Actually you're both right. The Structure of the US government was designed partially to protect from a Tyranny of the Majority, and partly to protect the interest of the propertied classes. It's a Red Herring to suggest that a pure unlimited democracy would have served the country better, but it's equally fallacious to ignore the clear bent toward protecting property rights and the privileges of the upper class in our government's design. Having said that, a great deal of the most blatant upper class bias has been removed from the government over the years. Property, race, and sex restrictions have been removed from voting requirements, Senators are now directly elected, etc. The original design was much more upper class biased. The Electoral College is really the last relic of the old "safeguards".
I think the problem is that the state has negotiated a new contract with Comcast that Comsast and the state claim overrides Detroit's original contract. Imagine we live in an apartment building. When we all signed our leases, the building management said: "You handle your own cable." So we did. You called Comcast and got a sweet package deal with all the channels you wanted and Internet, I called a month later got a different package that included a land line phone, and Bob down the hall called Cox and hooked up an Internet only thing because he never watches TV and has a Vonage phone.
6 months later, the building sends out a note saying that they've negotiated a new contract with Cox. Cox will now be the only available cable provider in the building, and they've negotiated a new fee structure that will allow every everyone to have basic cable cheap and all other services added on ala-carte. The new fee structure is mandatory. So now you and I have to get Cox, and Bob has to get basic cable that he'll never watch. Bob's bill goes up of course. Yours goes down, but it turns out that you can't get The Major League Soccer Channel, which was the whole reason you got Comcast in the first place. My bill goes up a little, because Cox apparently charges a lot more for telephone service.
Can the building do that? Probably depends on the laws in its particular jurisdiction. In this case, Detroit seems to believe that that state does not have the authority to negotiate a contract binding on the City Government. Is Detroit right? I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a Michigan Lawyer, but a casual reading of the Detroit's chosen laws seems to indicate that they have good case at the very least.
Usually you login and your MAC is registered for some length of time. I'd guess he wouldn't need to worry about this more than once a day or so. Though it would still be a pain if you forget and can't get any calls that day.
Based on "Verizon" I'm assuming he's in the US. We have literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of universities here in the States. While the vast majority of the larger ones are situated in or very near cities, there's a huge number of small "Liberal Arts Universities" many of which are in run in rural, almost estate like, scenarios. Think along the lines of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in the X-Men Comics, but larger (And with less super-powers, state of the art jets, massive AI systems, or Danger Rooms). Usually the schools have somewhere between one and five thousand students, and they're situated within a few miles of a small "University Town" that exists more or less totally to support the school.
It doesn't surprise me at all to hear that some of these schools don't have much cell coverage. Often even the supporting town is little more than a collection of restaurants, bars, and shops that specialize in things college students may want. It may or may not have much coverage itself.
Really any of the modern smart phones + a VOIP app seems like a reasonable bet here. iPhone, most Android devices, a Symbian device, newer Blackberries... All of them can connect to WLANS, all can run VOIP software (and the big issue with iPhone, lack of backgrounding, got solved last week with the new OS), and all will have the advantage of functioning as a "regular" phone when you're not on campus.
I'd figure out what company offers the best service either in your home town, or in the town nearest the school (or better yet good service in both) and get a smart phone from that company that offers good VOIP support. If it's AT&T I'd get an iPhone (AT&T's Android offerings are teh suck), otherwise most likely an Android. That way you have a good phone with good service while you're in the "real world" and it will double as your University VOIP setup. Get the cheapest plan you can get away with, of course.
And before *that* the colonies were regulated by British Patent Law. According to Wikipedia the earliest patent laws appeared in England in 1623 and were formalized in the early 1700's.
That's bullshit. I got modded Flamebait yesterday for saying the same thing with an iPhone slant. Simple fact is that most Slashdot moderators think "Flamebait" and "Troll" mean "I disagree". Thankfully, most people are smarter than this... Both I and the GGP got modded back up by more sensible mods. The system works, mostly.
I'm not entirely convinced on the the Office Suites, but I'll definitely buy the browsers. I just don't see many "normal" people using Open Office. Apple's new suite seems to be generating some interest, but even when compared to their overall market share it's pretty small. Browser are another matter though, you're definitely right there. Between Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, I think IE is down around 75% and dropping. Firefox definitely wins the "Open Source Software that most people have knowingly used" award.
I think OP seriously overestimates the threat of OSS of the desktop, but has a point of sorts. I see three major threat vectors affecting MS right now, and it's losing ground on all of them. Two it's losing ground slowly and may recover, the third it's already come closing to losing entirely.
1) Enterprise Data center: MS is losing ground to OSS here. Apple has made some small inroads, but basically this is Microsoft vs various Linuxes. They are not being pummeled by any means, but definite inroads are being made, and MS is slowly losing ground. This is bad because MS thrives on its ecosystem. You buy MS servers because they integrate so well with other MS servers and the MS desktops. If you have fewer MS servers then the need for more MS server seems less pressing. Then there's the:
2) Desktop: Obviously at the moment OSS is a minimal threat here, but Apple is more serious. They are making serious threats on the consumer side, and once people become used to it at home they ask about it at work. As things stand now, it's mostly smaller businesses that go for Apple on the desktop, or switch partially, but I've seen Macs creeping in larger businesses too (I used to do work with a Fortune 50 Aerospace company that had buckled and allowed some Macs for video editing in our facility). As bits of the data center go OSS, Macs become less of a liability too. Changes made to accommodate Unix based servers work just as well for Apple's Unix desktops. Installed an AD to OpenLDAP translator for the new web server? Oh look, Macs can auth against OpenLDAP. Again, Apple isn't anywhere close to "winning" on the desktop, but they're making inroads.
3) Mobile platforms: This is where MS is losing big time to Apple and Google (and RIM, and possibly a couple kids with tin cans and a string). This is a pretty serious problem IMO, because this is the next platform. I see mobile platforms, tablets and phones, doing what laptops did 10 years ago and desktops did 10 years before that. Taking over. Not to say that there won't still be laptops, and in the medium term it might even help desktops, but I've already found that my laptop is a bit redundant because of my iPhone. Last trip I went on, I didn't even take it out of the bag. Next time I'm debating leaving it at home. If Microsoft can't own this space, they're going to be in trouble. Not, "OMG they're going out of business" trouble, but growth will become mostly a thing of the past in the next decade.
Actually the problem here looks like she was a complete and total moron who blabbed details of the crime that only investigators, the owners, and the criminal would have had.
Sociopathic *and* stupid. there's a match made in heaven.
He's not. He's saying that you have a choice: to buy or not buy an iDevice. He, like me, is tired of hearing "it's all about choice" from people who then turn around and say, "of course if you chose Apple you are an evil mutant fanboi hypocrite that I shall never, ever shut up about." My *choice* to buy an iPhone was just that. At the moment I'm happy with the *choice*, if that changes I can *choose* to go buy and Android phone. Therefore no *choices* have been taken away from me at all.
But that's not direct profit. For the iDevices it's a good ad campaign, I'm not so sure about it being as valuable for a general purpose computer. Since it's doesn't make them much money directly, and would be seen as more of a hindrance than a help for general purpose computers (at least I think it would, and I love the concept on my phone), I can't see why they'd do it. Personally I think we *will* see a general decline in both Mac and PC general purpose computers in the coming decades (decades, not years), but not because Apple or anyone else presses the matter. I think people *in general* prefer the device model over the computer model, and as more and more capable devices become more and more common, I think we'll see a move away from general purpose computers.
I envision a situation where we all carry around a phone type device, much like a current generation smartphones. As powerful as what we now consider a desktop computer (though of course those will still exist for people, mostly people like us who work with them, and will be more powerful still), these devices will do everything a current phone can (phone, video conference, GPS, media player, etc) plus most of what a general purpose PC does. I expect they'll be a bit bigger than current phones, mainly because they will be so useful that people will want some screen real estate (I think tablets might be a dead end, but it will probably take a while to realize it, and they'll still be useful for specific applications).
When you're not mobile with your device you dock it. It becomes the electronic hub of the house. You have a keyboard, mouse, and monitor for it and use it like a simplified version of a computer. It'll get "normal" TV, allow you to use whatever the Web evolves into, play games, whatever. There will probably be some kind of additional storage it hooks into when docked as well. I doubt flash memory will ever be as efficient as hard drives for storing vast quantities of data, but it will have plenty of internal storage for a good subset of what it has when docked.
These will be what most people use for a "computer" most of the time. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not predicting the end of computers as we know them. There will always be servers, HPC systems used by researchers, and even PCs. It's just that not everyone will have a PC or two in the house. They'll be like those expensive kitchen gadgets that some people have. Plenty of people will have them, some people will even use them quite a bit, but they won't really be necessary and a lot of them will spend a lot of time gathering dust.
The biggest reason I hated the lack of copy paste was that I *also* lacked MMS messaging. Those stupid username/password combos you'd get to that useless website would have been much easier with copy/paste. Of course now I have both, and I've never used copy/paste *shrug*.
I just snagged an Otter Box case for my iPhone. I don't care to test it, but I think I could probably run this thing over without issue. (Yes, yes, I exaggerate, please do not kill me with your scornful pedantry.)
So what you're saying is "I have a fucked up work flow based around inaccurate assumptions about the capability of my technology and because I am a moderately capably bullshit artist you should bow down to worship me." You don't need four phones to get 4 different "views" of your e-mail, and even if insist that having four phone will somehow help you keep track of e-mail better, there's no reason not to do your filtering at the server level. Your inability to properly use your equipment is hardly a major IT concern.
I also doubt you bring in more money than I do. I do IT for the government as a contractor. I am my company's product, and people with my skill sets sell quite well.
This is a completely ridiculous statement. Videos are probably the EASIEST thing Flash does. If the new player can't handle video controls without frustrating a reasonably knowledgeable user, it's unlikely to do much better on more complex Flash apps. The fact that it will properly display the animated werewolves and vampires in a game advert is not exactly a selling point.
I see a number of philosophical issues here, not the least of which is your default assumption that school Internet *must* be filtered. Despite your comment to the contrary I taught elementary school, and I've managed labs for colleges. I don't see the practical issue with simple monitoring to solve most of the filtering issues. When you are teaching (i.e. standing in front of the class lecturing) no one should be messing with the computers. When the students are working independently, you should be moving among them. Kids who are looking at stuff they shouldn't be tend to be fairly obvious about it. Will something occasionally get through when a teacher isn't paying attention or is helping another student? Maybe, but physical stuff gets through too. Notes get passed, gum gets chewed, girlie magazines make the rounds of the boys locker room. Expecting perfect protection of not just just the bodies, but the mind and souls of schools children is unreasonable. I will perhaps grant you that the argument is stronger when dealing with primary school students rather than high school students, but realistically I don't know that it's even necessary to give very young students internet access in a classroom environment anyway.
The bigger and more interesting question IMHO is why this particular thing needs to be filtered and/or monitored. What are search results, ans why does it matter if the school can watch them? If I type "really raunchy man porn" into Google the results I get are not actually porn. They're links to sites which contain porn and should be filtered already (assuming you're relying on filters to begin with). So the kid's searches (assuming they actually use SSL searches) can't be viewed... so what? You still know where they go from the search page. You can still block access to illegal sites. I regularly search for terms here at work then find that I can't view the resulting links. I just go on to the next choice.
This is the eternal conundrum of education. Children all learn at different rates and in different ways. Often even within an individual child these can vary based on the subject being taught. It is utterly impractical to stick 3-9 hundred kids in the same building, teach them the same things and expect them to learn them at the same rate and in the same way. On the other hand it's utterly impractical to come up with 3-9 hundred different lesson plans to accommodate the needs of every student.
You say that the most effective way for you to learn is to ignore the teacher. Bobby over in the corner says the same thing. The difference of course being that you actually want to learn, and Bobby wants to be left alone so he can read comic books. You claim that you get sufficient information from your short notes to retain what is needed. So do 22 of the other 32 students; as it happens 5 of them are right. The others are either foolishly overconfident or just don't care and want to write as little as possible.
Well you say, that's their problem isn't it? If they want to want to not learn, ignore the teacher even though they really need to be paying attention, take crappy notes when they know that they won't be sufficient, it's not your fault so why should you be punished? Teachers can't look at it that way. They're expected to produce results. When half a class fails a standardized test, it's not the students who are blamed. They insist that you copy all of the notes, because in their experience students who copy all of the notes learn the material better than those who don't. Your protests, though they may very well be valid in your case, are the exact same protests uttered by a dozen other kids for whom they are not valid.
Even if they are perfectly aware of the fact that your protests are valid. Even if they KNOW you'll learn the material just as well, if not better, by doing it your own way, it doesn't matter. If they let you copy partial notes then they have to let Suzie and Jimmy copy partial notes and neither of them can afford to. If they let do your own reading in class, then they have to let Bobby do his own reading.
It's a problem, and not one likely to be solved any time soon. In larger schools it's usually reduced by creating Honors or Gifted programs that pull much faster learners out and allow them to work a greater pace. This doesn't *solve* the problem, obviously, but it reduces it. Even then it's only practical in larger schools. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that your experience was right, or that it should happen that way, I'm just saying that I'm not sure what the better way is.
1) You are a school that chooses to use Google's (free) educational services. 2) You are school that uses an SSL filtering system to limit what students can and can't get too. 3) Google releases a service that for the VAST majority of its customers increases privacy and security, it also unfortunately breaks Google's (free) educational services *if and only if* the schools are using SSL filtering software to limit what students can and can't get to, *and* those schools choose to block Google's SSL searches using this software. 4) You are now saying that Google should roll back this new service, which is beneficial to a large number of Google's income generating users; so that you can figure out how to make your software, that schools paid you to for, work in such that it allows them to continue using Google's free educational offering.
Google is offering two completely independent services, both of them free of charge to the user. These services both have value to someone. If you want to use one, but block the other, that's your problem not Google's. That kind of like me saying that I like Wendy's hamburgers, but their fries aren't very good, so they should provide me with McDonald's fries.
Personally I think the entire concept of filtering Internet access in schools is very sketchy in it's validity. Students should be supervised when they are using school equipment to access the Internet. Does this mean you can watch every kid every second they're on the 'Net? Of course not, you have to blink at a minimum, and most likely you'll need to walk around, check the other kids, etc. That's fine. As long as you're checking the screen of each student every few minutes you're very, very likely to catch any mishaps. Given that filtering software is well know for blocking things that might be very appropriate for learning and research, especially at the high school level, this seems like a better solution to me.
It's easy to say that porn should be blocked, but blocking porn often seems to involve blocking health sites which focus on, shall we say, personal health issues (cancers of various sexual and erogenous organs come to mind immediately). It's easy to say you should block hate sites, but how do you research hate groups without going to their sites? It's easy to say you should block sites related to social issues that create controversy, but who makes those determinations? What right do they have to decide what is controversy and what is learning?
My opinion regarding internet filtering aside though, though... Google is offering a service, Google Apps for Education, that schools want. They are offering another service, SSL search, that schools want to block. It seems to me that it is distinctly the school's problem to figure out how to do that. (Which, since they are paying you to provide filtering, makes it your problem). Google's just going to do what they always do, stick services out there and see what makes money.
The "All or nothing" nature of SSL makes me think this is almost certainly a legal issue. The system intercepting the information has no way of knowing whether it's intercepting your attempt to circumvent legitimate restrictions or your bank password. All it would take would be the first instance of a dishonest sys-admin gaining access to a school worth of financial data to sue this into oblivion. Better to just say "SSL doesn't work on these system, you can't get to your bank's site" than say "We're logging everything sent over SSL."
Now see. I just don't get this. I can totally see the iOS vs Android thing. There is little doubt that both are very usable device operating systems devised for the specific needs of a very small screen and limited input options. I'm currently using an iPhone, but realistically I think I'd be just as happy with an Android phone. My iPhone preference is about half "I find it really usable" and about half "I don't feel like changing carriers and AT&T's Android offerings suck". I've also played a bit with WebOS and it seemed usable enough.
Linux (or Windows, or Mac OS) on a cell phone just doesn't seem like it'd be any fun to use. What are they using for a WM? Anything like a standard X.org setup seems like it would be clumsy as Hell on a small screen, and most phones lack any kind of mouse. I realize that some people are willing to sacrifice usability for perceived control, or power, or freedom; but stock Linux on a phone just seems like it'd be more trouble than it's worth.
By contrast in lots of Latin America they've picked up both the Anglo "middle name" and the Spanish "two surnames" resulting in a total of four names for most people. That screws most name systems up but good.
Nearly every Chinese person I know who has immigrated to the US reverses the form of their name to make things easier for the locals. Therefore you are MORE likely to be wrong when addressing them in the manner you suggest than otherwise, at least in my experience. There's no real right answer here. The best you can do is be polite, be gracious if corrected, and expect that if you spend lots of time dealing with internationals you're going to get it wrong sometimes. If you're obviously addressing someone from a traditional East Asian background, perhaps make a point of asking how they structure their name.
Or you could have just said "Gee, an exception to the normal rule. I guess I'll just use their one name as their user name."
Nah, much better to turn their user name into some sort of "Red Badge of Different". This is the sort of thing that this article is precisely right about. I'm sure that user got a happy gushy little feeling every time he sat down at a terminal and logged in as "nonamer". Was his GECOS "Weird name that I can't be chuffed to sort out, Robert"?
How do you figure that? If they've entered a valid e-mail address (IE it's capable of actually getting to someone to spam them), then their can't be an advert in the address (else is wouldn't be valid... unless you happen to really have a Viagra ad embedded in your address). If they've entered an advert, it can't go anywhere. I suppose if you wanted to make a really inefficient spam generator you might use sites with verification e-mails and a format like: name@domain.com;buystuff@viagrasite.com but it would be trivial enough to strip semi-colons without a large complicated regex, and frankly I can see no value in it. It would be a slow as Hell way to send spam, and the only way that people would notice it is if they regularly analyze the "to" line in their e-mail headers.
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Actually you're both right. The Structure of the US government was designed partially to protect from a Tyranny of the Majority, and partly to protect the interest of the propertied classes. It's a Red Herring to suggest that a pure unlimited democracy would have served the country better, but it's equally fallacious to ignore the clear bent toward protecting property rights and the privileges of the upper class in our government's design. Having said that, a great deal of the most blatant upper class bias has been removed from the government over the years. Property, race, and sex restrictions have been removed from voting requirements, Senators are now directly elected, etc. The original design was much more upper class biased. The Electoral College is really the last relic of the old "safeguards".
I think the problem is that the state has negotiated a new contract with Comcast that Comsast and the state claim overrides Detroit's original contract. Imagine we live in an apartment building. When we all signed our leases, the building management said: "You handle your own cable." So we did. You called Comcast and got a sweet package deal with all the channels you wanted and Internet, I called a month later got a different package that included a land line phone, and Bob down the hall called Cox and hooked up an Internet only thing because he never watches TV and has a Vonage phone.
6 months later, the building sends out a note saying that they've negotiated a new contract with Cox. Cox will now be the only available cable provider in the building, and they've negotiated a new fee structure that will allow every everyone to have basic cable cheap and all other services added on ala-carte. The new fee structure is mandatory. So now you and I have to get Cox, and Bob has to get basic cable that he'll never watch. Bob's bill goes up of course. Yours goes down, but it turns out that you can't get The Major League Soccer Channel, which was the whole reason you got Comcast in the first place. My bill goes up a little, because Cox apparently charges a lot more for telephone service.
Can the building do that? Probably depends on the laws in its particular jurisdiction. In this case, Detroit seems to believe that that state does not have the authority to negotiate a contract binding on the City Government. Is Detroit right? I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a Michigan Lawyer, but a casual reading of the Detroit's chosen laws seems to indicate that they have good case at the very least.
Usually you login and your MAC is registered for some length of time. I'd guess he wouldn't need to worry about this more than once a day or so. Though it would still be a pain if you forget and can't get any calls that day.
Based on "Verizon" I'm assuming he's in the US. We have literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of universities here in the States. While the vast majority of the larger ones are situated in or very near cities, there's a huge number of small "Liberal Arts Universities" many of which are in run in rural, almost estate like, scenarios. Think along the lines of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in the X-Men Comics, but larger (And with less super-powers, state of the art jets, massive AI systems, or Danger Rooms). Usually the schools have somewhere between one and five thousand students, and they're situated within a few miles of a small "University Town" that exists more or less totally to support the school.
It doesn't surprise me at all to hear that some of these schools don't have much cell coverage. Often even the supporting town is little more than a collection of restaurants, bars, and shops that specialize in things college students may want. It may or may not have much coverage itself.
Really any of the modern smart phones + a VOIP app seems like a reasonable bet here. iPhone, most Android devices, a Symbian device, newer Blackberries... All of them can connect to WLANS, all can run VOIP software (and the big issue with iPhone, lack of backgrounding, got solved last week with the new OS), and all will have the advantage of functioning as a "regular" phone when you're not on campus.
I'd figure out what company offers the best service either in your home town, or in the town nearest the school (or better yet good service in both) and get a smart phone from that company that offers good VOIP support. If it's AT&T I'd get an iPhone (AT&T's Android offerings are teh suck), otherwise most likely an Android. That way you have a good phone with good service while you're in the "real world" and it will double as your University VOIP setup. Get the cheapest plan you can get away with, of course.
And before *that* the colonies were regulated by British Patent Law. According to Wikipedia the earliest patent laws appeared in England in 1623 and were formalized in the early 1700's.
That's bullshit. I got modded Flamebait yesterday for saying the same thing with an iPhone slant. Simple fact is that most Slashdot moderators think "Flamebait" and "Troll" mean "I disagree". Thankfully, most people are smarter than this... Both I and the GGP got modded back up by more sensible mods. The system works, mostly.
I'm not entirely convinced on the the Office Suites, but I'll definitely buy the browsers. I just don't see many "normal" people using Open Office. Apple's new suite seems to be generating some interest, but even when compared to their overall market share it's pretty small. Browser are another matter though, you're definitely right there. Between Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, I think IE is down around 75% and dropping. Firefox definitely wins the "Open Source Software that most people have knowingly used" award.
I think OP seriously overestimates the threat of OSS of the desktop, but has a point of sorts. I see three major threat vectors affecting MS right now, and it's losing ground on all of them. Two it's losing ground slowly and may recover, the third it's already come closing to losing entirely.
1) Enterprise Data center: MS is losing ground to OSS here. Apple has made some small inroads, but basically this is Microsoft vs various Linuxes. They are not being pummeled by any means, but definite inroads are being made, and MS is slowly losing ground. This is bad because MS thrives on its ecosystem. You buy MS servers because they integrate so well with other MS servers and the MS desktops. If you have fewer MS servers then the need for more MS server seems less pressing. Then there's the:
2) Desktop: Obviously at the moment OSS is a minimal threat here, but Apple is more serious. They are making serious threats on the consumer side, and once people become used to it at home they ask about it at work. As things stand now, it's mostly smaller businesses that go for Apple on the desktop, or switch partially, but I've seen Macs creeping in larger businesses too (I used to do work with a Fortune 50 Aerospace company that had buckled and allowed some Macs for video editing in our facility). As bits of the data center go OSS, Macs become less of a liability too. Changes made to accommodate Unix based servers work just as well for Apple's Unix desktops. Installed an AD to OpenLDAP translator for the new web server? Oh look, Macs can auth against OpenLDAP. Again, Apple isn't anywhere close to "winning" on the desktop, but they're making inroads.
3) Mobile platforms: This is where MS is losing big time to Apple and Google (and RIM, and possibly a couple kids with tin cans and a string). This is a pretty serious problem IMO, because this is the next platform. I see mobile platforms, tablets and phones, doing what laptops did 10 years ago and desktops did 10 years before that. Taking over. Not to say that there won't still be laptops, and in the medium term it might even help desktops, but I've already found that my laptop is a bit redundant because of my iPhone. Last trip I went on, I didn't even take it out of the bag. Next time I'm debating leaving it at home. If Microsoft can't own this space, they're going to be in trouble. Not, "OMG they're going out of business" trouble, but growth will become mostly a thing of the past in the next decade.
Actually the problem here looks like she was a complete and total moron who blabbed details of the crime that only investigators, the owners, and the criminal would have had.
Sociopathic *and* stupid. there's a match made in heaven.
He's not. He's saying that you have a choice: to buy or not buy an iDevice. He, like me, is tired of hearing "it's all about choice" from people who then turn around and say, "of course if you chose Apple you are an evil mutant fanboi hypocrite that I shall never, ever shut up about." My *choice* to buy an iPhone was just that. At the moment I'm happy with the *choice*, if that changes I can *choose* to go buy and Android phone. Therefore no *choices* have been taken away from me at all.
But that's not direct profit. For the iDevices it's a good ad campaign, I'm not so sure about it being as valuable for a general purpose computer. Since it's doesn't make them much money directly, and would be seen as more of a hindrance than a help for general purpose computers (at least I think it would, and I love the concept on my phone), I can't see why they'd do it. Personally I think we *will* see a general decline in both Mac and PC general purpose computers in the coming decades (decades, not years), but not because Apple or anyone else presses the matter. I think people *in general* prefer the device model over the computer model, and as more and more capable devices become more and more common, I think we'll see a move away from general purpose computers.
I envision a situation where we all carry around a phone type device, much like a current generation smartphones. As powerful as what we now consider a desktop computer (though of course those will still exist for people, mostly people like us who work with them, and will be more powerful still), these devices will do everything a current phone can (phone, video conference, GPS, media player, etc) plus most of what a general purpose PC does. I expect they'll be a bit bigger than current phones, mainly because they will be so useful that people will want some screen real estate (I think tablets might be a dead end, but it will probably take a while to realize it, and they'll still be useful for specific applications).
When you're not mobile with your device you dock it. It becomes the electronic hub of the house. You have a keyboard, mouse, and monitor for it and use it like a simplified version of a computer. It'll get "normal" TV, allow you to use whatever the Web evolves into, play games, whatever. There will probably be some kind of additional storage it hooks into when docked as well. I doubt flash memory will ever be as efficient as hard drives for storing vast quantities of data, but it will have plenty of internal storage for a good subset of what it has when docked.
These will be what most people use for a "computer" most of the time. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not predicting the end of computers as we know them. There will always be servers, HPC systems used by researchers, and even PCs. It's just that not everyone will have a PC or two in the house. They'll be like those expensive kitchen gadgets that some people have. Plenty of people will have them, some people will even use them quite a bit, but they won't really be necessary and a lot of them will spend a lot of time gathering dust.
The biggest reason I hated the lack of copy paste was that I *also* lacked MMS messaging. Those stupid username/password combos you'd get to that useless website would have been much easier with copy/paste. Of course now I have both, and I've never used copy/paste *shrug*.
I just snagged an Otter Box case for my iPhone. I don't care to test it, but I think I could probably run this thing over without issue. (Yes, yes, I exaggerate, please do not kill me with your scornful pedantry.)
So what you're saying is "I have a fucked up work flow based around inaccurate assumptions about the capability of my technology and because I am a moderately capably bullshit artist you should bow down to worship me." You don't need four phones to get 4 different "views" of your e-mail, and even if insist that having four phone will somehow help you keep track of e-mail better, there's no reason not to do your filtering at the server level. Your inability to properly use your equipment is hardly a major IT concern.
I also doubt you bring in more money than I do. I do IT for the government as a contractor. I am my company's product, and people with my skill sets sell quite well.
This is a completely ridiculous statement. Videos are probably the EASIEST thing Flash does. If the new player can't handle video controls without frustrating a reasonably knowledgeable user, it's unlikely to do much better on more complex Flash apps. The fact that it will properly display the animated werewolves and vampires in a game advert is not exactly a selling point.
I see a number of philosophical issues here, not the least of which is your default assumption that school Internet *must* be filtered. Despite your comment to the contrary I taught elementary school, and I've managed labs for colleges. I don't see the practical issue with simple monitoring to solve most of the filtering issues. When you are teaching (i.e. standing in front of the class lecturing) no one should be messing with the computers. When the students are working independently, you should be moving among them. Kids who are looking at stuff they shouldn't be tend to be fairly obvious about it. Will something occasionally get through when a teacher isn't paying attention or is helping another student? Maybe, but physical stuff gets through too. Notes get passed, gum gets chewed, girlie magazines make the rounds of the boys locker room. Expecting perfect protection of not just just the bodies, but the mind and souls of schools children is unreasonable. I will perhaps grant you that the argument is stronger when dealing with primary school students rather than high school students, but realistically I don't know that it's even necessary to give very young students internet access in a classroom environment anyway.
The bigger and more interesting question IMHO is why this particular thing needs to be filtered and/or monitored. What are search results, ans why does it matter if the school can watch them? If I type "really raunchy man porn" into Google the results I get are not actually porn. They're links to sites which contain porn and should be filtered already (assuming you're relying on filters to begin with). So the kid's searches (assuming they actually use SSL searches) can't be viewed... so what? You still know where they go from the search page. You can still block access to illegal sites. I regularly search for terms here at work then find that I can't view the resulting links. I just go on to the next choice.
This is the eternal conundrum of education. Children all learn at different rates and in different ways. Often even within an individual child these can vary based on the subject being taught. It is utterly impractical to stick 3-9 hundred kids in the same building, teach them the same things and expect them to learn them at the same rate and in the same way. On the other hand it's utterly impractical to come up with 3-9 hundred different lesson plans to accommodate the needs of every student.
You say that the most effective way for you to learn is to ignore the teacher. Bobby over in the corner says the same thing. The difference of course being that you actually want to learn, and Bobby wants to be left alone so he can read comic books. You claim that you get sufficient information from your short notes to retain what is needed. So do 22 of the other 32 students; as it happens 5 of them are right. The others are either foolishly overconfident or just don't care and want to write as little as possible.
Well you say, that's their problem isn't it? If they want to want to not learn, ignore the teacher even though they really need to be paying attention, take crappy notes when they know that they won't be sufficient, it's not your fault so why should you be punished? Teachers can't look at it that way. They're expected to produce results. When half a class fails a standardized test, it's not the students who are blamed. They insist that you copy all of the notes, because in their experience students who copy all of the notes learn the material better than those who don't. Your protests, though they may very well be valid in your case, are the exact same protests uttered by a dozen other kids for whom they are not valid.
Even if they are perfectly aware of the fact that your protests are valid. Even if they KNOW you'll learn the material just as well, if not better, by doing it your own way, it doesn't matter. If they let you copy partial notes then they have to let Suzie and Jimmy copy partial notes and neither of them can afford to. If they let do your own reading in class, then they have to let Bobby do his own reading.
It's a problem, and not one likely to be solved any time soon. In larger schools it's usually reduced by creating Honors or Gifted programs that pull much faster learners out and allow them to work a greater pace. This doesn't *solve* the problem, obviously, but it reduces it. Even then it's only practical in larger schools. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that your experience was right, or that it should happen that way, I'm just saying that I'm not sure what the better way is.
He means, simply, this:
1) You are a school that chooses to use Google's (free) educational services.
2) You are school that uses an SSL filtering system to limit what students can and can't get too.
3) Google releases a service that for the VAST majority of its customers increases privacy and security, it also unfortunately breaks Google's (free) educational services *if and only if* the schools are using SSL filtering software to limit what students can and can't get to, *and* those schools choose to block Google's SSL searches using this software.
4) You are now saying that Google should roll back this new service, which is beneficial to a large number of Google's income generating users; so that you can figure out how to make your software, that schools paid you to for, work in such that it allows them to continue using Google's free educational offering.
Google is offering two completely independent services, both of them free of charge to the user. These services both have value to someone. If you want to use one, but block the other, that's your problem not Google's. That kind of like me saying that I like Wendy's hamburgers, but their fries aren't very good, so they should provide me with McDonald's fries.
Personally I think the entire concept of filtering Internet access in schools is very sketchy in it's validity. Students should be supervised when they are using school equipment to access the Internet. Does this mean you can watch every kid every second they're on the 'Net? Of course not, you have to blink at a minimum, and most likely you'll need to walk around, check the other kids, etc. That's fine. As long as you're checking the screen of each student every few minutes you're very, very likely to catch any mishaps. Given that filtering software is well know for blocking things that might be very appropriate for learning and research, especially at the high school level, this seems like a better solution to me.
It's easy to say that porn should be blocked, but blocking porn often seems to involve blocking health sites which focus on, shall we say, personal health issues (cancers of various sexual and erogenous organs come to mind immediately). It's easy to say you should block hate sites, but how do you research hate groups without going to their sites? It's easy to say you should block sites related to social issues that create controversy, but who makes those determinations? What right do they have to decide what is controversy and what is learning?
My opinion regarding internet filtering aside though, though... Google is offering a service, Google Apps for Education, that schools want. They are offering another service, SSL search, that schools want to block. It seems to me that it is distinctly the school's problem to figure out how to do that. (Which, since they are paying you to provide filtering, makes it your problem). Google's just going to do what they always do, stick services out there and see what makes money.
The "All or nothing" nature of SSL makes me think this is almost certainly a legal issue. The system intercepting the information has no way of knowing whether it's intercepting your attempt to circumvent legitimate restrictions or your bank password. All it would take would be the first instance of a dishonest sys-admin gaining access to a school worth of financial data to sue this into oblivion. Better to just say "SSL doesn't work on these system, you can't get to your bank's site" than say "We're logging everything sent over SSL."
Now see. I just don't get this. I can totally see the iOS vs Android thing. There is little doubt that both are very usable device operating systems devised for the specific needs of a very small screen and limited input options. I'm currently using an iPhone, but realistically I think I'd be just as happy with an Android phone. My iPhone preference is about half "I find it really usable" and about half "I don't feel like changing carriers and AT&T's Android offerings suck". I've also played a bit with WebOS and it seemed usable enough.
Linux (or Windows, or Mac OS) on a cell phone just doesn't seem like it'd be any fun to use. What are they using for a WM? Anything like a standard X.org setup seems like it would be clumsy as Hell on a small screen, and most phones lack any kind of mouse. I realize that some people are willing to sacrifice usability for perceived control, or power, or freedom; but stock Linux on a phone just seems like it'd be more trouble than it's worth.
By contrast in lots of Latin America they've picked up both the Anglo "middle name" and the Spanish "two surnames" resulting in a total of four names for most people. That screws most name systems up but good.
Nearly every Chinese person I know who has immigrated to the US reverses the form of their name to make things easier for the locals. Therefore you are MORE likely to be wrong when addressing them in the manner you suggest than otherwise, at least in my experience. There's no real right answer here. The best you can do is be polite, be gracious if corrected, and expect that if you spend lots of time dealing with internationals you're going to get it wrong sometimes. If you're obviously addressing someone from a traditional East Asian background, perhaps make a point of asking how they structure their name.
Or you could have just said "Gee, an exception to the normal rule. I guess I'll just use their one name as their user name."
Nah, much better to turn their user name into some sort of "Red Badge of Different". This is the sort of thing that this article is precisely right about. I'm sure that user got a happy gushy little feeling every time he sat down at a terminal and logged in as "nonamer". Was his GECOS "Weird name that I can't be chuffed to sort out, Robert"?
How do you figure that? If they've entered a valid e-mail address (IE it's capable of actually getting to someone to spam them), then their can't be an advert in the address (else is wouldn't be valid... unless you happen to really have a Viagra ad embedded in your address). If they've entered an advert, it can't go anywhere. I suppose if you wanted to make a really inefficient spam generator you might use sites with verification e-mails and a format like: name@domain.com;buystuff@viagrasite.com but it would be trivial enough to strip semi-colons without a large complicated regex, and frankly I can see no value in it. It would be a slow as Hell way to send spam, and the only way that people would notice it is if they regularly analyze the "to" line in their e-mail headers.