Those of us born before 1985 or so can remember we LIVED WITHOUT INTERNET. We got by just fine. We went to libraries and subscribed to periodicals and bought books for information. We wrote letters on paper, used stamps, and waited days for mail turnaround. We read National Geographic for education and other activities. We survived, we liked it, we didn't notice much missing. No 'net? Been there. Done that. Was nice. Don't wanna go back. Pity the person who does.
In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things. - Hagakure (The Way of the Samurai)
Sorry,/. ate the insertion operator in my example. Heck, that improves the example: if you can't fix the bug in that after 15 weeks of study, reconsider whether you're willing to work as hard as you'll need to for the certification.
If you can't grasp the basics of variables, decisions, loops, functions and classes in 15 weeks then you are not ready for what comes next. I've had students who truly could not, and it would be cruel to let them continue on, only to get mired ever deeper and rack up more debt. If prerequisites, declared or implied, are not fulfilled then one is in no position to go farther. Those who take it again and struggle thru may pass (rare), but they have already shown that - aside from special cases and remarkable effort - they are just not equipped to compete in the complexity and speed of the subject.
If you can't grasp class C { public: void d(int n){ for(int i=0;in;++i) cout”Hi! "; } }; void main() { C c; if (true) c.d(); } in four months, you're not cut out for the career.
I get students who don't grasp the concept of variables. I mean they truly do not grasp the concept of x=3. Maybe they can get it at some point, but they don't keep up.
If you can't play standard scales in 4 months, you're not up to compete against talented musicians. If you can't dissect a frog in 4 months, you're not cut out to do surgery. If you can't write a poem in 4 months, you won't be teaching college English.
Sure we can hypothesize special cases, or give contrary anecdotes. Building policy on that is like not driving to work because you might be killed in a crash. I know Einstein failed math; he overcame, and so can any special cases - it's not like one is forbidden from the subject everywhere for life. If you can't grasp a bare minimum level of competency in four months of six hours a week lecture time plus up to all waking hours for assignments, take the hint - go find your talent, which isn't this.
Hence my #1 general complaint with free open source software: developers tend to fix what they want to fix, not what must be fixed. Stuff which is hard to do, uninteresting, and little-observed (whether during development or in the bug report bin) tends to be passed over by those who have no incentive to do it other than in return for cold hard nasty cash.
Lacking 3G coverage, most areas have EDGE network available, and the 3G radio should fall back to that. Yeah, it's slow - but at least it works (big difference between "slow" and "nothing"). 'tis rare that my iPad gets no service whatsoever, as most "middle of nowhere" areas still have EDGE at minimum.
Upshot: if your cell phone works, and you're not doing international roaming, it will at least function passably until you return to suitable civilization.
I was about to make a snarky comment about turning in your geek card, but then realized we now have a generation of geeks who legitimately don't know that ^W = Control-W => Delete Word.
You are suffering the same confusion I'm trying to point out.
Software engineers (and their management) confuse the blueprint with the finished product. Your source code is not the final product, it is the complete detailed blueprint of how to build the final product - from which your compiler chain then builds the final executable (in a manner nigh unto instant and free).
This confusion leads to misapplication of processes, which in turn lead to silly assertions such as TFA. As build time approaches zero, so does the imperative to do correct design.
In most engineering disciplines, the process of actually building something is long, hard, expensive, and persistent. If the project is build a bridge, you spend a lot of time making sure the design is right; why? because the process of actually building the bridge takes months or years, costs many millions of dollars, and once built is not easily replaced. There is no room for error, so process is taken very seriously as a central part of ensuring timely cost-effective correctness.
In software, the process of actually building something is instant, easy, free, and transient. Type "make all" and go get some coffee; find a bug? tweak a couple lines and do it again. This distorts the development process; "process" gets snubbed as a costly distracting annoyance instead of the means of assuring that what gets delivered is correct, because it's just so dang easy to fix and rebuild in seconds... losing sight of the long-term cost of not doing it right the first time.
Small wonder they dropped the "unlimited flat rate 3G" plan a month after the iPad 3G was introduced.
Makes me wonder how far the gap between the wonder and the reality of "cloud computing" is. Sounds great to keep all your data/music/video in the "cloud", but throwing around that much data grinds any capped data plan into the ground.
(Advantage to the early adopters: some of us still have that glorious "unlimited 3G" plan. Yay! FYI: they're transferrable.)
My answer: AppleTV ($99 flat) + Netflix ($13/mo) + Hulu+ ($9/mo). Considering I'd have Netflix anyway, and will dump Hulu+ for inadequate content, that's cheap and makes upgrading the hardware easy (can upgrade to the latest ATV each year and still save 10 months' cable costs).
Because some people want to have unilateral possession of content, not subject to the decisions of others. What is available for streaming now may not be in the future, for many possible reasons. Ownership matters. I've put a lot of movies on my Netflix Instant Queue, which are now not available either via streaming, or at all.
Example: I want a full collection of Looney Tunes, the same ones I grew up with as a kid. Can't get 'em now because many episodes are "politically incorrect". Ditto Disney's "Song of the South".
It's why people buy books instead of relying entirely on the public library. Borrowing (which streaming amounts to) is fine for most content, but sometimes you want to own a copy not subject to whether the library has it available or not, either for your own convenient access or to satisfy "I own a copy."
You carry a laptop because your desktop is too big to haul around. To get portability, you compromise power & capacity to achieve size and weight.
The iPad-style tablet is a recognition that something like 80% of what you do with a computer doesn't need the capacity, power, and I/O of a desktop, so leave that stuff on your desk and take the screen, connectivity, and not much else with you instead.
A laptop computer is a compromise. A tablet is meant to complement a desktop.
So when will the browser and operating system achieve a seamless integration? Why do we keep thinking in terms of "browser" and "web page" for what's becoming just another storage/source of executables?
This has been attempted several times in the past (Java Launcher (?), Active Desktop, etc.). Just fuse them already; the concept of "browser" is becoming an obsolete construct, impeding semantic progress.
The key amounts to a "true name", a label which is identical to the natural essence of that which is named. I'd never considered it anything other than an amusing literary device until now. Calling it "the HD-DVD key" is akin to "He Who Must Not Be Named". To state the true name itself - which is the only way to give an accurate reference thereto - is to reveal the great secret (of a now-defunct format - heh) and incur the wrath of the MPAA. To reference it using a peculiar sequence of colors is playing "I'm not saying it" games, akin to trying to tell someone the secret name without actually saying it. You cannot tell someone not to use that sequence of numbers, a short enough sequence that it could in fact be used by accident, without violating the [potential] copyright.
Upshot: the key amounts to a true name, and you can't assert legal right to a name and then prohibit anyone from ever using it (even in appropriate context). It wasn't copyrighted, it can't be copyrighted (heck, the copyright notice would be longer than what's copyrighted), and to ban use of the "free speech flag" is tantamount to fearing the utterance of "Voldemort" - silly. If there is in fact an issue, it need be fixed by means other than fearing a "true name".
Most discussions about failure in education fails to note the student's own failure to DO THE WORK.
About 1/3rd of my students fail, not because I'm tough or the material is hard or whatever the usual excuses are - they fail because they just don't do the work! Online quizzes not even opened/started, online discussions not participated in, homework assignments not submitted (not even a "I'm confused" text file as I recommend)...I am very sensitive and responsive to even slight attempts at effort, but if they don't do anywhere close to enough work - and I mean if I gave a 100% on every assignment they did do it still wouldn't hit 60% for the course - then there is nothing anyone else can do for them.
If you are willing to do the work, you can get a fine education at any school at any price. If you are not willing to do the work, you will fail and lose a lot of money in the process.
And yes, for-profit tech colleges can be trusted. If their product (education) sucked as bad as is implied by the question, they would soon fail because (hey, get this) they didn't do the work.
The device is under 9mm thick. Making the battery replacable means you have to add two more layers of thickness around the battery module itself, another layer inside the battery bay, a little space for fit tolerance, all adding up to non-trivial increase in overall thickness just so a small percentage of users can actually replace the battery (most who say "I want a removable battery" won't actually do it). Never mind the extra space/weight needed for the connector, interface circuitry, and other stuff. In addition, the replacement battery would have to be almost as wide as the iPad, only ~3mm thick, and somehow strong enough to not bend & break. Solving all that just isn't worth the problem being solved.
The 10+ hour run time is real. Are you REALLY not going to have a chance to recharge, using a 2 cu in charger, during that time?
In a year of heavy use, I've drained my iPad battery at most a half-dozen times, maybe twice when having a charger nearby wasn't a viable solution.
Known terrorists have literally been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Yassir Arafat.
At this point, if anyone gets the prize who deserves it, the reason isn't because they deserved it. Assange will get it, not because he deserves it, but because it would embarrass the USA.
The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.
And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Groan. We've been hearing "they're too expensive!" since 5 seconds after the iPad was announced.
Depends on your application. If a smartphone's ~4" screen is good enough for you, great. If a notebook's weight, origami, and ~4hr battery life is good enough for you, great. If a desktop's raging horsepower and screen size, tethered to the wall and weighing lots, is good enough for you, great. Those are not sarcastic comments.
Some of us want a usably large screen of the sub-notebook variety (~10"), ultralight weight (~1.5lbs), right-now setup (no unfolding & balancing, instant on), always-on power (~11 hours), and always-connected (3G). Ergo the tablet, iPad in particular, fulfills some people's needs. Mine paid for itself in about a month. That's not "too expensive", that's cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Those of us born before 1985 or so can remember we LIVED WITHOUT INTERNET. We got by just fine. We went to libraries and subscribed to periodicals and bought books for information. We wrote letters on paper, used stamps, and waited days for mail turnaround. We read National Geographic for education and other activities. We survived, we liked it, we didn't notice much missing.
No 'net?
Been there.
Done that.
Was nice.
Don't wanna go back.
Pity the person who does.
Sorry, /. ate the insertion operator in my example.
Heck, that improves the example: if you can't fix the bug in that after 15 weeks of study, reconsider whether you're willing to work as hard as you'll need to for the certification.
If you can't grasp the basics of variables, decisions, loops, functions and classes in 15 weeks then you are not ready for what comes next. I've had students who truly could not, and it would be cruel to let them continue on, only to get mired ever deeper and rack up more debt. If prerequisites, declared or implied, are not fulfilled then one is in no position to go farther. Those who take it again and struggle thru may pass (rare), but they have already shown that - aside from special cases and remarkable effort - they are just not equipped to compete in the complexity and speed of the subject.
If you can't grasp
class C { public: void d(int n){ for(int i=0;in;++i) cout”Hi! "; } };
void main() { C c; if (true) c.d(); }
in four months, you're not cut out for the career.
I get students who don't grasp the concept of variables. I mean they truly do not grasp the concept of x=3.
Maybe they can get it at some point, but they don't keep up.
If you can't play standard scales in 4 months, you're not up to compete against talented musicians.
If you can't dissect a frog in 4 months, you're not cut out to do surgery.
If you can't write a poem in 4 months, you won't be teaching college English.
Sure we can hypothesize special cases, or give contrary anecdotes. Building policy on that is like not driving to work because you might be killed in a crash. I know Einstein failed math; he overcame, and so can any special cases - it's not like one is forbidden from the subject everywhere for life.
If you can't grasp a bare minimum level of competency in four months of six hours a week lecture time plus up to all waking hours for assignments, take the hint - go find your talent, which isn't this.
Hence my #1 general complaint with free open source software: developers tend to fix what they want to fix, not what must be fixed. Stuff which is hard to do, uninteresting, and little-observed (whether during development or in the bug report bin) tends to be passed over by those who have no incentive to do it other than in return for cold hard nasty cash.
- from the linked-to abstract.
Lacking 3G coverage, most areas have EDGE network available, and the 3G radio should fall back to that.
Yeah, it's slow - but at least it works (big difference between "slow" and "nothing"). 'tis rare that my iPad gets no service whatsoever, as most "middle of nowhere" areas still have EDGE at minimum.
Upshot: if your cell phone works, and you're not doing international roaming, it will at least function passably until you return to suitable civilization.
I was about to make a snarky comment about turning in your geek card, but then realized we now have a generation of geeks who legitimately don't know that ^W = Control-W => Delete Word.
You are suffering the same confusion I'm trying to point out.
Software engineers (and their management) confuse the blueprint with the finished product. Your source code is not the final product, it is the complete detailed blueprint of how to build the final product - from which your compiler chain then builds the final executable (in a manner nigh unto instant and free).
This confusion leads to misapplication of processes, which in turn lead to silly assertions such as TFA. As build time approaches zero, so does the imperative to do correct design.
In most engineering disciplines, the process of actually building something is long, hard, expensive, and persistent. If the project is build a bridge, you spend a lot of time making sure the design is right; why? because the process of actually building the bridge takes months or years, costs many millions of dollars, and once built is not easily replaced. There is no room for error, so process is taken very seriously as a central part of ensuring timely cost-effective correctness.
In software, the process of actually building something is instant, easy, free, and transient. Type "make all" and go get some coffee; find a bug? tweak a couple lines and do it again. This distorts the development process; "process" gets snubbed as a costly distracting annoyance instead of the means of assuring that what gets delivered is correct, because it's just so dang easy to fix and rebuild in seconds ... losing sight of the long-term cost of not doing it right the first time.
Main feature of the HP-150.
Small wonder they dropped the "unlimited flat rate 3G" plan a month after the iPad 3G was introduced.
Makes me wonder how far the gap between the wonder and the reality of "cloud computing" is. Sounds great to keep all your data/music/video in the "cloud", but throwing around that much data grinds any capped data plan into the ground.
(Advantage to the early adopters: some of us still have that glorious "unlimited 3G" plan. Yay! FYI: they're transferrable.)
...as that's what TFS asks.
My answer:
AppleTV ($99 flat) + Netflix ($13/mo) + Hulu+ ($9/mo).
Considering I'd have Netflix anyway, and will dump Hulu+ for inadequate content, that's cheap and makes upgrading the hardware easy (can upgrade to the latest ATV each year and still save 10 months' cable costs).
Because some people want to have unilateral possession of content, not subject to the decisions of others. What is available for streaming now may not be in the future, for many possible reasons. Ownership matters. I've put a lot of movies on my Netflix Instant Queue, which are now not available either via streaming, or at all.
Example: I want a full collection of Looney Tunes, the same ones I grew up with as a kid. Can't get 'em now because many episodes are "politically incorrect". Ditto Disney's "Song of the South".
It's why people buy books instead of relying entirely on the public library. Borrowing (which streaming amounts to) is fine for most content, but sometimes you want to own a copy not subject to whether the library has it available or not, either for your own convenient access or to satisfy "I own a copy."
[Darn thing ate my > character in the title.]
You carry a laptop because your desktop is too big to haul around. To get portability, you compromise power & capacity to achieve size and weight.
The iPad-style tablet is a recognition that something like 80% of what you do with a computer doesn't need the capacity, power, and I/O of a desktop, so leave that stuff on your desk and take the screen, connectivity, and not much else with you instead.
A laptop computer is a compromise. A tablet is meant to complement a desktop.
Natural selection will provide some interesting long-term consequences.
So when will the browser and operating system achieve a seamless integration? Why do we keep thinking in terms of "browser" and "web page" for what's becoming just another storage/source of executables?
This has been attempted several times in the past (Java Launcher (?), Active Desktop, etc.). Just fuse them already; the concept of "browser" is becoming an obsolete construct, impeding semantic progress.
The key amounts to a "true name", a label which is identical to the natural essence of that which is named. I'd never considered it anything other than an amusing literary device until now. Calling it "the HD-DVD key" is akin to "He Who Must Not Be Named". To state the true name itself - which is the only way to give an accurate reference thereto - is to reveal the great secret (of a now-defunct format - heh) and incur the wrath of the MPAA. To reference it using a peculiar sequence of colors is playing "I'm not saying it" games, akin to trying to tell someone the secret name without actually saying it. You cannot tell someone not to use that sequence of numbers, a short enough sequence that it could in fact be used by accident, without violating the [potential] copyright.
Upshot: the key amounts to a true name, and you can't assert legal right to a name and then prohibit anyone from ever using it (even in appropriate context). It wasn't copyrighted, it can't be copyrighted (heck, the copyright notice would be longer than what's copyrighted), and to ban use of the "free speech flag" is tantamount to fearing the utterance of "Voldemort" - silly. If there is in fact an issue, it need be fixed by means other than fearing a "true name".
...and just showing up isn't good enough.
Most discussions about failure in education fails to note the student's own failure to DO THE WORK.
About 1/3rd of my students fail, not because I'm tough or the material is hard or whatever the usual excuses are - they fail because they just don't do the work! Online quizzes not even opened/started, online discussions not participated in, homework assignments not submitted (not even a "I'm confused" text file as I recommend)...I am very sensitive and responsive to even slight attempts at effort, but if they don't do anywhere close to enough work - and I mean if I gave a 100% on every assignment they did do it still wouldn't hit 60% for the course - then there is nothing anyone else can do for them.
If you are willing to do the work, you can get a fine education at any school at any price.
If you are not willing to do the work, you will fail and lose a lot of money in the process.
And yes, for-profit tech colleges can be trusted. If their product (education) sucked as bad as is implied by the question, they would soon fail because (hey, get this) they didn't do the work.
Don't you sleep?
The device is under 9mm thick. Making the battery replacable means you have to add two more layers of thickness around the battery module itself, another layer inside the battery bay, a little space for fit tolerance, all adding up to non-trivial increase in overall thickness just so a small percentage of users can actually replace the battery (most who say "I want a removable battery" won't actually do it). Never mind the extra space/weight needed for the connector, interface circuitry, and other stuff. In addition, the replacement battery would have to be almost as wide as the iPad, only ~3mm thick, and somehow strong enough to not bend & break. Solving all that just isn't worth the problem being solved.
The 10+ hour run time is real. Are you REALLY not going to have a chance to recharge, using a 2 cu in charger, during that time?
In a year of heavy use, I've drained my iPad battery at most a half-dozen times, maybe twice when having a charger nearby wasn't a viable solution.
Yassir Arafat.
At this point, if anyone gets the prize who deserves it, the reason isn't because they deserved it. Assange will get it, not because he deserves it, but because it would embarrass the USA.
It's a good award to refuse at this point.
Groan. We've been hearing "they're too expensive!" since 5 seconds after the iPad was announced.
Depends on your application.
If a smartphone's ~4" screen is good enough for you, great.
If a notebook's weight, origami, and ~4hr battery life is good enough for you, great.
If a desktop's raging horsepower and screen size, tethered to the wall and weighing lots, is good enough for you, great.
Those are not sarcastic comments.
Some of us want a usably large screen of the sub-notebook variety (~10"), ultralight weight (~1.5lbs), right-now setup (no unfolding & balancing, instant on), always-on power (~11 hours), and always-connected (3G). Ergo the tablet, iPad in particular, fulfills some people's needs.
Mine paid for itself in about a month. That's not "too expensive", that's cheap.