They are doing exactly what all technology companies should be doing: push the limits and try the impossible. It's always a win-win idea.
History is littered with the remains of companies who tried to push the limits, attempt the impossible, and failed. True, pushing limits can be extremely rewarding and is the foundation of technical progress, but it's by no means the panacea you imply!
Firefox hasn't become any slower. What's happened is that everything else become so much faster. There used to be a "pregnant pause" when entering a domain, I remember when 30 seconds to load a page was the norm, over 56k.
Now, I expect the results from a google search to appear as I type, interactively. This isn't just an improvement, it's a whole 'nother animal at that level of performance.
My bedroom "TV" is a Mac mini hooked up to a big (ish) monitor. Hulu + Netflix + abc/nbc/cbs/etc/.com works great for me. My big living room TV is similarly hooked up. I've never bothered with cable or an antenna.
For the record, I have a 12 year old 450 Mhz PIII Dell desktop that continues to do duty as a network monitor, with 100% uptime except for reboots for software updates, and forgetting that it won't boot unless a keyboard is plugged into it.
I could replace it, but why? It's been perfect so far, and recently took an upgrade to 32 bit RHEL6 without a hitch.
Oh, wouldn't it be nice if all those loving parents just put the smack down on their obviously under-disciplined children? You haven't parented children. Come back with an informed opinion when you have.
Think about this for a moment: a range that differs by some 80% of its base value, as the basis of whether or not we should ruin somebody's life. 12 is legal in some places, in others you have to be almost 2x as old to afford the same legal protections! Clearly, the age of "adult" is an imprecise measurement, at the very least.
Biologically speaking, it's appropriate for men to be attracted to young females. They are healthy, don't already have children, and are likely to be available for bearing children. If you are a guy and you want to generate posterity, paying particular attention to newly minted young women is a particularly successful strategy. 200 years ago, it was pretty common for a young woman to be wed at 14, and an 18 year old unwed woman was regarded to be almost a spinster. Life was simple, life expectancies short, rules weren't so arbitrary.
Enter civilization, which lengthens lifespans but doesn't lengthen puberty. Abstract ideas create complex hard rules somewhat divorced from individual situations. Life is more complex, and the ramifications of a bad decision can be much worse, and it takes much longer for people to be truly cognizant of the effects of their actions.
But millions of years of evolution (or a moody, jealous god, your choice) have created a life form that is hard-wired to reproduce at about age 15 to 16, while the circumstances of that life form in its present circumstance has the real, ideal age of reproduction some 10 years later. Young people are impressionable and easily manipulated, and society seeks to defend their decisions by letting them incubate longer before making major decisions.
Folks, this situation just isn't going to end well for everyone.
While we should definitely work to defend young, newly sexually active people from the manipulations of far more experienced adults, we shouldn't ruin the lives of people who otherwise do what they are hard wired to do. And we certainly shouldn't group them with people who have an actual, diagnosed mental disorder.
I'm a father of adult children. One of my sons had a healthy, sexual relationship with a young lady 4 years, 3 months his junior. It was a courteous, long-term relationship, and he was civil and polite the entire time. It was terrifying to me, and there was precious little I could do about it. He was legally an adult, but had any authorities found out about it, could have face serious legal consequences, including being branded a "sexual offender" for life, treated as a diseased sexual deviant that he is not.
Try telling my kid no? Puleeeeaaaase.... your ignorance is part of the problem.
And this is the part that drives me NUTS. Just because you can mount a loop back device with the command `mount -o loop/path/to/file.iso/mountpoint` doesn't mean that you HAVE to do it that way. KDE/Gnome have provided easy ways to mount ISO files for like EVER.
But here's the truth: doing it the "double click the icon way" is the lesser way. While fine for users that just want to mount the image rather than burn to disc first, it's limited. It's the way that can't be scripted, it can't be automated as part of a server process that (in my case) I use to build install files of my software for OSX.
Knowing the script form gives you power, a power similar to the written word - the power to have your ideas preserved and replicated for posterity. This isn't some goofy idea, it's reality for us programmer/hacker types. The things we do get replicated and spread broadly, thousands or millions can benefit from our ideas encoded.
Want to double click? Go for it. Even mentioning the command line option is a fail for those that can't see the power of the next level.
I would be ok with even 24 hours, or a week. A month becomes annoying, longer becomes obstructive. What bothers me is an increasing tendency to "lose" controversial footage. While it's a good move to record all police activity, we must realize that if we expect the police to document their crimes, they're going to do a lousy job of it.
We need to pass laws/regulations that make losing the recordings itself a crime of significant note.
You think it's part of a well-rounded education for a programmer to (apparently) know how to use tools like flex, while still lacking any competence whatsoever in manipulating the very basic, simple data types you learn in your 101-level courses? You know, integer... float.... char.... string... ?
And further, you think that it's reasonable that the programmer in question that has (apparently) demonstrated "mastery" in using flex to build a SQL language parser, is still (somehow) not able to write even an approximation of a SQL database query?
Is this the education you received, the one that poor, unqualified me is lacking? And based on this advanced education, you want me to hire you?
Of course, it also means that the police wouldn't be able to listen in either without setting up a fake cell phone tower to be a MitM
I don't get it. Somehow, you seem to have missed that one of the main points of a key exchange is to protect you from a MITM attack? See: Certificates, how do they work? You even said: "to establish a completely private connection on something that you are broadcasting, and do not know who might be listening in?"...
Well, if they could do a MITM, wouldn't they be listening in?
I changed my interview style after that. I ask a bunch of simple nitty-gritty tech question now, no matter how impressive the candidate sounds. You would be surprised how often someone whose resume looks stellar can't answer multiple simple questions - like what is a/24, a tcp reset packet, port used by http, etc.
This oh yes this! Interviewing for programmer positions, I've seen gorgeous resumes by people with Masters in CompSci at reputable colleges and universities, with "accomplishments" like writing SQL language lexical parsers, who could not write even an approximation of a SQL query or even write a simple string replace function. (how do you get to lexical parsing without being able to manipulate strings?)
This may seem a bit provocative, but this is very consistently the case with graduates from India. Having interviewed so many such people, so often having such beautiful resumes, you'd think I could have at least found a single one with enough programming expertise that I could hire, but that's so far not yet been the case.
I really feel for these guys, because they've obviously spent lots of time/money doing something, and whatever it is that they're doing, it's not helping them much.
Okular's not bad, and makes adobe acrobat look like a pregnant redneck with down syndrome and a half-dozen beers in its gut, but doesn't hold a candle to Chrome's build-in PDF viewer, which is so good it's barely distinguishable from any other web page, at least in speed.
San Francisco is a terrible place to have a car. This city has among the highest densities of cars per mile of road of any city anywhere in the world. Having lived there in the early 90s, I can say that my car was much more of a hindrance than a blessing!
San Francisco has great public transportation and stiff density. Walking isn't such a big deal because you don't have to go so far, and buses take you where you don't want to bother walking.
And when you drive, you rarely get to go faster than 20 MPH. You certainly never *average* much more than that. And at that pace, a guy on a bicycle could easily match your progress. The car isn't so much of an advantage.
An "engineer" is somebody who takes the time to understand a problem, and creates something to solve that.
Having done software from scales ranging from "quick shopping cart application" to enterprise scale organizational relationship management software, the only real difference between the two is that with the latter, you create a large number of smaller projects roughly the size of the aforementioned shopping cart application, except that the "users" are often other pieces of the same system. In larger systems, you'll be talking with other developers who have built or manage the pieces your parts will communicate with. You'll read more documentation, and it will be generally of higher quality than the shopping cart scripts.
Don't *ever* lose the "hacker" mentality - exactly what you described is what software engineering is. The toughest part IMHO is getting to an understanding of what the end user actually needs. That's far and away harder than all the other stuff, which boils down to implementation details once you understand the algorithms.
Mobile access to commonly email documents... you mean like a ZIP file? (which I couldn't open on WinCE 6.1)
A good integrated mail client... Well, sorta... it worked with Exchange, perhaps, otherwise it was bleh...
Thorough integrated contact management... it had a calendar app that was roughly on par with a $15 time management piece. It worked with Exchange, see previous post.
Excellent 3rd party mapping/GPS software... what are you smoking, exactly?
Thorough integrated contact management... I have no idea where this comment comes from. Wha?
The audacity of claiming that iOS or Android lack streaming and local video support, or mapping/GPS software options is stupid silly.
WinMo / WinCE is perhaps the single greatest spectacular failure in the history of tech - a commanding, multi-billion dollar, 10-year lead resulted in Windows Mobile 6.x, which couldn't even begin to compare to a copy (Android) of a well executed idea (iOS) implemented in short order using relatively standard technology. (*nix)
How do you blow your decade in the sun any harder?
Yes, use rather than looks, but there are ways to game the system...
I almost bought a (gorgeous!) pair of 1920's bungalow set in a history-steeped downtown, small-town America. There was over 3,000 feet of living space, enormous basements, riverfront access to a gorgeous river, etc.
But there were some caveats: because it was downtown, it was zoned for light commercial use, which meant that although you could live there, you had to have a "primary presence" of a commercial space. So where the front room would be, there was a clothing shop, with a sign, and posted hours: "open by appointment only" that nobody ever went into and hadn't been looked at in years.
After thinking about it (and the culture of the very small town, not nearly as intellectual as I'm used to) I decided not to buy. Of course, history is the best judge; had I bought the place I would likely have a net worth far greater than I do now, since the city bought the property under imminent domain and the owner made a small fortune on it.
I guess I just wanted to say that properties are frequently not what they seem. For giggles, take a Google tour of some of the stealth oil wells in the Los Angeles area.
In the end, we decided (as we have with most other cloud services) that the whole idea didn't live up to the hype, and we opted to lease a dedicated server housed in someone else's data centre and we basically just do an automatic rsync from our normal servers to the back-up with suitable levels of encryption applied throughout.
It's a rather cost-effective to do this. Modest equipment, inexpensive, large consumer SATA hard disk in RAID arrays. With a decent power supply, you can pack 20 or 30 TB of storage into a commodity case and have a reliable backup solution.
I admin dozens of servers, including a JBOD backups server (running Linux, of course!) with a dozen large SATA hard disks in it. Never once can I recall having problems with connectors coming loose. On the other hand, having a dozen drives in a single server makes me truly appreciate the thin, lightweight connectors - can you imagine the spaghetti feed of ribbon-cable nightmare that would be in there with a dozen Parallel ATA drives?
This is *precisely* what I've seen as a father of 6 (yes, SIX) homeschooled children. Normal K12 textbooks are so simply written that they are agonizing to study from. I've generally had far better results simply buying the collegiate "101" subject introductions and having my 14 year old (ish) kids study from that.
Strangely, textbooks seem to get *better* as you move away from the mainstream K-12 books: remedial textbooks are often better when a student is having trouble with a subject, because their focus is on explaining the basic concepts rather than including overviews of minutiae, and college textbooks are better at the other end because they are intended to be actually comprehensive rather than provide summaries with too little information to be useful.
Your 90% market figure is dated. The reality is that it's more like 67% which is still dominant but still a far cry from the 98% a year or so ago. We don't have an iPad in my home, but we do have a nook and a cheap-o knockoff.
My wireless router does not support IPV6, and it wasn't created in the stone age, a Linksys WRT54G2. (3ish years old) Sure, it was cheap, but it's also hard to justify spending more to replace reliably working equipment. A "nice" router that supports IPV6 with grace will probably cost $50 or more.
My Comcast modem is my own. I bought it for $20 because I didn't want to pay $7/month for the DOCSIS 3.0 modem. But because it's a DOCSIS 2.0 Modem, IPV6 support is limited. A DOCSIS 3.0 modem that supports IPV6 better costs around $100.
So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200, about what I pay for 2 YEARS of Netflix. That is only for getting the ability to have an IPV6 address to my home. That's without setting up the Xbox, Wii, or PS3 with IPV6. (Can you do it?) Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation, or the MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".
What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.
What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4, with traffic shaping that works as well as it does now with my cheap IPV4 modem? Somehow, I have my doubts...
Switching to IPV6 is easy, as long as you don't actually do it for real. As soon as you start trying to live it, use it everyday, make it part of your everyday life, well, things get complicated quickly. This is going to take a while to sort out, you know?
My first digital camera was a Kodak DC210. One of the first megapixel cameras, it was simply a good camera that took nice pictures available at a good price. Honestly, one of the best cameras I've ever had without getting into SLR lenses and such.
I have yet to see a point-n-shoot digital camera that took pictures that were of the quality (if not the resolution) of my original DC210.
You know what? This makes sense. I wish I had mod points.
Microsoft is right now locking horns with the "innovator's dilemma" and are fighting hard to avoid it. A new computing platform has emerged, the mobile market, and despite having a 10 year lead on it, Microsoft managed to miss the boat so badly that they make more money on patent licensing on their competitor's product (Android) than on sales of their own.
Windows 8 is their attempt to merge their Desktop environment (their strength) with the mobile market. (their complete failure after too many attempts to name)
Can they do it? Dunno. But realize that there was a time when Microsoft was the "Android" and IBM with its *nix mainframes was the "desktop". IBM mainframes still own their respective marketplace, and IBM is still a massive technology provider.
Android won't destroy Windows anymore than Windows destroyed *nix. It may take Microsoft a while to realize this.
Slashdot Mirror
They are doing exactly what all technology companies should be doing: push the limits and try the impossible. It's always a win-win idea.
History is littered with the remains of companies who tried to push the limits, attempt the impossible, and failed. True, pushing limits can be extremely rewarding and is the foundation of technical progress, but it's by no means the panacea you imply!
A sufficiently massive chunk of iron at sufficient velocity will get the job done.
To be fair, a sufficiently massive chunk of ice cream at sufficient velocity would be just as effective.
Firefox hasn't become any slower. What's happened is that everything else become so much faster. There used to be a "pregnant pause" when entering a domain, I remember when 30 seconds to load a page was the norm, over 56k.
Now, I expect the results from a google search to appear as I type, interactively. This isn't just an improvement, it's a whole 'nother animal at that level of performance.
My bedroom "TV" is a Mac mini hooked up to a big (ish) monitor. Hulu + Netflix + abc/nbc/cbs/etc/.com works great for me. My big living room TV is similarly hooked up. I've never bothered with cable or an antenna.
For the record, I have a 12 year old 450 Mhz PIII Dell desktop that continues to do duty as a network monitor, with 100% uptime except for reboots for software updates, and forgetting that it won't boot unless a keyboard is plugged into it.
I could replace it, but why? It's been perfect so far, and recently took an upgrade to 32 bit RHEL6 without a hitch.
Oh, wouldn't it be nice if all those loving parents just put the smack down on their obviously under-disciplined children? You haven't parented children. Come back with an informed opinion when you have.
Now speaking to the problems...
1) The term "pedophile" in a medical sense actually refers to people who are attracted to pre-pubescent children . Clearly this is a problem since 9 year olds can't reproduce.
2) The term "pedophile" in a more of a legal sense refers to people attracted to people under a certain age.(18 being common, but actually ranges to anywhere from 12 to 20).
Think about this for a moment: a range that differs by some 80% of its base value, as the basis of whether or not we should ruin somebody's life. 12 is legal in some places, in others you have to be almost 2x as old to afford the same legal protections! Clearly, the age of "adult" is an imprecise measurement, at the very least.
Biologically speaking, it's appropriate for men to be attracted to young females. They are healthy, don't already have children, and are likely to be available for bearing children. If you are a guy and you want to generate posterity, paying particular attention to newly minted young women is a particularly successful strategy. 200 years ago, it was pretty common for a young woman to be wed at 14, and an 18 year old unwed woman was regarded to be almost a spinster. Life was simple, life expectancies short, rules weren't so arbitrary.
Enter civilization, which lengthens lifespans but doesn't lengthen puberty. Abstract ideas create complex hard rules somewhat divorced from individual situations. Life is more complex, and the ramifications of a bad decision can be much worse, and it takes much longer for people to be truly cognizant of the effects of their actions.
But millions of years of evolution (or a moody, jealous god, your choice) have created a life form that is hard-wired to reproduce at about age 15 to 16, while the circumstances of that life form in its present circumstance has the real, ideal age of reproduction some 10 years later. Young people are impressionable and easily manipulated, and society seeks to defend their decisions by letting them incubate longer before making major decisions.
Folks, this situation just isn't going to end well for everyone.
While we should definitely work to defend young, newly sexually active people from the manipulations of far more experienced adults, we shouldn't ruin the lives of people who otherwise do what they are hard wired to do. And we certainly shouldn't group them with people who have an actual, diagnosed mental disorder.
I'm a father of adult children. One of my sons had a healthy, sexual relationship with a young lady 4 years, 3 months his junior. It was a courteous, long-term relationship, and he was civil and polite the entire time. It was terrifying to me, and there was precious little I could do about it. He was legally an adult, but had any authorities found out about it, could have face serious legal consequences, including being branded a "sexual offender" for life, treated as a diseased sexual deviant that he is not.
Try telling my kid no? Puleeeeaaaase.... your ignorance is part of the problem.
And this is the part that drives me NUTS. Just because you can mount a loop back device with the command `mount -o loop /path/to/file.iso /mountpoint` doesn't mean that you HAVE to do it that way. KDE/Gnome have provided easy ways to mount ISO files for like EVER.
But here's the truth: doing it the "double click the icon way" is the lesser way. While fine for users that just want to mount the image rather than burn to disc first, it's limited. It's the way that can't be scripted, it can't be automated as part of a server process that (in my case) I use to build install files of my software for OSX.
Knowing the script form gives you power, a power similar to the written word - the power to have your ideas preserved and replicated for posterity. This isn't some goofy idea, it's reality for us programmer/hacker types. The things we do get replicated and spread broadly, thousands or millions can benefit from our ideas encoded.
Want to double click? Go for it. Even mentioning the command line option is a fail for those that can't see the power of the next level.
I would be ok with even 24 hours, or a week. A month becomes annoying, longer becomes obstructive. What bothers me is an increasing tendency to "lose" controversial footage. While it's a good move to record all police activity, we must realize that if we expect the police to document their crimes, they're going to do a lousy job of it.
We need to pass laws/regulations that make losing the recordings itself a crime of significant note.
You use flex.
So let me get this straight...
You think it's part of a well-rounded education for a programmer to (apparently) know how to use tools like flex, while still lacking any competence whatsoever in manipulating the very basic, simple data types you learn in your 101-level courses? You know, integer... float.... char.... string... ?
And further, you think that it's reasonable that the programmer in question that has (apparently) demonstrated "mastery" in using flex to build a SQL language parser, is still (somehow) not able to write even an approximation of a SQL database query?
Is this the education you received, the one that poor, unqualified me is lacking? And based on this advanced education, you want me to hire you?
Of course, it also means that the police wouldn't be able to listen in either without setting up a fake cell phone tower to be a MitM
I don't get it. Somehow, you seem to have missed that one of the main points of a key exchange is to protect you from a MITM attack? See: Certificates, how do they work? You even said: "to establish a completely private connection on something that you are broadcasting, and do not know who might be listening in?"...
Well, if they could do a MITM, wouldn't they be listening in?
(cough)
I changed my interview style after that. I ask a bunch of simple nitty-gritty tech question now, no matter how impressive the candidate sounds. You would be surprised how often someone whose resume looks stellar can't answer multiple simple questions - like what is a /24, a tcp reset packet, port used by http, etc.
This oh yes this! Interviewing for programmer positions, I've seen gorgeous resumes by people with Masters in CompSci at reputable colleges and universities, with "accomplishments" like writing SQL language lexical parsers, who could not write even an approximation of a SQL query or even write a simple string replace function. (how do you get to lexical parsing without being able to manipulate strings?)
This may seem a bit provocative, but this is very consistently the case with graduates from India. Having interviewed so many such people, so often having such beautiful resumes, you'd think I could have at least found a single one with enough programming expertise that I could hire, but that's so far not yet been the case.
I really feel for these guys, because they've obviously spent lots of time/money doing something, and whatever it is that they're doing, it's not helping them much.
Okular's not bad, and makes adobe acrobat look like a pregnant redneck with down syndrome and a half-dozen beers in its gut, but doesn't hold a candle to Chrome's build-in PDF viewer, which is so good it's barely distinguishable from any other web page, at least in speed.
San Francisco is a terrible place to have a car. This city has among the highest densities of cars per mile of road of any city anywhere in the world. Having lived there in the early 90s, I can say that my car was much more of a hindrance than a blessing!
San Francisco has great public transportation and stiff density. Walking isn't such a big deal because you don't have to go so far, and buses take you where you don't want to bother walking.
And when you drive, you rarely get to go faster than 20 MPH. You certainly never *average* much more than that. And at that pace, a guy on a bicycle could easily match your progress. The car isn't so much of an advantage.
An "engineer" is somebody who takes the time to understand a problem, and creates something to solve that.
Having done software from scales ranging from "quick shopping cart application" to enterprise scale organizational relationship management software, the only real difference between the two is that with the latter, you create a large number of smaller projects roughly the size of the aforementioned shopping cart application, except that the "users" are often other pieces of the same system. In larger systems, you'll be talking with other developers who have built or manage the pieces your parts will communicate with. You'll read more documentation, and it will be generally of higher quality than the shopping cart scripts.
Don't *ever* lose the "hacker" mentality - exactly what you described is what software engineering is. The toughest part IMHO is getting to an understanding of what the end user actually needs. That's far and away harder than all the other stuff, which boils down to implementation details once you understand the algorithms.
WTF?
Mobile access to commonly email documents ... you mean like a ZIP file? (which I couldn't open on WinCE 6.1)
A good integrated mail client... Well, sorta... it worked with Exchange, perhaps, otherwise it was bleh...
Thorough integrated contact management... it had a calendar app that was roughly on par with a $15 time management piece. It worked with Exchange, see previous post.
Excellent 3rd party mapping/GPS software... what are you smoking, exactly?
Thorough integrated contact management ... I have no idea where this comment comes from. Wha?
The audacity of claiming that iOS or Android lack streaming and local video support, or mapping/GPS software options is stupid silly.
WinMo / WinCE is perhaps the single greatest spectacular failure in the history of tech - a commanding, multi-billion dollar, 10-year lead resulted in Windows Mobile 6.x, which couldn't even begin to compare to a copy (Android) of a well executed idea (iOS) implemented in short order using relatively standard technology. (*nix)
How do you blow your decade in the sun any harder?
Yes, use rather than looks, but there are ways to game the system...
I almost bought a (gorgeous!) pair of 1920's bungalow set in a history-steeped downtown, small-town America. There was over 3,000 feet of living space, enormous basements, riverfront access to a gorgeous river, etc.
But there were some caveats: because it was downtown, it was zoned for light commercial use, which meant that although you could live there, you had to have a "primary presence" of a commercial space. So where the front room would be, there was a clothing shop, with a sign, and posted hours: "open by appointment only" that nobody ever went into and hadn't been looked at in years.
After thinking about it (and the culture of the very small town, not nearly as intellectual as I'm used to) I decided not to buy. Of course, history is the best judge; had I bought the place I would likely have a net worth far greater than I do now, since the city bought the property under imminent domain and the owner made a small fortune on it.
I guess I just wanted to say that properties are frequently not what they seem. For giggles, take a Google tour of some of the stealth oil wells in the Los Angeles area.
In the end, we decided (as we have with most other cloud services) that the whole idea didn't live up to the hype, and we opted to lease a dedicated server housed in someone else's data centre and we basically just do an automatic rsync from our normal servers to the back-up with suitable levels of encryption applied throughout.
It's a rather cost-effective to do this. Modest equipment, inexpensive, large consumer SATA hard disk in RAID arrays. With a decent power supply, you can pack 20 or 30 TB of storage into a commodity case and have a reliable backup solution.
We do this, too, for all our online assets. I released the scripts I use to manage the backups years ago as an open source project.
I haven't released changes for a while because... it works.
It had to be said: obligatory xkcd reference.
I admin dozens of servers, including a JBOD backups server (running Linux, of course!) with a dozen large SATA hard disks in it. Never once can I recall having problems with connectors coming loose. On the other hand, having a dozen drives in a single server makes me truly appreciate the thin, lightweight connectors - can you imagine the spaghetti feed of ribbon-cable nightmare that would be in there with a dozen Parallel ATA drives?
This is *precisely* what I've seen as a father of 6 (yes, SIX) homeschooled children. Normal K12 textbooks are so simply written that they are agonizing to study from. I've generally had far better results simply buying the collegiate "101" subject introductions and having my 14 year old (ish) kids study from that.
Strangely, textbooks seem to get *better* as you move away from the mainstream K-12 books: remedial textbooks are often better when a student is having trouble with a subject, because their focus is on explaining the basic concepts rather than including overviews of minutiae, and college textbooks are better at the other end because they are intended to be actually comprehensive rather than provide summaries with too little information to be useful.
Your 90% market figure is dated. The reality is that it's more like 67% which is still dominant but still a far cry from the 98% a year or so ago. We don't have an iPad in my home, but we do have a nook and a cheap-o knockoff.
Sure, it *sounds* easy, but it's not.
My wireless router does not support IPV6, and it wasn't created in the stone age, a Linksys WRT54G2. (3ish years old) Sure, it was cheap, but it's also hard to justify spending more to replace reliably working equipment. A "nice" router that supports IPV6 with grace will probably cost $50 or more.
My Comcast modem is my own. I bought it for $20 because I didn't want to pay $7/month for the DOCSIS 3.0 modem. But because it's a DOCSIS 2.0 Modem, IPV6 support is limited. A DOCSIS 3.0 modem that supports IPV6 better costs around $100.
So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200, about what I pay for 2 YEARS of Netflix. That is only for getting the ability to have an IPV6 address to my home. That's without setting up the Xbox, Wii, or PS3 with IPV6. (Can you do it?) Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation, or the MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".
What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.
What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4, with traffic shaping that works as well as it does now with my cheap IPV4 modem? Somehow, I have my doubts...
Switching to IPV6 is easy, as long as you don't actually do it for real. As soon as you start trying to live it, use it everyday, make it part of your everyday life, well, things get complicated quickly. This is going to take a while to sort out, you know?
My first digital camera was a Kodak DC210. One of the first megapixel cameras, it was simply a good camera that took nice pictures available at a good price. Honestly, one of the best cameras I've ever had without getting into SLR lenses and such.
I have yet to see a point-n-shoot digital camera that took pictures that were of the quality (if not the resolution) of my original DC210.
Not to split hairs, but Reddit is significantly more popular than Slashdot is according to Alexa.
Granted, Alexa isn't the end-all-be-all, but it is a fairly useful metric, and straight popularity isn't a particularly good indicator of quality.
You know what? This makes sense. I wish I had mod points.
Microsoft is right now locking horns with the "innovator's dilemma" and are fighting hard to avoid it. A new computing platform has emerged, the mobile market, and despite having a 10 year lead on it, Microsoft managed to miss the boat so badly that they make more money on patent licensing on their competitor's product (Android) than on sales of their own.
Windows 8 is their attempt to merge their Desktop environment (their strength) with the mobile market. (their complete failure after too many attempts to name)
Can they do it? Dunno. But realize that there was a time when Microsoft was the "Android" and IBM with its *nix mainframes was the "desktop". IBM mainframes still own their respective marketplace, and IBM is still a massive technology provider.
Android won't destroy Windows anymore than Windows destroyed *nix. It may take Microsoft a while to realize this.