I wasn't so much meaning that 40 hours was a lot of TV per se, as you say, it's not really unreasonable. I more meant that is was a lot to be downloading from iTunes at $2 a show. I probably watch 30-40 hours of TV a month, but I wouldn't buy 30-40 hours at $2 an hour. Your point about multi-person households is very valid though. My wife plays WoW too, if the last update had come out a few weeks ago, or in a week or so, we'd have combined for ~3GB just in game update between us. Plus both of us would have need iTunes updates, OS updates, etc. I'm about to do a Fedora Core DVD download this weekend to, to build a new file server. It'll probably take all damned weekend on the hotel connection, but I want to have the server build when we move into our new place next week.
Nearly all the networks let you stream their shows for free, sites like Huluu have content that is either free or paid that you can legally access and is of varying quality up and including quite good. iTunes and Netflix let you legally download most TV shows and many movies for quite reasonable fees. Even youtube isn't a complete waste of time, though the video quality is pretty miserly even when the content is decent.
I've only really realized myself in the last few months but the content revolution is arriving and has arrived to some extent. With a decently fast and low latency connection you can stream just about any show on television legally and free of charge, for a few bucks you can download it and watch at leisure, and Internet "pure" content is getting there too (I didn't think Dr. Horrible was as awesome as some people paint it, but it was reasonably entertaining for a freely available fairly inexpensive production. I'll probably buy the DVD when it comes out just to support the concept.)
I dunno about that. From the sounds of things (and I'm an American so I have no direct experience, we have our own broadband woes, but they're different) it sounds like a lot of these ISPs throttle at 20-30 GB a month. That isn't very much at all. I'm living in a hotel for a couple of weeks and I missed Numb3rs last week. Lacking a DVR I decided to drop the $2 and buy it from iTunes (the Internet connection at my Hotel is fairly flaky, and the free stream from CBS.com seemed like a risky endeavor). I was surprised to see it was 500+ MB. Luckily this wasn't a problem since I wasn't streaming... I just let it download all night, but that means that 40 TV shows on iTunes = a 20 GB cap. 40 shows is a lot of course, but one assumes that the person downloading TV shows also got e-mail, OS updates, software updates, some non-TV related web browsing, etc. The last WoW update was 1.5 GB all by itself... I'm starting to see where even a non-power users could exceed a 20GB limit pretty easily at least on occasion. Iwouldn't be half surprised to find that I've hit 10-15 GB this month in the freaking slow ass hotel room between WoW update, huge iTunes update, iPhone OS update and a couple of TV shows, plus web browsing and such. I may normally be considered a power user, but I've seriously cut back because of the lack of speed, but I still could have flubbed some limit just because of circumstances this month.
Well, while it'd be nice to see an easy to use tool that monitors your usage on, say, your ISP's website, it's pretty trivial to keep track of it from your end. Just monitor and log the traffic on your gateway. Whether you have one machine plugged directly into your cable or DSL "modem", a computer set up to route your network, or a set top router box there is always some single ethernet connection through which traffic leaves "your" network and enters the ISPs network. That connection can be monitored. I supposed there might be some off-brand piece of crap set top router that won't keep track of its outbound and incoming traffic numbers, but I've never seen one.
and given the usual media-bloated MySpace page, I would say they're requiring a healthy dose of bandwidth, too.
Ain't that the truth. On a fast connection with a new computer (either my MacBook, My MacBook Pro I had through my last job, or my wife's dual core desktop replacement laptop) my brother's Myspace page takes 5-10 seconds to load. Fecker is huge. And he reloads it constantly looking for updates. And his wife has a huge page that SHE reloads constantly... They have no kids, but I'm sure a similar couple with a teenager could double what the parents alone do.
Step one: US and UK (and probably several other) governments get together and decide this is a good idea. Step two: Both governments go back to their people and say "This is to facilitate entry into $otherCountry." Step three: Both governments get the standards implemented and both get to make it look like they were just being nice and facilitating travel to $otherCountry; while at the same time getting what they actually wanted anyway.
Both governments get what they want, neither side actually lied (since, after all, travel between the two or more countries IS facilitated) and everyone is happy except for the people who realized that this was a dumb, ineffective, and potentially abusable idea in the first place.
I'm not really seeing either point to honest. The data plan for my iPhone is cheaper than the data plan for my wife's Treo. Granted I have the original iPhone with the $20 a month plan, but even the new $30 one is still cheaper than the $40 a month plan for Treos (through AT&T at any rate). And the G-1 has removable storage, giving it a potentially unlimited amount (of course you have to buy the cards...)
I'd say the reason has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft dominates the desktop and designed their desktop OS to be incredibly difficult to integrate with non-MS server systems when it comes to file sharing and authentication. While it's technically possible to integrate Windows clients into an NFS based file sharing system or an LDAP based authentication system, in practice it's a pain in the ass. Plus once you get it working it's a client side config that has to be redone every time you install a new system or (if the shop is large enough to want/need it) create a new system image. With Samba, the work is done on the server and the clients all see things as if they were interacting with the auth/file sharing system that they were designed to work with.
In a perfect world, people would ditch the desktop system that forces them to buy or imitate its own special servers and go with real inter-operable systems. In the real world no one wants to ditch MS on the Desktop so they buy AD servers (or try to imitate them with Samba). On the Personal Information Management front, the situation is similar, but the desktop client is Outlook. Again, you can make Outlook work with other stuff, but it's a pain unless that stuff acts like an Exchange server. So rather than replace Outlook people buy or try to imitate Exchange.
In both cases the main argument seems to be that it's easier to pay whatever MS wants for server software rather than force a mass user migration to another desktop or PIM. If a sufficiently capable alternative to Microsoft server software were available (like a Samba tweaked with real help from MS), it would at least allow companies to configure their back ends however they want, even if they still feel trapped with Windows on the front end.
That's where all of these lawsuits originally came from you see. It's not that Microsoft makes bad software (I actually happen to think that Exchange/Outlook is a pretty good system), it's that they use dominance in one field to force their way into others. Got a lot of Windows desktops? Well, you need an AD server to authenticate and serve files to them! While you're at it, our web server works way better with our browser... Ohh, and look, our SQL server is optimized for our webserver! Plus that SQL server and our Mail server more or less require those previously mentioned AD servers! So, unless you want all your employees to have learn a new desktop OS, you pretty much have buy ALL of our stuff. well.. you don't have to, but our NFS stack sucks (and requires separate installation), convincing our clients to auth against anything except AD practically requires reprogramming the OS, Outlook's IMAP functions seem to be subtly crippled...
Truthfully things have gotten better since they realized that governments would call them on the most egregious problems. Outlook seems to have lost a lot of its subtle problems with open e-mail formats and there's a lot less IE only stuff in the web server. It's still a LOT easier to run an all MS shop than to integrate MS boxes into a heterogeneous network though, and not because MS stuff is particularly easy to configure.
Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom...
And then there were several other places where he specifically talked about giving away one's labor for free, which is pretty much what most Open-Scource projects are to one extent or another... I mean, he didn't use the exact words every other sentence, but the intent was pretty clearly to include FS/OSS in the category of "Free things that should or must go away".
I fail to see how this follows. I was out of work for a bit over a month and a half just recently. It was certainly the case that I was stressed as hell, and that I was spending a lot of time looking for work. It was also the case that I was to broke for any significant expenditures on entertainment, and try as I might I could find no way to turn "looking for work" into a 50-60 hour a week job like I'd been doing. I spent a lot more time reading, writing and playing games than I had previously.
I'm certainly not recommending unemployment as a way to relax, or suggesting that thing might not have gotten more difficult had I been out long enough to say, lose my house; but on average I'd say unemployed people spend more time doing the things that they want to do than employed people (especially in this industry with its insane expectations of "normal" 60 hour weeks in many shops). At least if the time is spent working on an OSS project you get some potential contacts and something to show off at job interviews. I learned a new language while I was unemployed, but honestly I'm not sure my time wouldn't have been better spent applying something I already knew to a project I could point to later.
That's where I think a lot of people are missing the boat on how to do this. You can already control and display iPods and iPhones through bases, so clearly the circuitry is already there. Similarly with a lot of other smartphones, their sync ports allow quite a bit of control. Build a base with a USB controller and {whateverthefuckvideosystemtheiPoduses} to VGA or DVI adapter and when you dock your phone it's displayed/controlled by your monitor and USB KB/mouse. You might have to add a very small amount of hardware and software to the phone, but most of it is already there. How much more hardware could you possibly need to take KB and Mouse signals through the sync port in addition to "Play/Pause/stop/fwd/etc".
Not to mention that GGP's argument is wrong even without unlocking. iPhone users have proven to be extremely willing and able to use their data plans. Much more so than users of earlier smart phones. Probably has to do with the web browser not being a useless piece of trash. Android's browser is meant to be fairly nice as well, so I suspect that as better mobile Internet experiences start to appear, people will make greater use of their data plans. Not to mention that both the iPhone and Android have versions of an application store available that make use of the network. Ironically, I pay $20 a month for my iPhone data plan and $40 a month for my wife's Treo data plan. Guess which one sees more data? I'd as soon never use the web again as use Blazer to surf.
(Of course most of these pretty new phones with decent web browsers also have wifi chipsets. That helps the carriers out somewhat since people will use hotspots when available... I still use actual cell phone data easily two or three times as much on my iPhone as I did on my Treo, and probably four or five times as much as my wife uses her Treo's data plan.)
That doesn't really answer the GP's question. It seems pretty obvious from the answers here that to simply "be able to read all kinds of old media" is nearly impossible. Unless SOME kind of limit is placed on the question you could bleed money, time, and hardware for ever and never be able to read ALL the archaic old forms of data storage out there. Even if you limit yourself to the various types and incarnations of "personal computers" you're looking at dozens of combinations of hardware and software that have been used on hundred of systems from the Aquarius and Vic 20 cassette tapes through current Blue-ray and multi-terabyte tape systems.
On top of that, the VAST majority of the software available for these old systems has already been transfered, by someone, somewhere, onto a modern network connected hard drive available on the web or a newsgroup somewhere. I've seen floppy disk image files for ancient Commodore 64 software; and I'm sure the "retro" communities for the Amiga, Apple II, etc have done the same with every popular or modestly interesting (or freaking useless) piece of software ever written for those platforms as well. What's the point of being able to directly read the media?
If I absolutely MUST retrieve my high school English paper off of a 1541 formated 5.25 inch Commodore 64 disk (written in WordStar 2.0 probably) I can probably find a guy that still has a C-64 with a 1541 drive, and can get the data onto a modern hard drive. The same is probably true of a an Apple II disk that has MS Word 1.0 docs on it. The chance that these will be the same guy, with some massive media rig capable of reading EVERYTHING though, is pretty small. Some hobbyists will likely keep all of these formats readable for decades, if not forever; but they'll out of their individual loves for the Vic 20, the Apple II, or DOS 6.0, not because of some Frankenstein monster media machine with Blue-Ray drive, 25 different floppy drive model, and a couple of cassette player hanging off of it.
But as has been repeated pointed out, the MacBook is a consumer grade device. I know, I have one. The MBP, the Mac Pro, and the iMac still have firewire. Technically the Mac Mini does too, but I wouldn't be surprised if it goes away in the next rev. Firewire has proven to be a pro-spec. The main people that use it are audio and video pros or dedicated amateurs. It makes sense to offer it on the computers that pros will use and leave it off of the consumer grade stuff. When I bought my MacBook I was aware that I was buying lower end gear. Had I wanted MBP specs, I'd have spent the extra money.
That's a fairly irrelevant distinction. Donations and tuition are all money the college has available to spend
Not likely true, or at least "true but misleading". Often donations are given to schools with lots of strings attached, and equally often, schools get grants from the government to do specific things. Grants often also require matching funds from universities; forcing the university to spend some its own money in specific ways if they want the additional funds. It is quite possible that with a number of donations that are required to be used for some IT related purpose, a grant to, for instance, "make use of mobile technology in an educational environment", matching funds for that grant, and Apple providing substantial markdowns in support of a pilot program, none (or very little) of the funds came out of tuition.
I've never worked for THIS university, but I have worked for universities. They often do things like this when a company or person offers them seed money, and then they fill in the gaps with other grants and donations. As a for instance, Tulane University put in campus wide wireless in the 2002-2003 time frame. Jim Barksdale gave them $10 million and said "install campus wireless with this." Obviously $10 million wasn't enough money for such a project (Tulane has a fairly large campus), so the university got together with vendors to get some partnership deals, they nabbed a couple of mid-sized federal education technology grants, and they talked to a couple of wealthy alums who made their money in IT to get some focused donations. Pretty soon we had campus wide wireless and not much of the price came from the general fund.
Most likely scenario here is either:
1) Apple came to ACU and offered to partner with them on this cool pilot project if ACU could come up with some matching funds. ACU said they'd look into it and got some federal money and donations together to make it happen. Most of this money was likely focused for educational IT purposes only and not in the general fund. A lot of it was probably generated specifically for and by this project.
2) Someone who was not Apple came to ACU with a big pot of money for an experimental program combining mobile technology with education. After talking to vendors Apple offered them the best deal for partnering on this interesting (and already partially funded) project. Again, additional grants and donations were found, either with a general enough requirement that they could be used for this, or generated specifically for and by this project.
Usually when universities do these sorts of huge and innovation infrastructure things it's because someone offered to pay for part or all of it, and even if it means spending some money out of the general fund, the offer was too good to pass up. Almost never will a successful university just up and say, "let's spend a few million bucks on something that may or may not work and see whether the students like/use it."
As sibling pointed out, you can choose an iPod touch instead of an iPhone, and from the looks of things the university is keeping it's option open for future improvements in the smart phone arena:
ACU created a bundle of Web-based mobile applications, rather than make use of Apple's software developers kit. That gives the school the option of making use of other devices in the future, possibly a touch-based Android phone, running a full mobile Web browser such as Firefox for Mobile, now in development.
If Android or any of the other upcoming smartphone efforts seem to provide what they're looking for, it seems they're prepared to branch out.
Especially control. GP and GGGP make mention of some fairly straight forward display solutions which might be workable in the medium to long term, but control is a real problem. I love my iPhone, but I'm going to be writing a book (or even a modest sized/. post) on it if I can help it. Those laser based keyboards are kinda nifty, but again, I wouldn't want to write my first novel on one. Until someone can come up with a viable alternative to keyboards, mice, and touch screens; and shove that alternative into a pocketable device so that it doesn't decrease usability, I don't think desktops/laptops are going anywhere. They may get re-imaged (a desktop general use computer built into your plasma TV with a remote keyboard maybe? Or a multiuser system based in the house but capable of displaying in multiple rooms for multiple people? Kind of like a personal version of these thin clients?), but they aren't likely to be replaced by a smart-phone, no matter how powerful.
Maybe a smart-phone with a docking cradle that allows you to display instantly turn it into a "workstation" computer? Possibly that could work (kind of like docking a laptop). Though in some ways you'd lose portability, The device could be carried anywhere but unless you had a "home" dock and and "portable" dock you'd lose the ability to use the device to it's full capability outside of your home.
You're not paying them to provide a game service, or a general computing service. You're paying them to provide a research network. If, by playing flash games, doing word processing, or checking facebook, you are using resources that other people need to do research then you are cheating those people. One assumes that the rules are established to ensure that students who need the computers or bandwidth for the intended purpose of the system do not have to compete with others who are misusing the resources.
You're confusing "I pay these people to provided me with a specific service" with "I pay these people to do whatever I want". You can pay for general use computing capabilities, say from an Internet Cafe, in which case you would have a basis to complain if they refused to allow you to play flash games.
I seem to get mod points every other week. I've probably wasted 30 or more in the last few months just for not seeing enough stuff I wanted to moderate. I wonder what kind of algorithm they use for this.
The idea behind any "group based" health care plan, whether it be a private company or a national health care system, is based on the very thing you are talking about. Yes, as a healthy 23 year old you pay money and receive little benefit. This sucks for you. I feel your pain, as a healthy 34 year old I drop ~$240 a month on health insurance for myself and my equally healthy wife. Meanwhile, the 55 year old guy down the hall pays the same ~$240 a month for him and his wife and they are both much less healthy. Let's not even talk about the 75 year old guy in the corner office. This is horribly unfair really. I'm paying for all these unhealthy people to get treatment, but I almost never use my coverage (annual check-up and rare accidents or illness are unlikely to come close to my contribution). Of course, 25 or 30 years from now I or my wife may well be the unhealthy ones drawing more on the system and some ~30 year old will be bitching about it. That's the point. It's insurance, not "I need to get out everything I take in". Even as a healthy 23 year old, you might have had a stroke or fallen down and broken some important bone or other... suddenly you get out the system more than you pain in. I knew a guy in college who had a stroke at 22. Between hospital stay and therapy (it caused him to forget how to speak), he got WAY more than his money's worth out of his insurance.
How about pretty much any politician in Europe or Canada who does not self-identify as "conservative". You may remember that most first world countries in the world already have already have a "$mascotofcountrysgovt Hospital Monopoly", and even their consevatives are generally supportive of the idea.
It sounds good to say that, but how do you actually do it? There's no real barrier to the creation of third (or fourth or fifth) parties here in the US, they just don't get votes of donations. The Dems and Repubs could and, if it ever came to it, might put real barriers up if they wanted or needed to, but as things stand it's pretty much a social problem. People feel that a vote for a third party is a wasted vote, but until more people vote third party it will continue to look that way. How do you fix that?
I'm guilty of it too, I'm not acting holy here. I haven't really even looked at the third party candidates this year, because I badly enough DON'T want a Republican that I'm going to vote Democrat. It's wrong of me... I should vote for the guy I want, not vote against the guy I don't, but it seems the lesser of two evils right now.
Palin did well, but probably not good enough to matter
Yeah, but the common Fox News crowd opinion seems to be that by not coming across as a moron or a lunatic Palin "won" politically. It was widely feared in Republican circles that Palin would completely foul up the debate and lose all credibility. If that had happened it would put McCain in the unenviable position of having to choose between supporting her (and looking like he was an idiot or a fool), or dumping her (and looking like he made a fantastically bad choice in the first place). By doing OK Palin avoided a complete disaster, so she "won".
The problem with the whole debate in my opinion was that Biden couldn't "win". Palin could "lose", if she really made herself look like an idiot or said something crazy, but Biden could have been Cicero and it wouldn't have mattered. The nature of the two candidates totally put the the ball in Palin's court. If she did well she would win, if she did OK she would tie (and still in a way "win"), if she bombed she would lose. Biden was going to more or less be fine unless he bombed (and lost), but could never "win" on he own.
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I wasn't so much meaning that 40 hours was a lot of TV per se, as you say, it's not really unreasonable. I more meant that is was a lot to be downloading from iTunes at $2 a show. I probably watch 30-40 hours of TV a month, but I wouldn't buy 30-40 hours at $2 an hour. Your point about multi-person households is very valid though. My wife plays WoW too, if the last update had come out a few weeks ago, or in a week or so, we'd have combined for ~3GB just in game update between us. Plus both of us would have need iTunes updates, OS updates, etc. I'm about to do a Fedora Core DVD download this weekend to, to build a new file server. It'll probably take all damned weekend on the hotel connection, but I want to have the server build when we move into our new place next week.
Nearly all the networks let you stream their shows for free, sites like Huluu have content that is either free or paid that you can legally access and is of varying quality up and including quite good. iTunes and Netflix let you legally download most TV shows and many movies for quite reasonable fees. Even youtube isn't a complete waste of time, though the video quality is pretty miserly even when the content is decent.
I've only really realized myself in the last few months but the content revolution is arriving and has arrived to some extent. With a decently fast and low latency connection you can stream just about any show on television legally and free of charge, for a few bucks you can download it and watch at leisure, and Internet "pure" content is getting there too (I didn't think Dr. Horrible was as awesome as some people paint it, but it was reasonably entertaining for a freely available fairly inexpensive production. I'll probably buy the DVD when it comes out just to support the concept.)
I dunno about that. From the sounds of things (and I'm an American so I have no direct experience, we have our own broadband woes, but they're different) it sounds like a lot of these ISPs throttle at 20-30 GB a month. That isn't very much at all. I'm living in a hotel for a couple of weeks and I missed Numb3rs last week. Lacking a DVR I decided to drop the $2 and buy it from iTunes (the Internet connection at my Hotel is fairly flaky, and the free stream from CBS.com seemed like a risky endeavor). I was surprised to see it was 500+ MB. Luckily this wasn't a problem since I wasn't streaming... I just let it download all night, but that means that 40 TV shows on iTunes = a 20 GB cap. 40 shows is a lot of course, but one assumes that the person downloading TV shows also got e-mail, OS updates, software updates, some non-TV related web browsing, etc. The last WoW update was 1.5 GB all by itself... I'm starting to see where even a non-power users could exceed a 20GB limit pretty easily at least on occasion. Iwouldn't be half surprised to find that I've hit 10-15 GB this month in the freaking slow ass hotel room between WoW update, huge iTunes update, iPhone OS update and a couple of TV shows, plus web browsing and such. I may normally be considered a power user, but I've seriously cut back because of the lack of speed, but I still could have flubbed some limit just because of circumstances this month.
Well, while it'd be nice to see an easy to use tool that monitors your usage on, say, your ISP's website, it's pretty trivial to keep track of it from your end. Just monitor and log the traffic on your gateway. Whether you have one machine plugged directly into your cable or DSL "modem", a computer set up to route your network, or a set top router box there is always some single ethernet connection through which traffic leaves "your" network and enters the ISPs network. That connection can be monitored. I supposed there might be some off-brand piece of crap set top router that won't keep track of its outbound and incoming traffic numbers, but I've never seen one.
and given the usual media-bloated MySpace page, I would say they're requiring a healthy dose of bandwidth, too.
Ain't that the truth. On a fast connection with a new computer (either my MacBook, My MacBook Pro I had through my last job, or my wife's dual core desktop replacement laptop) my brother's Myspace page takes 5-10 seconds to load. Fecker is huge. And he reloads it constantly looking for updates. And his wife has a huge page that SHE reloads constantly... They have no kids, but I'm sure a similar couple with a teenager could double what the parents alone do.
I don't see the conflict here:
Step one: US and UK (and probably several other) governments get together and decide this is a good idea.
Step two: Both governments go back to their people and say "This is to facilitate entry into $otherCountry."
Step three: Both governments get the standards implemented and both get to make it look like they were just being nice and facilitating travel to $otherCountry; while at the same time getting what they actually wanted anyway.
Both governments get what they want, neither side actually lied (since, after all, travel between the two or more countries IS facilitated) and everyone is happy except for the people who realized that this was a dumb, ineffective, and potentially abusable idea in the first place.
I'm not really seeing either point to honest. The data plan for my iPhone is cheaper than the data plan for my wife's Treo. Granted I have the original iPhone with the $20 a month plan, but even the new $30 one is still cheaper than the $40 a month plan for Treos (through AT&T at any rate). And the G-1 has removable storage, giving it a potentially unlimited amount (of course you have to buy the cards...)
I'd say the reason has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft dominates the desktop and designed their desktop OS to be incredibly difficult to integrate with non-MS server systems when it comes to file sharing and authentication. While it's technically possible to integrate Windows clients into an NFS based file sharing system or an LDAP based authentication system, in practice it's a pain in the ass. Plus once you get it working it's a client side config that has to be redone every time you install a new system or (if the shop is large enough to want/need it) create a new system image. With Samba, the work is done on the server and the clients all see things as if they were interacting with the auth/file sharing system that they were designed to work with.
In a perfect world, people would ditch the desktop system that forces them to buy or imitate its own special servers and go with real inter-operable systems. In the real world no one wants to ditch MS on the Desktop so they buy AD servers (or try to imitate them with Samba). On the Personal Information Management front, the situation is similar, but the desktop client is Outlook. Again, you can make Outlook work with other stuff, but it's a pain unless that stuff acts like an Exchange server. So rather than replace Outlook people buy or try to imitate Exchange.
In both cases the main argument seems to be that it's easier to pay whatever MS wants for server software rather than force a mass user migration to another desktop or PIM. If a sufficiently capable alternative to Microsoft server software were available (like a Samba tweaked with real help from MS), it would at least allow companies to configure their back ends however they want, even if they still feel trapped with Windows on the front end.
That's where all of these lawsuits originally came from you see. It's not that Microsoft makes bad software (I actually happen to think that Exchange/Outlook is a pretty good system), it's that they use dominance in one field to force their way into others. Got a lot of Windows desktops? Well, you need an AD server to authenticate and serve files to them! While you're at it, our web server works way better with our browser... Ohh, and look, our SQL server is optimized for our webserver! Plus that SQL server and our Mail server more or less require those previously mentioned AD servers! So, unless you want all your employees to have learn a new desktop OS, you pretty much have buy ALL of our stuff. well.. you don't have to, but our NFS stack sucks (and requires separate installation), convincing our clients to auth against anything except AD practically requires reprogramming the OS, Outlook's IMAP functions seem to be subtly crippled...
Truthfully things have gotten better since they realized that governments would call them on the most egregious problems. Outlook seems to have lost a lot of its subtle problems with open e-mail formats and there's a lot less IE only stuff in the web server. It's still a LOT easier to run an all MS shop than to integrate MS boxes into a heterogeneous network though, and not because MS stuff is particularly easy to configure.
And you really don't want that. I mean, regular union thugs are thugs, what must thug union thugs be like?
Well there was the article title:
Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping
and specifically here:
Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom...
And then there were several other places where he specifically talked about giving away one's labor for free, which is pretty much what most Open-Scource projects are to one extent or another... I mean, he didn't use the exact words every other sentence, but the intent was pretty clearly to include FS/OSS in the category of "Free things that should or must go away".
I fail to see how this follows. I was out of work for a bit over a month and a half just recently. It was certainly the case that I was stressed as hell, and that I was spending a lot of time looking for work. It was also the case that I was to broke for any significant expenditures on entertainment, and try as I might I could find no way to turn "looking for work" into a 50-60 hour a week job like I'd been doing. I spent a lot more time reading, writing and playing games than I had previously.
I'm certainly not recommending unemployment as a way to relax, or suggesting that thing might not have gotten more difficult had I been out long enough to say, lose my house; but on average I'd say unemployed people spend more time doing the things that they want to do than employed people (especially in this industry with its insane expectations of "normal" 60 hour weeks in many shops). At least if the time is spent working on an OSS project you get some potential contacts and something to show off at job interviews. I learned a new language while I was unemployed, but honestly I'm not sure my time wouldn't have been better spent applying something I already knew to a project I could point to later.
That's where I think a lot of people are missing the boat on how to do this. You can already control and display iPods and iPhones through bases, so clearly the circuitry is already there. Similarly with a lot of other smartphones, their sync ports allow quite a bit of control. Build a base with a USB controller and {whateverthefuckvideosystemtheiPoduses} to VGA or DVI adapter and when you dock your phone it's displayed/controlled by your monitor and USB KB/mouse. You might have to add a very small amount of hardware and software to the phone, but most of it is already there. How much more hardware could you possibly need to take KB and Mouse signals through the sync port in addition to "Play/Pause/stop/fwd/etc".
Not to mention that GGP's argument is wrong even without unlocking. iPhone users have proven to be extremely willing and able to use their data plans. Much more so than users of earlier smart phones. Probably has to do with the web browser not being a useless piece of trash. Android's browser is meant to be fairly nice as well, so I suspect that as better mobile Internet experiences start to appear, people will make greater use of their data plans. Not to mention that both the iPhone and Android have versions of an application store available that make use of the network. Ironically, I pay $20 a month for my iPhone data plan and $40 a month for my wife's Treo data plan. Guess which one sees more data? I'd as soon never use the web again as use Blazer to surf.
(Of course most of these pretty new phones with decent web browsers also have wifi chipsets. That helps the carriers out somewhat since people will use hotspots when available... I still use actual cell phone data easily two or three times as much on my iPhone as I did on my Treo, and probably four or five times as much as my wife uses her Treo's data plan.)
That doesn't really answer the GP's question. It seems pretty obvious from the answers here that to simply "be able to read all kinds of old media" is nearly impossible. Unless SOME kind of limit is placed on the question you could bleed money, time, and hardware for ever and never be able to read ALL the archaic old forms of data storage out there. Even if you limit yourself to the various types and incarnations of "personal computers" you're looking at dozens of combinations of hardware and software that have been used on hundred of systems from the Aquarius and Vic 20 cassette tapes through current Blue-ray and multi-terabyte tape systems.
On top of that, the VAST majority of the software available for these old systems has already been transfered, by someone, somewhere, onto a modern network connected hard drive available on the web or a newsgroup somewhere. I've seen floppy disk image files for ancient Commodore 64 software; and I'm sure the "retro" communities for the Amiga, Apple II, etc have done the same with every popular or modestly interesting (or freaking useless) piece of software ever written for those platforms as well. What's the point of being able to directly read the media?
If I absolutely MUST retrieve my high school English paper off of a 1541 formated 5.25 inch Commodore 64 disk (written in WordStar 2.0 probably) I can probably find a guy that still has a C-64 with a 1541 drive, and can get the data onto a modern hard drive. The same is probably true of a an Apple II disk that has MS Word 1.0 docs on it. The chance that these will be the same guy, with some massive media rig capable of reading EVERYTHING though, is pretty small. Some hobbyists will likely keep all of these formats readable for decades, if not forever; but they'll out of their individual loves for the Vic 20, the Apple II, or DOS 6.0, not because of some Frankenstein monster media machine with Blue-Ray drive, 25 different floppy drive model, and a couple of cassette player hanging off of it.
But as has been repeated pointed out, the MacBook is a consumer grade device. I know, I have one. The MBP, the Mac Pro, and the iMac still have firewire. Technically the Mac Mini does too, but I wouldn't be surprised if it goes away in the next rev. Firewire has proven to be a pro-spec. The main people that use it are audio and video pros or dedicated amateurs. It makes sense to offer it on the computers that pros will use and leave it off of the consumer grade stuff. When I bought my MacBook I was aware that I was buying lower end gear. Had I wanted MBP specs, I'd have spent the extra money.
's cuz Java is a Sun product. Freaking SunOS hasn't had a major revision update since Solaris was released. Solaris X == SunOS 5.X.
That's a fairly irrelevant distinction. Donations and tuition are all money the college has available to spend
Not likely true, or at least "true but misleading". Often donations are given to schools with lots of strings attached, and equally often, schools get grants from the government to do specific things. Grants often also require matching funds from universities; forcing the university to spend some its own money in specific ways if they want the additional funds. It is quite possible that with a number of donations that are required to be used for some IT related purpose, a grant to, for instance, "make use of mobile technology in an educational environment", matching funds for that grant, and Apple providing substantial markdowns in support of a pilot program, none (or very little) of the funds came out of tuition.
I've never worked for THIS university, but I have worked for universities. They often do things like this when a company or person offers them seed money, and then they fill in the gaps with other grants and donations. As a for instance, Tulane University put in campus wide wireless in the 2002-2003 time frame. Jim Barksdale gave them $10 million and said "install campus wireless with this." Obviously $10 million wasn't enough money for such a project (Tulane has a fairly large campus), so the university got together with vendors to get some partnership deals, they nabbed a couple of mid-sized federal education technology grants, and they talked to a couple of wealthy alums who made their money in IT to get some focused donations. Pretty soon we had campus wide wireless and not much of the price came from the general fund.
Most likely scenario here is either:
1) Apple came to ACU and offered to partner with them on this cool pilot project if ACU could come up with some matching funds. ACU said they'd look into it and got some federal money and donations together to make it happen. Most of this money was likely focused for educational IT purposes only and not in the general fund. A lot of it was probably generated specifically for and by this project.
2) Someone who was not Apple came to ACU with a big pot of money for an experimental program combining mobile technology with education. After talking to vendors Apple offered them the best deal for partnering on this interesting (and already partially funded) project. Again, additional grants and donations were found, either with a general enough requirement that they could be used for this, or generated specifically for and by this project.
Usually when universities do these sorts of huge and innovation infrastructure things it's because someone offered to pay for part or all of it, and even if it means spending some money out of the general fund, the offer was too good to pass up. Almost never will a successful university just up and say, "let's spend a few million bucks on something that may or may not work and see whether the students like/use it."
As sibling pointed out, you can choose an iPod touch instead of an iPhone, and from the looks of things the university is keeping it's option open for future improvements in the smart phone arena:
ACU created a bundle of Web-based mobile applications, rather than make use of Apple's software developers kit. That gives the school the option of making use of other devices in the future, possibly a touch-based Android phone, running a full mobile Web browser such as Firefox for Mobile, now in development.
If Android or any of the other upcoming smartphone efforts seem to provide what they're looking for, it seems they're prepared to branch out.
Especially control. GP and GGGP make mention of some fairly straight forward display solutions which might be workable in the medium to long term, but control is a real problem. I love my iPhone, but I'm going to be writing a book (or even a modest sized /. post) on it if I can help it. Those laser based keyboards are kinda nifty, but again, I wouldn't want to write my first novel on one. Until someone can come up with a viable alternative to keyboards, mice, and touch screens; and shove that alternative into a pocketable device so that it doesn't decrease usability, I don't think desktops/laptops are going anywhere. They may get re-imaged (a desktop general use computer built into your plasma TV with a remote keyboard maybe? Or a multiuser system based in the house but capable of displaying in multiple rooms for multiple people? Kind of like a personal version of these thin clients?), but they aren't likely to be replaced by a smart-phone, no matter how powerful.
Maybe a smart-phone with a docking cradle that allows you to display instantly turn it into a "workstation" computer? Possibly that could work (kind of like docking a laptop). Though in some ways you'd lose portability, The device could be carried anywhere but unless you had a "home" dock and and "portable" dock you'd lose the ability to use the device to it's full capability outside of your home.
Not to feed the troll, but...
You're not paying them to provide a game service, or a general computing service. You're paying them to provide a research network. If, by playing flash games, doing word processing, or checking facebook, you are using resources that other people need to do research then you are cheating those people. One assumes that the rules are established to ensure that students who need the computers or bandwidth for the intended purpose of the system do not have to compete with others who are misusing the resources.
You're confusing "I pay these people to provided me with a specific service" with "I pay these people to do whatever I want". You can pay for general use computing capabilities, say from an Internet Cafe, in which case you would have a basis to complain if they refused to allow you to play flash games.
I seem to get mod points every other week. I've probably wasted 30 or more in the last few months just for not seeing enough stuff I wanted to moderate. I wonder what kind of algorithm they use for this.
The idea behind any "group based" health care plan, whether it be a private company or a national health care system, is based on the very thing you are talking about. Yes, as a healthy 23 year old you pay money and receive little benefit. This sucks for you. I feel your pain, as a healthy 34 year old I drop ~$240 a month on health insurance for myself and my equally healthy wife. Meanwhile, the 55 year old guy down the hall pays the same ~$240 a month for him and his wife and they are both much less healthy. Let's not even talk about the 75 year old guy in the corner office. This is horribly unfair really. I'm paying for all these unhealthy people to get treatment, but I almost never use my coverage (annual check-up and rare accidents or illness are unlikely to come close to my contribution). Of course, 25 or 30 years from now I or my wife may well be the unhealthy ones drawing more on the system and some ~30 year old will be bitching about it. That's the point. It's insurance, not "I need to get out everything I take in". Even as a healthy 23 year old, you might have had a stroke or fallen down and broken some important bone or other... suddenly you get out the system more than you pain in. I knew a guy in college who had a stroke at 22. Between hospital stay and therapy (it caused him to forget how to speak), he got WAY more than his money's worth out of his insurance.
How about pretty much any politician in Europe or Canada who does not self-identify as "conservative". You may remember that most first world countries in the world already have already have a "$mascotofcountrysgovt Hospital Monopoly", and even their consevatives are generally supportive of the idea.
It sounds good to say that, but how do you actually do it? There's no real barrier to the creation of third (or fourth or fifth) parties here in the US, they just don't get votes of donations. The Dems and Repubs could and, if it ever came to it, might put real barriers up if they wanted or needed to, but as things stand it's pretty much a social problem. People feel that a vote for a third party is a wasted vote, but until more people vote third party it will continue to look that way. How do you fix that?
I'm guilty of it too, I'm not acting holy here. I haven't really even looked at the third party candidates this year, because I badly enough DON'T want a Republican that I'm going to vote Democrat. It's wrong of me... I should vote for the guy I want, not vote against the guy I don't, but it seems the lesser of two evils right now.
Palin did well, but probably not good enough to matter
Yeah, but the common Fox News crowd opinion seems to be that by not coming across as a moron or a lunatic Palin "won" politically. It was widely feared in Republican circles that Palin would completely foul up the debate and lose all credibility. If that had happened it would put McCain in the unenviable position of having to choose between supporting her (and looking like he was an idiot or a fool), or dumping her (and looking like he made a fantastically bad choice in the first place). By doing OK Palin avoided a complete disaster, so she "won".
The problem with the whole debate in my opinion was that Biden couldn't "win". Palin could "lose", if she really made herself look like an idiot or said something crazy, but Biden could have been Cicero and it wouldn't have mattered. The nature of the two candidates totally put the the ball in Palin's court. If she did well she would win, if she did OK she would tie (and still in a way "win"), if she bombed she would lose. Biden was going to more or less be fine unless he bombed (and lost), but could never "win" on he own.