The problem is, business sense prevails. If you're a farmer, and your neighbour farmer is growing Monsanto GM crops, which are $10 per unit more expensive but yield twice the profits, what do you do? Even if you know it's short term, and that Monsanto are going to sell you something different in ten years (just as their competitors are catching up), do you really sacrifice the profits you could be making today?
What's surprising is that farmers don't seem to learn (or doctors, for the same reasons). Centuries ago farmers got to grips with the concept of crop rotation; planting the same crops in the same fields every season produces ever deteriorating results. So even if it means planting a less profitable crop type every season or so, it's better for the farm in the long run.
Creatures will form a resistance to pesticides (and for doctors, antibiotics) if they're used constantly. The only way to lessen this problem is to use a constantly shifting pattern of pesticides/antibiotics, making sure to "rest" a given method for a certain amount of time. That way no species gets a chance to evolve towards a serious resistance to any one of them.
Instead, we pick one "wonder method" (the miracle chemical of the moment, or a GM solution, or radiation treatment, or whatever) and use it until it doesn't work any more. And then panic.
The bit in parenthesis was important. In the US, teachers tend to be taken from the poorest performing quarter of graduates. In most countries, teachers are taken from the best performing quarter. It should be no surprise that schools in the US perform as they do.
But then you do get what you pay for. If a job in banking pays 5 times what a job in teaching pays, where do you think the best maths graduates are going to go?
A good teacher is like a good performer- they can read the room and adjust accordingly. If they say something and it's clear that people didn't get it, they can return to that point and try again from a different angle. If people are whizzing through it, they can pick up the pace and spend less time on the easy stuff. If people are looking bored, they can make the material more engaging; if people are looking unfocused, they can get stern and serious. And at its simplest- if you raise your hand during a live lesson, the teacher will answer your questions.
Good for you if you can learn well from reading static text and watching video clips, but most people can't; they need a skilful person to manipulate them into learning. Sad maybe, but we are talking about universal education here- not just education for the elite.
TFA is stupid in all sorts of ways. The fact that every household (and schoolroom) in the country already has desktop computers, laptops, netbooks and tablets galore, all with internet connectivity and proper full screens and keyboards seems to have passed them by. Why would a low power e-ink reader be a paradigm shifter if proper computers weren't?
And then there's the fact that teachers are highly trained professionals (in most countries) who can't just be replaced by a gadget or idle parent (especially those of a non-academic disposition). Or the fact that most parents work, so closing schools would mean the reduction of the workforce by almost half. Or the fact that school is about more than textbook exercises, and that group work and practical work can only be done in a school-like environment. Or the fact that schools provide more than just simple education, in the form of socialisation and teaching kids the social norms of the workplace.
Just about the only think e-readers might do is reduce the bill for paper textbooks. And even that's debatable, considering the non-subsidized price of e-readers, and the fact that most of them probably aren't rugged enough for intense use in a school set up.
China would traditionally be considered a "Second World" nation, not "Third World". The terms traditionally referred to "NATO & Friends" (First World), "Soviets, Chinese and friends" (Second World), and "Not a world power or friend of a world power" (Third World).
On the education front, China has a published literacy rate of something like 91%. That doesn't compare all that badly with the US's 97%. Hardly as if they're an unruly peasant rabble that need to be stomped on by a strong man, compared to the enlightened Americans and their democracy.
Profit equals money paid by a company to it's shareholders, or into its investment pot. It is generally net of worker's salaries.
Here's a crazy idea, imported from the exotic east: maybe creating paid employment, in relatively sanitary conditions, for the rank and file population is a goal worth pursuing in its own right?
Sarcasm mode off, it's depressing that this hasn't come up in this thread already. It should be pretty much the sole concern of a government. Profit is for shareholders to worry about, governments are supposed to care about conditions for their citizens.
Why buy now, when the march of technology means you're going to be able to buy more and better in 10 years time?
Stick with the one devices, and when your kids need one for their own home, buy them one then. Or give them your old one and buy a new one for yourself. Copying data across from one machine to another isn't exactly tricky (and although 8 TB of data might be time consuming, we're talking days rather than years).
The big problem with all those things the the US makes/does is that most of it is consumed internally, rather than exported to the world. The US balance of trade showed the biggest deficit ever in 2006; that is, the US imported more goods/services and exported more money than ever before.
Take automobiles. The US is home to two of the biggest auto manufacturers in the world- Ford and GM (plus also Chrysler). However, I've never seen or heard of a non-luxury US export car in Europe. We have plenty of Fords and Opels/Vauxhalls, sure, but we have all the factories over hear too. Crikey, look at the first sentence from the Wikipedia article on the Ford Fiesta:
The Ford Fiesta is a front wheel drive supermini/subcompact manufactured and marketed by Ford Motor Company and built in Europe, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, China, India, Thailand and South Africa. The current-generation Fiesta is marketed worldwide.
The only reason the US is such a big car producer is because it is also a huge car consumer. That doesn't create much wealth, just moves it around.
I'm no Bing fan, but I'd hardly call it unusable. Search results are OK, homepage is clean (unlike Yahoo), and the maps are actually pretty good. If you wanted to use Bing, you could certainly do worse.
The point is, Google is better. So people choose to use it more.
Baidu is presumably better liked by Chinese users than Google or the other alternatives, so people use it more.
There you go (not a recommendation necessarily, just the first thing the search engine produced). If you want something like you described, why don't you buy it? What made you go for the touchscreen Android smartphone if what you wanted was something else?
As someone else said earlier in the thread- man who doesn't want bells and whistles complaining about the cost of bells and whistles. I like the extra things my Android phone does- but if I didn't, I wouldn't have spent the money on it.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're behind half the story submissions. They should just learn to flag it as "Ask Slashdot" and we'd probably be OK with it...
Some of the Cowon range (not necessarily iAudio branded) have HDD instead of flash. Aside from capacity, though, I'm not sure why you'd want it. Maybe my music collection is just titchy, but I've never been able to exceed the 32 GB or so which is the max for most flash devices.
People can choose desktops and laptops without Windows- they're called "Macs". Which was sort of the point of this thread. Like you, I lament that Linux boxes aren't widely available, and that Linux netbooks were killed in such a clinical fashion. But the lack of Linux boxes has nothing to do with Windows beating Apple, or Amiga, or Acorn, or anybody else...
Very few people buy Android because they can download the source code for it (some of it), or because they can root it and run a custom version of Android.
People, maybe not. Companies, yes. Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, etc. picked Android because it was free (by which I mean, they were offered the source code and license to a sophisticated modern OS for free, no strings attached). That is the direct cause of the high availability of many and varied Android devices vs. their rivals.
The same went with Windows vs. Mac back in the day. Nobody used Windows because it was open source (due in no small part to it not being open source), they used it because it was widely available on a large number of different devices. The reason for that was because MS were far more accommodating of that than Apple (who didn't let companies manufacture or sell Macs, except as a direct supplier to them).
There are levels of "lock down", to which the iPod is towards the meaner end of the spectrum.
While not (as far as I'm aware) an open source device, I've been very happy with my Cowon iAudio device. It functions as a UMS device (which means it has drag-and-drop file transfers under every system with a USB port). It works fine under every OS you can throw it at (any versions of Windows, Mac or Linux). And it plays pretty much every file format I know of in mainstream use. It also has dozens of audio and equalizer settings to play with if you're an audiophile, half of which I have no idea about (and happily ignore, to no great detriment). Never will I have the kind of headaches with it that an iPod user might experience in terms of system compatibility or file conversion.
The iAudio 7 (which I own) is a bit of an ugly bugger, but they've got a big range, and some of their more recent devices look pretty nifty.
Even the entire volume of WP7 sales is probably not enough to sustain them. And Microsoft can't even let them have that, because they'll never get their market share off the floor with only one vendor who, by necessity, will itself have to continue selling and marketing non-WP7 in the interim.
Well to be fair, it is possible to have a good market share with only the one vendor. Apple is the only vendor or iOS products, and RIM the only vendor of BlackBerries. And if you had to pick a "one vendor" to bet your product's future on, you could do worse than Nokia- former title holder for #1 smartphone market share, and current title holder for #1 overall mobile phone market share.
It doesn't have to be deleted instantly, as long as they're making good steps to delete it. In the UK, we have data protection laws that stipulate that data must be retained for a certain period after it is no longer in use, and then must be permanently deleted after that. The vast majority of "grown up" companies (such as the big banks) are bound by this and manage to do it just fine. If Facebook can't do this, it's their problem. They shouldn't be in the data centre game if they can't abide by data protection laws properly.
One problem is that data uploaded to Facebook is not always uploaded by the person who it concerns. There are dozens of pictures of me on Facebook, every single one of which uploaded by one of my friends or family. If one of my friends uploads a picture of me I disapprove of (a picture of my bank statement, say, with all my private data clearly visible) and I ask them nicely to remove it, I should have every expectation that the hosting company (Facebook) will not only "remove" it, but also set about deleting it in line with data protection laws. No excuses.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, business sense prevails. If you're a farmer, and your neighbour farmer is growing Monsanto GM crops, which are $10 per unit more expensive but yield twice the profits, what do you do? Even if you know it's short term, and that Monsanto are going to sell you something different in ten years (just as their competitors are catching up), do you really sacrifice the profits you could be making today?
What's surprising is that farmers don't seem to learn (or doctors, for the same reasons). Centuries ago farmers got to grips with the concept of crop rotation; planting the same crops in the same fields every season produces ever deteriorating results. So even if it means planting a less profitable crop type every season or so, it's better for the farm in the long run.
Creatures will form a resistance to pesticides (and for doctors, antibiotics) if they're used constantly. The only way to lessen this problem is to use a constantly shifting pattern of pesticides/antibiotics, making sure to "rest" a given method for a certain amount of time. That way no species gets a chance to evolve towards a serious resistance to any one of them.
Instead, we pick one "wonder method" (the miracle chemical of the moment, or a GM solution, or radiation treatment, or whatever) and use it until it doesn't work any more. And then panic.
The bit in parenthesis was important. In the US, teachers tend to be taken from the poorest performing quarter of graduates. In most countries, teachers are taken from the best performing quarter. It should be no surprise that schools in the US perform as they do.
But then you do get what you pay for. If a job in banking pays 5 times what a job in teaching pays, where do you think the best maths graduates are going to go?
A good teacher is like a good performer- they can read the room and adjust accordingly. If they say something and it's clear that people didn't get it, they can return to that point and try again from a different angle. If people are whizzing through it, they can pick up the pace and spend less time on the easy stuff. If people are looking bored, they can make the material more engaging; if people are looking unfocused, they can get stern and serious. And at its simplest- if you raise your hand during a live lesson, the teacher will answer your questions.
Good for you if you can learn well from reading static text and watching video clips, but most people can't; they need a skilful person to manipulate them into learning. Sad maybe, but we are talking about universal education here- not just education for the elite.
TFA is stupid in all sorts of ways. The fact that every household (and schoolroom) in the country already has desktop computers, laptops, netbooks and tablets galore, all with internet connectivity and proper full screens and keyboards seems to have passed them by. Why would a low power e-ink reader be a paradigm shifter if proper computers weren't?
And then there's the fact that teachers are highly trained professionals (in most countries) who can't just be replaced by a gadget or idle parent (especially those of a non-academic disposition). Or the fact that most parents work, so closing schools would mean the reduction of the workforce by almost half. Or the fact that school is about more than textbook exercises, and that group work and practical work can only be done in a school-like environment. Or the fact that schools provide more than just simple education, in the form of socialisation and teaching kids the social norms of the workplace.
Just about the only think e-readers might do is reduce the bill for paper textbooks. And even that's debatable, considering the non-subsidized price of e-readers, and the fact that most of them probably aren't rugged enough for intense use in a school set up.
China would traditionally be considered a "Second World" nation, not "Third World". The terms traditionally referred to "NATO & Friends" (First World), "Soviets, Chinese and friends" (Second World), and "Not a world power or friend of a world power" (Third World).
On the education front, China has a published literacy rate of something like 91%. That doesn't compare all that badly with the US's 97%. Hardly as if they're an unruly peasant rabble that need to be stomped on by a strong man, compared to the enlightened Americans and their democracy.
Profit equals money paid by a company to it's shareholders, or into its investment pot. It is generally net of worker's salaries.
Here's a crazy idea, imported from the exotic east: maybe creating paid employment, in relatively sanitary conditions, for the rank and file population is a goal worth pursuing in its own right?
Sarcasm mode off, it's depressing that this hasn't come up in this thread already. It should be pretty much the sole concern of a government. Profit is for shareholders to worry about, governments are supposed to care about conditions for their citizens.
Trying to get as many as the rank and file population into gainful employment as possible? Those devious commie bastards...
Why buy now, when the march of technology means you're going to be able to buy more and better in 10 years time?
Stick with the one devices, and when your kids need one for their own home, buy them one then. Or give them your old one and buy a new one for yourself. Copying data across from one machine to another isn't exactly tricky (and although 8 TB of data might be time consuming, we're talking days rather than years).
This is probably a lot to ask of Slashdot, but maybe you should only reply to "Ask Slashdot" questions if you actually understand the question?
The big problem with all those things the the US makes/does is that most of it is consumed internally, rather than exported to the world. The US balance of trade showed the biggest deficit ever in 2006; that is, the US imported more goods/services and exported more money than ever before.
Take automobiles. The US is home to two of the biggest auto manufacturers in the world- Ford and GM (plus also Chrysler). However, I've never seen or heard of a non-luxury US export car in Europe. We have plenty of Fords and Opels/Vauxhalls, sure, but we have all the factories over hear too. Crikey, look at the first sentence from the Wikipedia article on the Ford Fiesta:
The Ford Fiesta is a front wheel drive supermini/subcompact manufactured and marketed by Ford Motor Company and built in Europe, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, China, India, Thailand and South Africa. The current-generation Fiesta is marketed worldwide.
The only reason the US is such a big car producer is because it is also a huge car consumer. That doesn't create much wealth, just moves it around.
Been done many times I'm sure, but it makes me think specifically of...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcjlzSod0CE
I'm no Bing fan, but I'd hardly call it unusable. Search results are OK, homepage is clean (unlike Yahoo), and the maps are actually pretty good. If you wanted to use Bing, you could certainly do worse.
The point is, Google is better. So people choose to use it more.
Baidu is presumably better liked by Chinese users than Google or the other alternatives, so people use it more.
But how do you explain the 80% market share of Baidu?
The same way you can explain Google's 80% market share in the US?
http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-monthly-201011-201111
That is to say, that they're popular because they deliver what people are after?
Yeah, because the Boards of all companies except Apple are stupid. I'm sure that the Kindle Fire is going to destroy Amazon, any minute now!
http://www.mobile-phones-uk.org.uk/nokia-c2-01.htm
There you go (not a recommendation necessarily, just the first thing the search engine produced). If you want something like you described, why don't you buy it? What made you go for the touchscreen Android smartphone if what you wanted was something else?
As someone else said earlier in the thread- man who doesn't want bells and whistles complaining about the cost of bells and whistles. I like the extra things my Android phone does- but if I didn't, I wouldn't have spent the money on it.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're behind half the story submissions. They should just learn to flag it as "Ask Slashdot" and we'd probably be OK with it...
Some of the Cowon range (not necessarily iAudio branded) have HDD instead of flash. Aside from capacity, though, I'm not sure why you'd want it. Maybe my music collection is just titchy, but I've never been able to exceed the 32 GB or so which is the max for most flash devices.
People can choose desktops and laptops without Windows- they're called "Macs". Which was sort of the point of this thread. Like you, I lament that Linux boxes aren't widely available, and that Linux netbooks were killed in such a clinical fashion. But the lack of Linux boxes has nothing to do with Windows beating Apple, or Amiga, or Acorn, or anybody else...
Very few people buy Android because they can download the source code for it (some of it), or because they can root it and run a custom version of Android.
People, maybe not. Companies, yes. Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, etc. picked Android because it was free (by which I mean, they were offered the source code and license to a sophisticated modern OS for free, no strings attached). That is the direct cause of the high availability of many and varied Android devices vs. their rivals.
The same went with Windows vs. Mac back in the day. Nobody used Windows because it was open source (due in no small part to it not being open source), they used it because it was widely available on a large number of different devices. The reason for that was because MS were far more accommodating of that than Apple (who didn't let companies manufacture or sell Macs, except as a direct supplier to them).
There are levels of "lock down", to which the iPod is towards the meaner end of the spectrum.
While not (as far as I'm aware) an open source device, I've been very happy with my Cowon iAudio device. It functions as a UMS device (which means it has drag-and-drop file transfers under every system with a USB port). It works fine under every OS you can throw it at (any versions of Windows, Mac or Linux). And it plays pretty much every file format I know of in mainstream use. It also has dozens of audio and equalizer settings to play with if you're an audiophile, half of which I have no idea about (and happily ignore, to no great detriment). Never will I have the kind of headaches with it that an iPod user might experience in terms of system compatibility or file conversion.
The iAudio 7 (which I own) is a bit of an ugly bugger, but they've got a big range, and some of their more recent devices look pretty nifty.
Even the entire volume of WP7 sales is probably not enough to sustain them. And Microsoft can't even let them have that, because they'll never get their market share off the floor with only one vendor who, by necessity, will itself have to continue selling and marketing non-WP7 in the interim.
Well to be fair, it is possible to have a good market share with only the one vendor. Apple is the only vendor or iOS products, and RIM the only vendor of BlackBerries. And if you had to pick a "one vendor" to bet your product's future on, you could do worse than Nokia- former title holder for #1 smartphone market share, and current title holder for #1 overall mobile phone market share.
That said, I do actually agree with you.
That seems like a redundant title for a book to have...
Your Linux machine clearly does not run a recent version of Ubuntu then.
/ typed, for reason that frankly I'm somewhat unable to recall, from a machine running Unity.
It doesn't have to be deleted instantly, as long as they're making good steps to delete it. In the UK, we have data protection laws that stipulate that data must be retained for a certain period after it is no longer in use, and then must be permanently deleted after that. The vast majority of "grown up" companies (such as the big banks) are bound by this and manage to do it just fine. If Facebook can't do this, it's their problem. They shouldn't be in the data centre game if they can't abide by data protection laws properly.
One problem is that data uploaded to Facebook is not always uploaded by the person who it concerns. There are dozens of pictures of me on Facebook, every single one of which uploaded by one of my friends or family. If one of my friends uploads a picture of me I disapprove of (a picture of my bank statement, say, with all my private data clearly visible) and I ask them nicely to remove it, I should have every expectation that the hosting company (Facebook) will not only "remove" it, but also set about deleting it in line with data protection laws. No excuses.