You know, in the rest of society they would hold a vote for that. But fuck students anyway, right? Because a university is one sacred place in society where The Smart People really are in charge, and where their enlightened wisdom and superior education can make a difference.
On the surface, that looks like a really good point. But there's a really big flaw in the argument--undergraduate students are in school for 4-5 years. By the time their vote would actually matter for most large projects, they've moved on. Budgets are planned a couple of years in advance. Budgets for large projects (a gym, for example, or building renovation) are planned even further ahead. At any given time, 25-50% of the student population shouldn't have a vote, because they won't be affected by the outcome. And no student should reasonably have a vote on anything which is going to take more than 4 years of planning.
Regardless, I wasn't trying to imply that this was a good thing at all. It's just a thing. And it's a thing which 80% of students in the trial said was good. And that beats most every other service that the university provides besides the actual learning.
Whether any of those services should be there in the first place, with or without a vote, is largely irrelevant to my point. My point is merely that this particular plan got better attachment that lots and lots of existing services.
If there's one complaint I've heard about a college campus it's that there is just too much student parking available.
As to the parking, you're arguing something different than I am. The amount of adequate parking is wholly irrelevant when discussing the percentage of students making use of the parking, assuming that all students are chipping in to some degree (some schools do it better by only charging the students who actually want to park.)
I also left out buses, though--which shares the characteristics. All students at my school pay into a fund which goes to running bus service--not only to the university, but for the surrounding community. That's right--you don't need any sort of pass or identification to use our buses. I understand some other schools do it this way, too, while others require a pass, but almost all of them use money from tuition.
I appreciate the compliment. The post is also likely controversial, as would be any discussion about a social program (which this plan mimics in many ways.)
It's a shiny gadget*, of course they'll say yes. The fact that 20% said "no" really means that more like 90% would have said no if they were paying for it themselves (and of the 10% who say "yes", 90% of them will be getting a big allowance from rich parents).
I think it depends upon how much of the difference would be made up by the cost of textbooks. Most textbooks are somewhat cheaper in electronic form. Over the course of four years, I bet at least half of the cost could be made up.
Moreover, I think your estimates are a bit low. Given the number of macs I see on campus every day, there are plenty of people with money to burn.
There's also convenience--which wouldn't be realized by most of the students if the program were voluntary, but which will likely benefit the majority of students. Heck, making the program mandatory means that other massive things can be done--completely eliminating paper books (eventually) which has benefits beyond the school.
{*} Too shiny in fact. Is it really just me who can't see anything but reflected lights on iPod screens?
I have an iPad, and I couldn't agree more. I bought a matte screen protector--not to protect the screen, but to cut the glare.
80% attachment is extremely high for services at a college, at least where I'm from. Students here pay for a gym whether or not they use it (about 35% do), they pay for the student center (don't have numbers on this, but I'd guess that most students don't set foot in it more than once or twice a semester). They pay for organizations that they never join and sometimes never gain any benefit from whatsoever. They pay for upkeep on buildings they never enter. They pay for "free printing" that they probably never use to the fullest (and that they'd likely have gotten cheaper going to Kinko's.) They pay for phone service at outrageously marked up prices, for lab computers they never use because they all have laptops, and for parking lots when fully 25% live on campus and another 15% commute by bicycle or walking.
People pay a lot for things that they didn't want. The same can be said for taxes in any country with any social services to speak of. 80% is great, and frankly a no-brainer except that you have to wonder how many of that 80% just thought it was cool to get an iPad.
Some of us remember when the vast majority of Slashdot stories were news for nerds and were either well-sourced or were the kinds of stories that didn't require sources.
As part of their guidelines, they may reject if they feel that the market is saturated with your type of app, or if your app doesn't provide enough entertainment or utility.
With such a wide array of content available on the App Store, Apple is cautious of letting the quality apps become drowned out by poorly-made products. "If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you're trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour."
It may well be an improvement over Intel's previous integrated video--in fact, they've been steadily improving for the past couple of years. But there are benchmarks for HD3000 and they aren't great.
They have a complaint page somewhere on their website, and sometimes people have luck mailing Jobs (though since he's on sick leave, that's probably not the thing to do.)
Frankly, the 13" MBP has been the redheaded stepchild for the last generation or two. It's barely worth buying over the Macbook, if at all.
You can get an idea right now, since the HD3000 has been out for a while. Basically, in raw GPU performance, it's pretty lousy. There are places where the memory bus improvements can make up some of the difference, but frankly, I consider this a step back. It's a shame, too--I'd been planning on picking up the 13" MBP after this refresh. Now I'm going to start looking at other notebooks.
That does sound like a marketing droid, but let's not pretend that there aren't driver issues on Linux. A lot of printers will work fine out of the box, but if they don't, you aren't going to get any support from the manufacturer. This sounds more like an IT team that couldn't do their research or had a lot of previously bought hardware around that happened to not work.
- for consumers who will eventually have to pay ~30% more,
That's a fee for marketing and distribution. I'm skeptical that we consumers would pay 30% less if developers all had to manage their own sales, marketing, and distribution channels. The evidence so far indicates that we can expect to pay 60% less on apps delivered through the app store, despite this 30% fee.
Amazon claims to take 30% (that's slightly off as I understand it, but good enough for our purposes) and give 70% upstream. Now Apple wants 30% of the whole, which is equivalent to Amazon's cut. Amazon can increase the cost by some amount in order to make any money whatsoever on the sale, or they can completely eat any in-app purchases (hoping that extra-app purchases make up enough to keep the whole thing profitable) or they can stop distributing their Kindle app.
The Apple price has to be equal or less than the outside price.
The developer isn't allowed to include a link to purchase outside of Apple within the app.
For Netflix, right this moment, I suspect that this won't matter. Netflix almost certainly gets most of their revenue from people signing up first.
For Amazon, this is a huge deal[*]. People will buy things after having installed the Kindle app, and will probably be pretty likely to do so from within the app where Apple gets their 30%. Frankly, I hope that Apple gets slapped down by the FTC over this. Taking a cut is one thing, but requiring equal or lower prices is quite another and is obviously and blatantly anticompetitive.
[*] That said, I haven't seen a clarification on whether one-time purchases like e-books actually fall under the new terms, which everyone calls the "subscription model."
On the other hand, the more devices out there that are incapable of running Flash, the more likely Flash falls out of fashion. I'm all for that, frankly.
I see that you don't mention battery life. iPad battery life is great. Doing most anything, I get 10 hours out of mine. A handful of games tax it more.
Those cheap laptops everyone loves to compare with iPads so much rarely get 5 hours. 3 hours is fairly common.
There's a huge amount of overlap, to be sure. But to the GP's credit, there are some that allow such access because they monitor everything that goes across their network or happens on their PCs. It's much harder to monitor things that are going across the cellular network.
Slashdot Mirror
What does that have to do with anything? Do you think that malware can't do bad things unless it gets root?
You know, in the rest of society they would hold a vote for that. But fuck students anyway, right? Because a university is one sacred place in society where The Smart People really are in charge, and where their enlightened wisdom and superior education can make a difference.
On the surface, that looks like a really good point. But there's a really big flaw in the argument--undergraduate students are in school for 4-5 years. By the time their vote would actually matter for most large projects, they've moved on. Budgets are planned a couple of years in advance. Budgets for large projects (a gym, for example, or building renovation) are planned even further ahead. At any given time, 25-50% of the student population shouldn't have a vote, because they won't be affected by the outcome. And no student should reasonably have a vote on anything which is going to take more than 4 years of planning.
Regardless, I wasn't trying to imply that this was a good thing at all. It's just a thing. And it's a thing which 80% of students in the trial said was good. And that beats most every other service that the university provides besides the actual learning.
Whether any of those services should be there in the first place, with or without a vote, is largely irrelevant to my point. My point is merely that this particular plan got better attachment that lots and lots of existing services.
If there's one complaint I've heard about a college campus it's that there is just too much student parking available.
As to the parking, you're arguing something different than I am. The amount of adequate parking is wholly irrelevant when discussing the percentage of students making use of the parking, assuming that all students are chipping in to some degree (some schools do it better by only charging the students who actually want to park.)
I also left out buses, though--which shares the characteristics. All students at my school pay into a fund which goes to running bus service--not only to the university, but for the surrounding community. That's right--you don't need any sort of pass or identification to use our buses. I understand some other schools do it this way, too, while others require a pass, but almost all of them use money from tuition.
I appreciate the compliment. The post is also likely controversial, as would be any discussion about a social program (which this plan mimics in many ways.)
It's a shiny gadget*, of course they'll say yes. The fact that 20% said "no" really means that more like 90% would have said no if they were paying for it themselves (and of the 10% who say "yes", 90% of them will be getting a big allowance from rich parents).
I think it depends upon how much of the difference would be made up by the cost of textbooks. Most textbooks are somewhat cheaper in electronic form. Over the course of four years, I bet at least half of the cost could be made up.
Moreover, I think your estimates are a bit low. Given the number of macs I see on campus every day, there are plenty of people with money to burn.
There's also convenience--which wouldn't be realized by most of the students if the program were voluntary, but which will likely benefit the majority of students. Heck, making the program mandatory means that other massive things can be done--completely eliminating paper books (eventually) which has benefits beyond the school.
{*} Too shiny in fact. Is it really just me who can't see anything but reflected lights on iPod screens?
I have an iPad, and I couldn't agree more. I bought a matte screen protector--not to protect the screen, but to cut the glare.
80% attachment is extremely high for services at a college, at least where I'm from. Students here pay for a gym whether or not they use it (about 35% do), they pay for the student center (don't have numbers on this, but I'd guess that most students don't set foot in it more than once or twice a semester). They pay for organizations that they never join and sometimes never gain any benefit from whatsoever. They pay for upkeep on buildings they never enter. They pay for "free printing" that they probably never use to the fullest (and that they'd likely have gotten cheaper going to Kinko's.) They pay for phone service at outrageously marked up prices, for lab computers they never use because they all have laptops, and for parking lots when fully 25% live on campus and another 15% commute by bicycle or walking.
People pay a lot for things that they didn't want. The same can be said for taxes in any country with any social services to speak of. 80% is great, and frankly a no-brainer except that you have to wonder how many of that 80% just thought it was cool to get an iPad.
Not low enough for that, but it does mean that I'm officially an Old Fart.
Only I have no interest in downloading music, so the tax does me no good.
Some of us remember when the vast majority of Slashdot stories were news for nerds and were either well-sourced or were the kinds of stories that didn't require sources.
The problem is that their guidelines are vague and broad.
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100909/apple-bye-bye-fart-apps/
As part of their guidelines, they may reject if they feel that the market is saturated with your type of app, or if your app doesn't provide enough entertainment or utility.
And directly addressing the quality aspect: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30338/NewlyRevealed_App_Store_Guidelines_Discourage_Amateur_Hour.php
With such a wide array of content available on the App Store, Apple is cautious of letting the quality apps become drowned out by poorly-made products. "If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you're trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour."
I bookmarked this blog post a while back when I saw it, in the event that I bought a Macbook Pro.
http://remiel.info/post/1601242301/making-the-leap-to-ssd-on-a-macbook
Unfortunately, Apple's downgrading of the GPU in the 13" model has prompted me to look for other options.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Vaio Z and the Envy both have significantly better graphics cards than the current 13" MBP, right?
Also, Sony is pretty well regarded as having vastly overpriced laptops.
In my area, it shows Verizon as providing 50mbps to 100mbps DSL. Which is false. So yes, the data could use some work.
Since when do manufacturers take a step back in hardware capability from the previous generation?
It may well be an improvement over Intel's previous integrated video--in fact, they've been steadily improving for the past couple of years. But there are benchmarks for HD3000 and they aren't great.
They have a complaint page somewhere on their website, and sometimes people have luck mailing Jobs (though since he's on sick leave, that's probably not the thing to do.)
Frankly, the 13" MBP has been the redheaded stepchild for the last generation or two. It's barely worth buying over the Macbook, if at all.
You can get an idea right now, since the HD3000 has been out for a while. Basically, in raw GPU performance, it's pretty lousy. There are places where the memory bus improvements can make up some of the difference, but frankly, I consider this a step back. It's a shame, too--I'd been planning on picking up the 13" MBP after this refresh. Now I'm going to start looking at other notebooks.
That does sound like a marketing droid, but let's not pretend that there aren't driver issues on Linux. A lot of printers will work fine out of the box, but if they don't, you aren't going to get any support from the manufacturer. This sounds more like an IT team that couldn't do their research or had a lot of previously bought hardware around that happened to not work.
It's anticompetitive because Apple has their own bookstore.
- for consumers who will eventually have to pay ~30% more,
That's a fee for marketing and distribution. I'm skeptical that we consumers would pay 30% less if developers all had to manage their own sales, marketing, and distribution channels. The evidence so far indicates that we can expect to pay 60% less on apps delivered through the app store, despite this 30% fee.
Amazon claims to take 30% (that's slightly off as I understand it, but good enough for our purposes) and give 70% upstream. Now Apple wants 30% of the whole, which is equivalent to Amazon's cut. Amazon can increase the cost by some amount in order to make any money whatsoever on the sale, or they can completely eat any in-app purchases (hoping that extra-app purchases make up enough to keep the whole thing profitable) or they can stop distributing their Kindle app.
Details do matter. Here are a couple more.
The Apple price has to be equal or less than the outside price.
The developer isn't allowed to include a link to purchase outside of Apple within the app.
For Netflix, right this moment, I suspect that this won't matter. Netflix almost certainly gets most of their revenue from people signing up first.
For Amazon, this is a huge deal[*]. People will buy things after having installed the Kindle app, and will probably be pretty likely to do so from within the app where Apple gets their 30%. Frankly, I hope that Apple gets slapped down by the FTC over this. Taking a cut is one thing, but requiring equal or lower prices is quite another and is obviously and blatantly anticompetitive.
[*] That said, I haven't seen a clarification on whether one-time purchases like e-books actually fall under the new terms, which everyone calls the "subscription model."
On the other hand, the more devices out there that are incapable of running Flash, the more likely Flash falls out of fashion. I'm all for that, frankly.
Another datapoint: when I try to post a comment on my Droid, each keystroke in the text field lags by 1-2 seconds.
I see that you don't mention battery life. iPad battery life is great. Doing most anything, I get 10 hours out of mine. A handful of games tax it more.
Those cheap laptops everyone loves to compare with iPads so much rarely get 5 hours. 3 hours is fairly common.
Yeah. I thought the real problem was choosing slash as the character signifying an option in so many of their utilities.
There's a huge amount of overlap, to be sure. But to the GP's credit, there are some that allow such access because they monitor everything that goes across their network or happens on their PCs. It's much harder to monitor things that are going across the cellular network.