Google currently makes billions being the middleman that helps everybody aggregate clicks into identities. If everybody's traffic was already associated with a globally-unique identity, then why would they need Google?
As it turns out, the video format isn't an issue for me -- I've already converted all my video to h264 and loaded it in iTunes, so all my video is already iPad compatible. It was a bit of a pain when I switched from my old format, but hasn't been an issue since. I downsampled some of my videos to save space (and because I couldn't tell the difference on the iPad or on my 720p TV).
I definitely wouldn't buy any video from the iTunes store unless I really didn't care about being able to use it in the future or on different devices (I think I bought a handful of TV episodes when I didn't want to wait for the DVD to come from Netflix). But this really isn't an iPad problem -- it's a MPAA problem, and anybody else that sold movies or TV shows would have the same DRM bullshit as Apple.
The other form factors (laptop/netbook and iPod touch) are completely out for the car -- a laptop/netbook can't be easily mounted in the backseat, and an iPod touch is way too small for two kids to watch together. Before the iPad came out, I had looked for a replacement for the DVD player, and found very few that would play video from SD cards, and none that had internal storage of any kind. So the options were either a DVD player with marginal support for playing video from an SD card, or a phone-sized device that was too small to bother with. I was leaning towards just not replacing the DVD player because those options really weren't appealing to me.
And for just a video player, I wasn't sold on an iPad either. It was a couple hundred bucks more than the DVD players. But when I realized it could replace our (admittedly aging and underused) laptop, then it made sense to me.
You say it's "slow", and I really don't know what you're talking about. It does all the tasks I need doing without any obvious slowness. I haven't compiled anything on it or transcoded any video, but then that not what it's for.
I recently bought an iPad to replace an old laptop and a portable DVD player.
It's better than the portable DVD player because instead of carrying around DVDs, I can just load up movies from iTunes. I can rip the DVDs using HandBrake, and put them in iTunes, or I can buy stuff from the iTunes store. As a nice bonus, it's also a much better map in the car than an iPhone, because the screen is so much bigger.
It's better than the laptop because it's a couple hundred bucks cheaper than buying the new laptop we were considering. It can handle all of the same tasks we used the old laptop for (it was our living room computer which we mostly used for checking email, web browsing, etc. while hanging out with our kids, watching tv, etc.). It's also easier to use standing up, which is great when you mostly use the computer for only a minute or two at a time to lookup a recipe, read a few emails, check movie times, etc.
I was initially skeptical of the iPad because its limits are pretty obvious (like most tablet computers). But it fills a niche for me much better than a laptop would, and at a lower price.
No -- 3D is just a less mature technology, and like sound and movies before them, it'll go through a fad phase before the novelty wears off and somebody gets around to using it to make art.
I think early access to stories and removing ads are big features some people would pay for. Customized searching and reporting, free/discounted classified ads, PDF/ebook formats for downloading to mobile devices, etc. I don't know if these add up to a viable business model or not, but I can see how they would be worth a modest subscription price to some users.
I think the bigger problem with news is that the internet (and on a smaller scale before that, cable) has divided the market so that instead of reading one newspaper, many users now read dozens of news sites. So asking $20/month from each user is now completely unreasonable. Maybe users feel like any given site is worth only $1/month. That's great if you're a blog with at most a handful of staff and some hosted webservers. But it sucks if you're a traditional newspaper with hundreds of staff and a rapidly declining readership.
The way things have been going the last few years, I suspect that a lot of the free high-quality news sites are going to go out of business, or be forced into larger and larger merged corporate entities. Maybe it'll be easier to setup profitable paywalls and/or premium services when there are only five news sites all under the same profit pressures. Or maybe it'll be easier to convince people to pay $20/month when they get a full suite of news, entertainment, sports, etc. sites -- in short when the conglomeration of internet content has turned it into TV.
Basically it looks like a thin bundle of electrical tape attached to the wire between the magstripe reader and the circuit board inside the gas pump -- completely hidden inside the pump cabinet unlike ATM skimmers.
My wife has an iPhone and we're getting a 3G iPad, and I'm really pleased with this. For the iPad, I expect to use the 3G only occasionally, so being able to upgrade to 2GB for $25 seems like a better deal than unlimited for $30. My wife uses nowhere near 200MB a month, so she'll be able to cut her data plan price in half. I wish she could have the iPad data plan, instead of having to pay $15 for each 200MB if she goes over, but you can't have everything.
More importantly, I'm really glad AT&T has gotten rid of unlimited plans. Their 3G network is a finite resource, and a small percentage of users were using huge amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of all. If they want to keep doing that, they should pay more for it than normal users who just want to check email, browse websites, etc.
This seems like the most likely outcome to me. Completely shutting off access to ARM chips to everyone else would kill ARM's business and lose Apple a lot of money.
But they could probably just give themselves priority, and then they would always have the newest chips, and everyone else would be a step behind. This would give Apple a competitive advantage, but probably not make everyone else jump ship.
Am I the only one who doesn't see a conflict...
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
...between making general-purpose computers that are great for creating content, and creating limited devices for consuming that content?
Sure, the iPhone, iPad and AppleTV aren't very good general-purpose computers. They don't have the same keyboard and pointing devices. They are limited to the walled garden of approved apps. You have to buy in to Apple's other products to get the most out of them, etc. But they are great at what a lot of people are using their computers for these days -- watching TV, listening to music, browsing the web, looking at photos, etc., etc.
I don't know anyone who could have an iPad as their only computer -- even Grandma needs to upload her digital pictures somewhere, and the iPad doesn't fit the bill. But it strikes me as a great computer for hanging out and casually consuming email/web/video/photos/etc. while talking to people, watching TV, etc. This helps content creators by increasing the way people can consume their content. And that obviously helps Apple sell more MacPros.
So the whole premise of this story is bogus: why would Woz be disappointed that Apple was making devices for content consumption. How is that at odds with content creation, which was always Apple's focus?
First of all, I never said I had anything more than a passing familiarity with the British tax system -- but my general point was that the vast majority of British people don't have to file tax returns (I've seen it estimated that only 10% do). So the notion of getting people in trouble for not filing tax returns makes much less sense when most people don't have to file tax returns in the first place.
Second, the rest of my post isn't "wrong" -- and you couldn't possibly know anything about it, anyway.
I see you're not very familiar with the British tax system. My understanding is that unless you're self-employed, you don't file a tax return. Your employer takes the taxes, and you don't get them back, no matter what. You do the equivalent (registering family changes that would affect your tax due) with your employer, and they adjust the withholding accordingly.
I lived in England (while telecommuting to a job in the US) for a couple of years. And it took me 18 months to figure out that I didn't have to pay taxes in the UK on my US income. Best of all, the way I found out was that I applied for a tax number so I could fill out a tax return, and they refused to give me one. It was a little disorienting to have the British civil service tell me it didn't want to tax me...
I think you're dead wrong. This test clearly shows the problem with the current proprietary solution: Flash video has low CPU usage on Windows because Adobe has optimized for that platform, but high CPU usage on Macs because they haven't bothered for that platform. And because it's a proprietary plugin, if Adobe doesn't want to fix this problem, neither Apple nor anyone else can do anything about it.
Having a standards-based solution, with multiple open source implementations means that anyone can add the GPU offloading for Macs.
Several people have mentioned good resources (museums, local government, geography dept., etc.). I'd add university libraries to that list (especially the maps or special collections departments). But the most important thing is location. Since you don't want to move the maps more than necessary, and if the maps are of your local area, then the library/museum/government in your area will be most interested in them.
For geocoding the maps, I think you'll need to figure out what you're going to do with them. If you want to do overlays in Google Earth, then using KML will probably be the best. If you want to use some other GIS software, then whatever formats it accepts, etc.
I think this is the only way to prevent orphan works. And this argument is simple: if your book/film/song/etc. is "intellectual property", shouldn't you have to pay "intellectual property taxes"?
I think the thing you are not considering is that we are currently paying both ways: researchers pay page fees to publish, and their institutions pay subscription fees so the researchers, grad students, etc. can access the journals. Both of these payments come mainly from the same place: research grants from major government science agencies. The researchers get grants and include publishing costs. The researchers' institution taxes the grants ("overhead fees") which generally gets distributed to the library who purchases subscriptions.
So, if all grant-funded research was publicly available, and researchers had to pay higher publishing fees, but the library had to pay lower (or no) subscription fees, it all balances out to roughly the same amount of money. And it's better to have the researchers doing all the payment, so funding agencies can limit the amount of publishing costs they will fund. What do you think the big journal publishers will do if NIH and NSF suddenly say all grant-funded research must be open access from day 1, and they will only fund publishing costs up to $50/page? They will have little choice but to live with lower revenues.
I suppose you've looked over their statistics, then? Or maybe you're just completely ignorant of behavioral sciences where a significantly larger sample size usually indicates poor design, lack of understanding of statistics, or a fishing expedition?
Many kinds of experiments require large sample sizes, either because of small effects or large amounts of variance in the population being studied. But not everything needs a large sample. And using a large sample where a small one will do is just wasteful.
I am all in favor of helping out people who don't have healthcare, but in order for those people to have healthcare, someone else is going to get screwed.
Not necessarily. Right now, the US spends a lot more money per person on healthcare that most countries that have universal coverage. That's mostly because uninsured people wait until they're very sick or injured and then go to an emergency room. They get treated, and the hospital can't collect, so everybody else picks up the tab. So we're already getting screwed right now.
It would be much cheaper to just pay for basic doctor visits for everyone, which would prevent a lot of expensive procedures from ever happening. Our taxes might be a little higher to pay for this (different people have different ideas about how to pay for it, some want to tax rich people, or very expensive health insurance benefits, etc.). But our health insurance will be cheaper, so it'll be about even.
For education, I don't think an education at a top-50 school regardless of the price is a basic right like healthcare. There are lots of good schools that are still reasonably-priced. I think there are a lot of things we could do to make college more affordable, and I'm all in favor of that, but there are affordable options right now.
I personally think it would be great for state schools to be free in return for service (military, public service, etc.) or for a higher tax rate (which wouldn't be that much different from having student loans to pay off).
I think the fee would have to be uncomfortably high to stop squatters. A commercial developer with a vague intention of making an app at some point might find it acceptable to pay $10, $50 or $100 to reserve good names. But how much would developers of free apps be willing to spend? Not as much, I would expect. So maybe you'd need to take donations to be able to afford the submission fee...
I think the real solution is for a human being to review submissions and either release the submitted app to the app store, or reject the submission and free up the name. There is no good reason to have the names be in limbo.
I don't think having an 18-month-old prepares you for what it's like to have an older child. An 18-month-old is still very dependent on you, and having them in your sight (or in the sight of a trusted caregiver) at all times is realistic.
I think devices like this are targeted more at parents with 8-10-year-old children. Depending on your circumstances, they might ride their bikes to and from school. Or walk over to friends' houses to play. They might go to one friend's house and find they can't play, and try another friend a few houses down (or even just wander home the long way around). Or when you're out shopping, they might stop and look at something, or head down a different aisle without telling you. Even if they are only a few yards away, it might take a while to backtrack and find them. Etc. So there will be times when there is uncertainty about exactly where they are. And this can cause a lot of anxiety.
The healthy response to this anxiety is to create circumstances where they can have a little independence, teach them about what to do if things go wrong or they get lost. Work up to more responsibility and confidence (for both child and parent). That's what I'm doing with my 8-year-old. But I can understand why some people might have a bad experience, or be overwhelmed by anxiety and want something like this.
1. They're pulling this info from the current and previous borrower fields. 2. They've developed their own software and haven't thought about the privacy implications of storing this info. 3. The librarian desire to hoard information has motivated ILS vendors to change their systems to store this info. It wouldn't surprise me if the original current/previous limitation started out as a database limitation and the privacy justification was post-hoc.
It's been a long time since I've worked a circ desk, and my library experience is mostly at large research universities that have the budgets needed to buy commercial ILS software, and the inclination to think about user privacy.
Though when my wife and I were undergrads, my wife worked a circ desk, and FBI agents actually approached student workers and tried to get info without warrants. And the library administration was adamant that they not give out what info was there. She only had access to what a user currently had checked out, but doesn't know if staff had access to anything more.
Most of the commercial library systems store exactly the information you mention: only the current and previous borrowers. When a new person checks out a book, the old previous borrower gets overwritten, and isn't stored anywhere else. So there's no way to get a list of all the people who have checked out a particular book, or every book a user has ever checked out, because the data simply isn't there.
Now web usage is something different. I suspect many libraries store their webserver logs until the end of time. So we couldn't produce a list of who checked out what, but we could probably produce a list of who searched for what on our websites. This is one area where librarians' instincts (keep everything forever) need to be overcome to protect the privacy of our users.
What are the major mistakes that organizations like universities make?
In my experience, two big mistakes that university IT shops often make are:
Centralizing services to reduce costs, without appreciating how much poorer the service is. I've seen this several times where departments were running their own email and/or file servers. They cost a lot of money (esp. the staff to maintain the servers). So the department switched to campus-managed email/storage to save money. Only later did they realize that campus wasn't really providing the same service. POP (or IMAP with a very small quota, which is basically the same) is not the same as shell access with basically unlimited storage.
Standardizing on one option (or a small number of options) when there is a huge diversity of users. I've seen hardware purchasing agreements where a few configurations that were perfectly good for general office use were heavily discounted, but anything else (rackmounted servers, workstations, etc.) were basically full price. I've seen other places negotiate for a good percentage discount across the board. So I think understanding that you can't generalize from students or "normal" office users is important -- you really need to talk to people from different disciplines (esp. engineering, medicine, etc.) because different people have different needs.
I've lived and driven in the US (mostly California, Arkansas, and Florida) and the UK (Brighton), and I'd say that urban and suburban driving in the UK is much more challenging. Though I had driven in the US for 10 years without incident, I had to take driving lessons in the UK to pass the driving test, mostly because of the smaller streets and constant need to pay attention to road conditions. In the US, you can often just assume that you can drive down a street, without having to worry about oncoming traffic, pedestrians, lane markings changing, etc. There is lip service paid to the notion that stuff will happen in front of you and you have to pay attention, but it rarely actually happens. Driving in the UK required constant vigilance.
The US also tends to have a lot more suburban sprawl with multi-lane boulevards and 40-50mph speed limits. Most of the city/country breaks I saw in the UK went straight from 30mph city to 60mph country.
On the other hand, my experience on highways and motorways is that they are roughly the same in lane sizes, markings, signage, etc. But the big difference is that in the UK, people drive roughly the speed limit, give or take 5 or 10 mph. In the US, it's not uncommon for the dominant speed to be 15 or 20 mph over the posted speed limit. I think that's a big reason why we have higher fatality rates.
With any decent metadata format, that kind of system (or even more complex) is perfectly fine. Every one of those is meaningful to someone, and maybe they want to search using it. For example, lots of cataloged materials have barcodes which would be a colossal pain to type in by hand (and no one would remember them anyway) -- but they're great for scanning in if you happen to have the thing in your hand and want to look it up.
You probably don't need to show all of the identifiers to most users, but if an item has six different identifiers, indexing them all is the Right Thing To Do.
On a system I'm working on, we've got records with lots of different identifiers (the source system catalog number, the item's barcode, the vendor id (if it was scanned or OCR'd by a vendor), possibly an id from flickr or other systems we've exported the image to, plus our own system's id (because you can't count on any of those others being there for every record)). And that's not counting descriptive fields like titles, call numbers, etc. that people might use to identify the records. They are all indexed and searchable from the default search box.
When you print (or read aloud for radio), you have to pick which identifiers/titles you want to use. I think classical music often errs on the side of including all of them when one would do. But if some people know a piece as "HWV 295" and some as "Organ Concerto #13" and others as "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale", and if a lot of the people were anal-retentive pedants with lots of free time to call up radio stations and complain about not using the "right" identifier, it might just be easier to read them all.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've got that exactly backwards:
Google currently makes billions being the middleman that helps everybody aggregate clicks into identities. If everybody's traffic was already associated with a globally-unique identity, then why would they need Google?
As it turns out, the video format isn't an issue for me -- I've already converted all my video to h264 and loaded it in iTunes, so all my video is already iPad compatible. It was a bit of a pain when I switched from my old format, but hasn't been an issue since. I downsampled some of my videos to save space (and because I couldn't tell the difference on the iPad or on my 720p TV).
I definitely wouldn't buy any video from the iTunes store unless I really didn't care about being able to use it in the future or on different devices (I think I bought a handful of TV episodes when I didn't want to wait for the DVD to come from Netflix). But this really isn't an iPad problem -- it's a MPAA problem, and anybody else that sold movies or TV shows would have the same DRM bullshit as Apple.
The other form factors (laptop/netbook and iPod touch) are completely out for the car -- a laptop/netbook can't be easily mounted in the backseat, and an iPod touch is way too small for two kids to watch together. Before the iPad came out, I had looked for a replacement for the DVD player, and found very few that would play video from SD cards, and none that had internal storage of any kind. So the options were either a DVD player with marginal support for playing video from an SD card, or a phone-sized device that was too small to bother with. I was leaning towards just not replacing the DVD player because those options really weren't appealing to me.
And for just a video player, I wasn't sold on an iPad either. It was a couple hundred bucks more than the DVD players. But when I realized it could replace our (admittedly aging and underused) laptop, then it made sense to me.
You say it's "slow", and I really don't know what you're talking about. It does all the tasks I need doing without any obvious slowness. I haven't compiled anything on it or transcoded any video, but then that not what it's for.
-Esme
OK, I'll bite:
I recently bought an iPad to replace an old laptop and a portable DVD player.
It's better than the portable DVD player because instead of carrying around DVDs, I can just load up movies from iTunes. I can rip the DVDs using HandBrake, and put them in iTunes, or I can buy stuff from the iTunes store. As a nice bonus, it's also a much better map in the car than an iPhone, because the screen is so much bigger.
It's better than the laptop because it's a couple hundred bucks cheaper than buying the new laptop we were considering. It can handle all of the same tasks we used the old laptop for (it was our living room computer which we mostly used for checking email, web browsing, etc. while hanging out with our kids, watching tv, etc.). It's also easier to use standing up, which is great when you mostly use the computer for only a minute or two at a time to lookup a recipe, read a few emails, check movie times, etc.
I was initially skeptical of the iPad because its limits are pretty obvious (like most tablet computers). But it fills a niche for me much better than a laptop would, and at a lower price.
-Esme
No -- 3D is just a less mature technology, and like sound and movies before them, it'll go through a fad phase before the novelty wears off and somebody gets around to using it to make art.
I think early access to stories and removing ads are big features some people would pay for. Customized searching and reporting, free/discounted classified ads, PDF/ebook formats for downloading to mobile devices, etc. I don't know if these add up to a viable business model or not, but I can see how they would be worth a modest subscription price to some users.
I think the bigger problem with news is that the internet (and on a smaller scale before that, cable) has divided the market so that instead of reading one newspaper, many users now read dozens of news sites. So asking $20/month from each user is now completely unreasonable. Maybe users feel like any given site is worth only $1/month. That's great if you're a blog with at most a handful of staff and some hosted webservers. But it sucks if you're a traditional newspaper with hundreds of staff and a rapidly declining readership.
The way things have been going the last few years, I suspect that a lot of the free high-quality news sites are going to go out of business, or be forced into larger and larger merged corporate entities. Maybe it'll be easier to setup profitable paywalls and/or premium services when there are only five news sites all under the same profit pressures. Or maybe it'll be easier to convince people to pay $20/month when they get a full suite of news, entertainment, sports, etc. sites -- in short when the conglomeration of internet content has turned it into TV.
-Esme
The local paper (Gainesville Sun) had a picture of the skimmer on the first day it was found:
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20100707/ARTICLES/100709681
Basically it looks like a thin bundle of electrical tape attached to the wire between the magstripe reader and the circuit board inside the gas pump -- completely hidden inside the pump cabinet unlike ATM skimmers.
-Esme
My wife has an iPhone and we're getting a 3G iPad, and I'm really pleased with this. For the iPad, I expect to use the 3G only occasionally, so being able to upgrade to 2GB for $25 seems like a better deal than unlimited for $30. My wife uses nowhere near 200MB a month, so she'll be able to cut her data plan price in half. I wish she could have the iPad data plan, instead of having to pay $15 for each 200MB if she goes over, but you can't have everything.
More importantly, I'm really glad AT&T has gotten rid of unlimited plans. Their 3G network is a finite resource, and a small percentage of users were using huge amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of all. If they want to keep doing that, they should pay more for it than normal users who just want to check email, browse websites, etc.
-Esme
This seems like the most likely outcome to me. Completely shutting off access to ARM chips to everyone else would kill ARM's business and lose Apple a lot of money.
But they could probably just give themselves priority, and then they would always have the newest chips, and everyone else would be a step behind. This would give Apple a competitive advantage, but probably not make everyone else jump ship.
...between making general-purpose computers that are great for creating content, and creating limited devices for consuming that content?
Sure, the iPhone, iPad and AppleTV aren't very good general-purpose computers. They don't have the same keyboard and pointing devices. They are limited to the walled garden of approved apps. You have to buy in to Apple's other products to get the most out of them, etc. But they are great at what a lot of people are using their computers for these days -- watching TV, listening to music, browsing the web, looking at photos, etc., etc.
I don't know anyone who could have an iPad as their only computer -- even Grandma needs to upload her digital pictures somewhere, and the iPad doesn't fit the bill. But it strikes me as a great computer for hanging out and casually consuming email/web/video/photos/etc. while talking to people, watching TV, etc. This helps content creators by increasing the way people can consume their content. And that obviously helps Apple sell more MacPros.
So the whole premise of this story is bogus: why would Woz be disappointed that Apple was making devices for content consumption. How is that at odds with content creation, which was always Apple's focus?
-Esme
Wendy's would beg to differ.
First of all, I never said I had anything more than a passing familiarity with the British tax system -- but my general point was that the vast majority of British people don't have to file tax returns (I've seen it estimated that only 10% do). So the notion of getting people in trouble for not filing tax returns makes much less sense when most people don't have to file tax returns in the first place.
Second, the rest of my post isn't "wrong" -- and you couldn't possibly know anything about it, anyway.
-Esme
I see you're not very familiar with the British tax system. My understanding is that unless you're self-employed, you don't file a tax return. Your employer takes the taxes, and you don't get them back, no matter what. You do the equivalent (registering family changes that would affect your tax due) with your employer, and they adjust the withholding accordingly.
I lived in England (while telecommuting to a job in the US) for a couple of years. And it took me 18 months to figure out that I didn't have to pay taxes in the UK on my US income. Best of all, the way I found out was that I applied for a tax number so I could fill out a tax return, and they refused to give me one. It was a little disorienting to have the British civil service tell me it didn't want to tax me...
-Esme
I think you're dead wrong. This test clearly shows the problem with the current proprietary solution: Flash video has low CPU usage on Windows because Adobe has optimized for that platform, but high CPU usage on Macs because they haven't bothered for that platform. And because it's a proprietary plugin, if Adobe doesn't want to fix this problem, neither Apple nor anyone else can do anything about it.
Having a standards-based solution, with multiple open source implementations means that anyone can add the GPU offloading for Macs.
-Esme
Several people have mentioned good resources (museums, local government, geography dept., etc.). I'd add university libraries to that list (especially the maps or special collections departments). But the most important thing is location. Since you don't want to move the maps more than necessary, and if the maps are of your local area, then the library/museum/government in your area will be most interested in them.
For geocoding the maps, I think you'll need to figure out what you're going to do with them. If you want to do overlays in Google Earth, then using KML will probably be the best. If you want to use some other GIS software, then whatever formats it accepts, etc.
I think this is the only way to prevent orphan works. And this argument is simple: if your book/film/song/etc. is "intellectual property", shouldn't you have to pay "intellectual property taxes"?
I think the thing you are not considering is that we are currently paying both ways: researchers pay page fees to publish, and their institutions pay subscription fees so the researchers, grad students, etc. can access the journals. Both of these payments come mainly from the same place: research grants from major government science agencies. The researchers get grants and include publishing costs. The researchers' institution taxes the grants ("overhead fees") which generally gets distributed to the library who purchases subscriptions.
So, if all grant-funded research was publicly available, and researchers had to pay higher publishing fees, but the library had to pay lower (or no) subscription fees, it all balances out to roughly the same amount of money. And it's better to have the researchers doing all the payment, so funding agencies can limit the amount of publishing costs they will fund. What do you think the big journal publishers will do if NIH and NSF suddenly say all grant-funded research must be open access from day 1, and they will only fund publishing costs up to $50/page? They will have little choice but to live with lower revenues.
-Esme
I suppose you've looked over their statistics, then? Or maybe you're just completely ignorant of behavioral sciences where a significantly larger sample size usually indicates poor design, lack of understanding of statistics, or a fishing expedition?
Many kinds of experiments require large sample sizes, either because of small effects or large amounts of variance in the population being studied. But not everything needs a large sample. And using a large sample where a small one will do is just wasteful.
Not necessarily. Right now, the US spends a lot more money per person on healthcare that most countries that have universal coverage. That's mostly because uninsured people wait until they're very sick or injured and then go to an emergency room. They get treated, and the hospital can't collect, so everybody else picks up the tab. So we're already getting screwed right now.
It would be much cheaper to just pay for basic doctor visits for everyone, which would prevent a lot of expensive procedures from ever happening. Our taxes might be a little higher to pay for this (different people have different ideas about how to pay for it, some want to tax rich people, or very expensive health insurance benefits, etc.). But our health insurance will be cheaper, so it'll be about even.
For education, I don't think an education at a top-50 school regardless of the price is a basic right like healthcare. There are lots of good schools that are still reasonably-priced. I think there are a lot of things we could do to make college more affordable, and I'm all in favor of that, but there are affordable options right now.
I personally think it would be great for state schools to be free in return for service (military, public service, etc.) or for a higher tax rate (which wouldn't be that much different from having student loans to pay off).
-Esme
I think the fee would have to be uncomfortably high to stop squatters. A commercial developer with a vague intention of making an app at some point might find it acceptable to pay $10, $50 or $100 to reserve good names. But how much would developers of free apps be willing to spend? Not as much, I would expect. So maybe you'd need to take donations to be able to afford the submission fee...
I think the real solution is for a human being to review submissions and either release the submitted app to the app store, or reject the submission and free up the name. There is no good reason to have the names be in limbo.
-Esme
I don't think having an 18-month-old prepares you for what it's like to have an older child. An 18-month-old is still very dependent on you, and having them in your sight (or in the sight of a trusted caregiver) at all times is realistic.
I think devices like this are targeted more at parents with 8-10-year-old children. Depending on your circumstances, they might ride their bikes to and from school. Or walk over to friends' houses to play. They might go to one friend's house and find they can't play, and try another friend a few houses down (or even just wander home the long way around). Or when you're out shopping, they might stop and look at something, or head down a different aisle without telling you. Even if they are only a few yards away, it might take a while to backtrack and find them. Etc. So there will be times when there is uncertainty about exactly where they are. And this can cause a lot of anxiety.
The healthy response to this anxiety is to create circumstances where they can have a little independence, teach them about what to do if things go wrong or they get lost. Work up to more responsibility and confidence (for both child and parent). That's what I'm doing with my 8-year-old. But I can understand why some people might have a bad experience, or be overwhelmed by anxiety and want something like this.
-Esme
I'm guessing it's either:
1. They're pulling this info from the current and previous borrower fields.
2. They've developed their own software and haven't thought about the privacy implications of storing this info.
3. The librarian desire to hoard information has motivated ILS vendors to change their systems to store this info. It wouldn't surprise me if the original current/previous limitation started out as a database limitation and the privacy justification was post-hoc.
It's been a long time since I've worked a circ desk, and my library experience is mostly at large research universities that have the budgets needed to buy commercial ILS software, and the inclination to think about user privacy.
Though when my wife and I were undergrads, my wife worked a circ desk, and FBI agents actually approached student workers and tried to get info without warrants. And the library administration was adamant that they not give out what info was there. She only had access to what a user currently had checked out, but doesn't know if staff had access to anything more.
-Esme
Most of the commercial library systems store exactly the information you mention: only the current and previous borrowers. When a new person checks out a book, the old previous borrower gets overwritten, and isn't stored anywhere else. So there's no way to get a list of all the people who have checked out a particular book, or every book a user has ever checked out, because the data simply isn't there.
Now web usage is something different. I suspect many libraries store their webserver logs until the end of time. So we couldn't produce a list of who checked out what, but we could probably produce a list of who searched for what on our websites. This is one area where librarians' instincts (keep everything forever) need to be overcome to protect the privacy of our users.
-Esme
In my experience, two big mistakes that university IT shops often make are:
-Esme
I've lived and driven in the US (mostly California, Arkansas, and Florida) and the UK (Brighton), and I'd say that urban and suburban driving in the UK is much more challenging. Though I had driven in the US for 10 years without incident, I had to take driving lessons in the UK to pass the driving test, mostly because of the smaller streets and constant need to pay attention to road conditions. In the US, you can often just assume that you can drive down a street, without having to worry about oncoming traffic, pedestrians, lane markings changing, etc. There is lip service paid to the notion that stuff will happen in front of you and you have to pay attention, but it rarely actually happens. Driving in the UK required constant vigilance.
The US also tends to have a lot more suburban sprawl with multi-lane boulevards and 40-50mph speed limits. Most of the city/country breaks I saw in the UK went straight from 30mph city to 60mph country.
On the other hand, my experience on highways and motorways is that they are roughly the same in lane sizes, markings, signage, etc. But the big difference is that in the UK, people drive roughly the speed limit, give or take 5 or 10 mph. In the US, it's not uncommon for the dominant speed to be 15 or 20 mph over the posted speed limit. I think that's a big reason why we have higher fatality rates.
With any decent metadata format, that kind of system (or even more complex) is perfectly fine. Every one of those is meaningful to someone, and maybe they want to search using it. For example, lots of cataloged materials have barcodes which would be a colossal pain to type in by hand (and no one would remember them anyway) -- but they're great for scanning in if you happen to have the thing in your hand and want to look it up.
You probably don't need to show all of the identifiers to most users, but if an item has six different identifiers, indexing them all is the Right Thing To Do.
On a system I'm working on, we've got records with lots of different identifiers (the source system catalog number, the item's barcode, the vendor id (if it was scanned or OCR'd by a vendor), possibly an id from flickr or other systems we've exported the image to, plus our own system's id (because you can't count on any of those others being there for every record)). And that's not counting descriptive fields like titles, call numbers, etc. that people might use to identify the records. They are all indexed and searchable from the default search box.
When you print (or read aloud for radio), you have to pick which identifiers/titles you want to use. I think classical music often errs on the side of including all of them when one would do. But if some people know a piece as "HWV 295" and some as "Organ Concerto #13" and others as "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale", and if a lot of the people were anal-retentive pedants with lots of free time to call up radio stations and complain about not using the "right" identifier, it might just be easier to read them all.
-Esme