tied up in administration, middlemen, etc.)
Neither US political party has a moral high ground on this one, that's for sure. Frankly, the rest of the world is rather baffled by the lack of laws in America against corporate lobbying, donations and other corporate influence in your elections and lawmaking process. That kind of behaviour simply wouldn't fly in most other countries.
That's simply not true. Many (actually, most) governments in the world are nowhere near as influenced by corporations as in the US. Not even close. Indeed, many countries have very strict rules that severely restrict or prohibit lobbying, donations to political parties, etc. In these countries corporations honestly have very little real influence. Not none, but far, far less than in the US. After all, companies can't vote for you. People can. So if companies are forbidden from donating to you or providing you with any other benefits, you have no real reason to favour them over people who can actually vote for you.
I could point to many examples even from my own country where political reforms demanded by the people but hated by companies have been pushed into law successfully, even though the corporate world has resisted, whined and complained about it every step of the way.
I agree that paying the carrier for a software feature is ridiculous. But it does appear to be a practice mostly limited to the US and a few other countries. In most places they don't (and can't) charge you for such a thing.
Actually it sorta fits with the whole way the cellular industry works in the US though. It has always been way more carrier-controlled than any other market. To some extent that's a learned behaviour that has derived from the fact that the US has had various incompatible phone networks for most of its history (CDMA, TDMA, analog, GSM etc.). The result was that 'handsets tied to particular carriers/plans' became the norm in the US (because in most cases, it wouldn't work on other networks even if you tried), whereas in the rest of the world it's quite normal to buy a phone from a store completely independently of a carrier, then just whack your SIM card in it from your carrier of choice and off you go. The carrier doesn't even know or care what phone you're using. This was made possible of course by the fact that most other countries have been standardised on GSM since the start.
Frankly to an outsider's perspective, it seems like the carriers have you by the balls in the US. I'd hate it. But there are benefits to such a system too I suppose ('free' phones paid off over compulsory 2 year contracts for instance: these don't work out any cheaper than the 'buy phone outright up front for $600 then pay provider for cheaper plan without included phone repayments' model over the contract period, but it does reduce the up front cost and potentially make things more affordable for some people).
I fully agree with everything you wrote. Where I differ is that I'm prepared to accept that certain devices in my life: my phone, my music player, my camera, my microwave, and yes, my web-browsing coffee-table-sitting tablet (iPad), are not 'computers' (in that you do not have full control or flexibility to run code of your choosing on them).
The way I see it is that I have an actual computer (desktop or laptop, PC or Mac) for doing such things. And I will always want such a device. But I consider something like an iPad or an iPhone an appliance, not a computer. I honestly have no desire to install my own software and stuff. I just want it to make calls/browse the web/play some games/listen to some music. Same with things like game consoles etc: you can mod them but I can't be bothered doing so.
OTOH, you disagree with this, and would prefer to see your phone and tablet as full computing devices. That is perfectly fine by me.
What I don't understand are the zealots who will insist that such a thing is so evil: yes it's a locked down appliance but frankly, that's what I want, and I buy it in the full knowledge of its limitations. If you don't want that, don't buy it (e.g. you bought a HTC Desire instead). But don't judge me on the basis of my different choice - it's not that all iPhone/iPad users are idiots, we're just happy to leave the 'real computing work' to actual PCs and are content with an appliance for some purposes.
Seriously?
DSL connections are generally always PPPoE/oA, I thought? They certainly are in this country. How is it done elsewhere?
Either way, the protocols used to connect aren't really relevant. The point I was making was ISPs here generally provide a dialup access as a bonus extra with broadband plans. You dial a number and authenticate using the same credentials as the 'main' account.
Good point. I shouldn't have added the "(and the UK)". We have Halls of Residence in Australia too and they are generally considered to be alternatives to a university College: Generally less in the way of extra-curricular stuff and less prestigous: closer to being a purely residential facility like US dorms I suppose you could say, although some of them still have fairly hefty fees attached. The distinction isn't always clear though: I went to a Hall of Residence at an Australian uni that was rather College-like. But it wasn't a college. It was just housing owned by the university still, not a separate entity.
I'm not confused on my use of the word. I simply meant that 'college' refers not to the actual educational institution (the university itself, either as a whole or particular parts of it, e.g. 'College of Engineering at the University of blah"), but to a place whose ~primary~ function is residential.
I then said 'not merely a place to sleep' to clarify that they aren't just a glorified hotel. They offer pastoral care, extra-curricular activities and have a strong identity. They have competitions with other colleges (e.g. sporting) etc. That is, they ARE residential institutions first and foremost, but there's a bit more to it than that.
Note that some Aussie universities also have Halls of Residence, which are generally a bit more 'pure residential' and a bit less 'extra activities'. They have less prestige, but it's generally easier to get a place in them compared to a top College.
THanks for the info about the UK. I admittedly made a big assumption there that it was similar to Australia, but had forgotten about the 'extra uses' of the word (now that you mention it, I did actually know that the UK calls some institutions 'colleges' that are kind of like alternative tertiary education, or places that are preparation for university ... sorta like tech schools in the US or TAFEs in Australia).
The whole mess is rather confusing though :) I guess the point of my post was mostly to indicate to readers who might think TFA was talking about a university giving iPads to its students, that that's false. It's a residential college, hall of residence, whatever you want to call it, doing it. A privately owned one that has pretty hefty fees to boot - so an extra iPad won't make much difference.
What on earth are you talking about?
Notwithstanding the fact that every iOS device ever sold ships with the YouTube app, and has from day one, the YouTube ~site~ itself has allowed you to view stuff using HTML5 rather than Flash for quite a while now, which works just fine on standard iOS browsers.
Yes there are plenty of Flash-based sites out there that you CAN'T use with an Apple product, and yes that sucks. But you picked a terrible example to make your point, considering YouTube is one of the few sites that DOES actually work perfectly. :)
Yes I feel that the meaning of the article is getting 'lost in translation' by many Americans reading it. Americans use the word 'college' to refer to the ~entire university~. They say 'I went to college' to indicate that they went to university. This has resulted in many confusing conversations about tertiary education between Americans and other English speakers in my experience (which is extensive as I'm a dual US-Australian citizen and spend a lot of time in both countries).
In Australia (and the UK and other Commonwealth countries), a 'college' is a ~residential~ institution, typically situated on campus (but perhaps also elsewhere in the city). That is, where the students go to eat and sleep at the end of the day. Many also offer out of hours tuition services and other extra-curricular stuff. They may be indirectly owned by the university itself, or they may be completely private institutions. But they are not 'the university' (i.e. the entity you pay your tuition to). They are separate entities who you pay for food and lodging.
American students often live in 'the dorms', which fills the same need as colleges but in reality is quite a different experience. As mentioned, colleges are often private, completely separate institutions from the universities themselves. They have various levels of prestige in their own right (Trinity, mentioned in TFA, is a pretty high end one and doesn't come cheap). They aren't merely a place to sleep but are a big part of your university life and experience.
Slight correction. From TFA:
"recommended that iPads be rolled out in 2011 to all staff involved in Trinity’s Foundation Studies course, which prepares overseas students for undergraduate university entry.
In addition, the quartet recommended iPads be rolled out to all staff and students at the college in time for the August 2011 student entry"
So the initial rollout is just to foreign students, followed by a wider rollout. My bad. Point #1 above still applies though: the university won't be getting any more of taxpayers money, simply because they decided to give people an iPad.
No they don't. Firstly, the school would get a set amount from the government. If it wants to spend some of this on iPads, then sure ... but they will have to make savings elsewhere to compensate. They don't just get this unlimited bucket of money from the government. Taxpayers wouldn't pay any more. But this is a moot point regardless, because...
Secondly the TFA mentions that this university is for FOREIGN students, not Australian residents. I.e. the students are not Australian taxpayers and are paying full, unsubsidised fees. So in this particular case, the impact on taxpayers is zero regardless of how the government funding system might work.
Not really. University tuition fees (for Australian residents) are heavily subsidised by the government (to the tune of 75%+ of the real fee) and regulated/standardised across the country. So what the students pay is predictable and set in stone by legislation for several years into the future. They can't be arbitrarily adjusted.
Having said this, TFA mentions that this particular university is mostly for foreign students, not Australian residents. These students are unsubsidised. They are referred to as 'full fee-paying students', due to the fact that they get into the university simply by paying the (huge) fees to do so, rather than based on academic merit and high school performance (like subsidised Australian residents would be). Statistically speaking, most will be from fairly well-off families in places like China, Singapore, India, and other Asian countries. They are already paying (or more likely, their parents are already paying) huge amounts of money to study abroad in Australia. A few hundred extra for an iPad wouldn't be noticed (if it's even actually coming out of their tutition fees in the first place, which I doubt). Indeed, it may even be perceived as a desirable reason for these students to pick this university over others: competition for these students among the universities is high, as they are full fee-paying and hence pure profit as far as the universities are concerned.
If the university was giving the Motorola Xoom instead, I'd be very impressed, considering they are essentially vapourware in this country (and virtually everywhere else outside the US). I've heard all kinds of hype about them ... but has anyone actually ever seen one? At least the iPad is a real, shipping product in Australia :)