Blackberry's key problem is that they assumed the Z10 (Blackberry's answer to the iphone) would be a hit, and manufactured a gazillion of them, but by the time it came out in the US, most consumers had written them off, and not enough people gave it a try. It's actually a very good phone, with some nice features; most Z10 owners I know like their phones a lot. But that counts for little if people aren't willing to try it in the first place. Superb marketing (focusing on what makes the phone unique) would have solved that problem: enough people would have tried it to establish a groundswell of interest, but Blackberry's marketing was lackluster.
Netflix really has no choice about DRM. Content holders allow their content to be viewed on Netflix under the assumption that the content will only be viewed, not copied and kept. A DRM-protected channel is what is required for content holders to view that assumption as valid. If content holders began to think that putting their content on Netflix was more like selling a copy than selling a view, then Netflix would have to pay that much more for the content, destroying their business model.
This happened right in front of me this morning, as I was on my way to work.
The left rear wheel of a car came off and went rolling down the road for about a block before it fell over. The driver did not look happy.
I've tried various electronic forms of notetaking, and they're all deficient in some way or another. The approach I currently use is a high-resolution tablet PC (I use a refurbished Thinkpad X61 tablet with the 1400x1050 screen). It's better than a lower-resolution tablet PC (typically 1024x768 or 1280x800), which I've tried, where the low resolution is really quite obvious. For software, I use Windows 7 with OneNote 2010 -- it's quite decent. Complaints about poorish handwriting recognition, while true, are beside the point: compared to transcribing pen and paper, it's dramatically better.
But a tablet PC is a heavy object to carry around, and the battery life is only 2-4 hours, so I am making some compromises here. Android/iOS tablets address the weight and battery life, but lack resolution. Despite its portability and battery life, iPad is a nonstarter with its whiteboard-marker-like pen and low 1024x768 resolution. The Thinkpad tablet with stylus is better in both respects, and is a reasonable option for people willing to give up some resolution for portability and battery life. I haven't tried the stylus-equipped Samsung Galaxy Note yet, which offers the same resolution as the Thinkpad (1280x800) in a 5" package rather than a 10": I suspect 5" will be too physically small. The Creative Ziio 7" (with stylus, suggested above) is between the Thinkpad and the Galaxy Note in size, but at 800x480 it's quite low resolution.
While I don't really ask many brain teasers when interviewing people, one key benefit that brain teasers offer is to see how candidates do when facing an unexpected, off-the-wall problem. Do they freeze? Panic? Make stuff up? Give up? Or do they start thinking it through? This is really important when the job entails facing unexpected off-the-wall problems regularly, as it does in my shop (a top-ten computer science department where weird computing is not unusual).
A similarly useful technique in interviews is to hand a candidate a stack of paper, each sheet of which has a snippet of code, the output of a command, or the contents of a standard system file (some of them should be obscure, some common), and ask them to simply identify the programming or scripting language, the command, or the system file, if they know what it is. It's a really quick way to see a candidate's breadth of knowledge and experience, and also (for obscure sheets) how they react to being faced with something they've never seen before. And yes, it does sometimes lead to surreal situations, such as candidates who claim to be e.g. Java programmers but can't recognize Java when they see it.
I don't understand all the disillusionment here: the Obama administration didn't actually have to respond to the software patent petition.
But they did, and clearly put some work into the response too. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Computers can be very distracting. Kids often have trouble with distraction; focus is, for many children, a skill that needs to be learned and practised. Pencils and paper are generally much less interesting, and thus distracting, than computers, ipads and the like. So there can be real benefits to not allowing computers in the classroom.
More likely, AMD would note the GPL and decide not to use the code at all. The MIT license is more suitable than the GPL for code you want broadly adopted, for exactly this sort of reason. And the benefits are real: for example, closed-source and open-source stuff can more easily interoperate if they can use the same code base. No luck, though, if the proposed code base is GPLed. A few years ago, Richard Stallman gave a talk in Toronto during which he claimed the GPL was motivated by his desire to make code as broadly adopted as possible. I pointed out this issue during the Q&A that followed the talk. Unfortunately I didn't get an answer out of him (he walked out of the room instead) but my guess is that he hopes to achieve broad adoption of code through discouraging people from writing closed-source stuff in the first place. But I don't think its working: after several decades of the GPL, closed-source is still alive and well.
The comparison doesn't hold. Wifi isn't necessarily mission-critical for an elementary school. Keeping your students alive (which is what immunizations do) is.
This may, in fact, be a rational decision by the school's administration. While the health dangers due to wifi may not be real, the (often irrational) fear that some people (e.g. parents) have of wifi is, unfortunately, very real. If enough people are sufficiently afraid, and their fear is causing a great deal of difficulty, banning wifi may be the most straightforward solution, especially if wifi isn't mission-critical for that particular school.
In the mid-1980s, I worked for a few months beside a guy whose hobby was falconry; he told me at the time that he had been employed by the Toronto Airport to use his falcon to help reduce the number of seagulls near the airport.
Pardners, lookee here -- we should git rid of this gosh darn sheriff. Why should we get our protectin' only from him? If we didn't have no darn tootin' sheriff, we could get our protectin' from the outlaws direct-like. Right now, if you don't like the protectin' the sheriff gives, yer only option is ter get outta Dodge. But without a sheriff, if you didn't like the protectin' yer get from one outlaw, you kin always switch outlaws!
It's fair for Ars to block content to those who block ads from their site, if that's what they wish: it's Ars content. It's also fair for those who use ad blockers to be annoyed at Ars for it: nobody likes having something nice taken away from them, and Ars is taking away ad-free access to the content. Ars needs to be careful about the trade-off: is the increased ad revenue (if any) worth the bad publicity?
Slashdot Mirror
Blackberry's key problem is that they assumed the Z10 (Blackberry's answer to the iphone) would be a hit, and manufactured a gazillion of them, but by the time it came out in the US, most consumers had written them off, and not enough people gave it a try. It's actually a very good phone, with some nice features; most Z10 owners I know like their phones a lot. But that counts for little if people aren't willing to try it in the first place. Superb marketing (focusing on what makes the phone unique) would have solved that problem: enough people would have tried it to establish a groundswell of interest, but Blackberry's marketing was lackluster.
Netflix really has no choice about DRM. Content holders allow their content to be viewed on Netflix under the assumption that the content will only be viewed, not copied and kept. A DRM-protected channel is what is required for content holders to view that assumption as valid. If content holders began to think that putting their content on Netflix was more like selling a copy than selling a view, then Netflix would have to pay that much more for the content, destroying their business model.
This happened right in front of me this morning, as I was on my way to work. The left rear wheel of a car came off and went rolling down the road for about a block before it fell over. The driver did not look happy.
I've tried various electronic forms of notetaking, and they're all deficient in some way or another. The approach I currently use is a high-resolution tablet PC (I use a refurbished Thinkpad X61 tablet with the 1400x1050 screen). It's better than a lower-resolution tablet PC (typically 1024x768 or 1280x800), which I've tried, where the low resolution is really quite obvious. For software, I use Windows 7 with OneNote 2010 -- it's quite decent. Complaints about poorish handwriting recognition, while true, are beside the point: compared to transcribing pen and paper, it's dramatically better. But a tablet PC is a heavy object to carry around, and the battery life is only 2-4 hours, so I am making some compromises here. Android/iOS tablets address the weight and battery life, but lack resolution. Despite its portability and battery life, iPad is a nonstarter with its whiteboard-marker-like pen and low 1024x768 resolution. The Thinkpad tablet with stylus is better in both respects, and is a reasonable option for people willing to give up some resolution for portability and battery life. I haven't tried the stylus-equipped Samsung Galaxy Note yet, which offers the same resolution as the Thinkpad (1280x800) in a 5" package rather than a 10": I suspect 5" will be too physically small. The Creative Ziio 7" (with stylus, suggested above) is between the Thinkpad and the Galaxy Note in size, but at 800x480 it's quite low resolution.
While I don't really ask many brain teasers when interviewing people, one key benefit that brain teasers offer is to see how candidates do when facing an unexpected, off-the-wall problem. Do they freeze? Panic? Make stuff up? Give up? Or do they start thinking it through? This is really important when the job entails facing unexpected off-the-wall problems regularly, as it does in my shop (a top-ten computer science department where weird computing is not unusual). A similarly useful technique in interviews is to hand a candidate a stack of paper, each sheet of which has a snippet of code, the output of a command, or the contents of a standard system file (some of them should be obscure, some common), and ask them to simply identify the programming or scripting language, the command, or the system file, if they know what it is. It's a really quick way to see a candidate's breadth of knowledge and experience, and also (for obscure sheets) how they react to being faced with something they've never seen before. And yes, it does sometimes lead to surreal situations, such as candidates who claim to be e.g. Java programmers but can't recognize Java when they see it.
I don't understand all the disillusionment here: the Obama administration didn't actually have to respond to the software patent petition. But they did, and clearly put some work into the response too. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Computers can be very distracting. Kids often have trouble with distraction; focus is, for many children, a skill that needs to be learned and practised. Pencils and paper are generally much less interesting, and thus distracting, than computers, ipads and the like. So there can be real benefits to not allowing computers in the classroom.
More likely, AMD would note the GPL and decide not to use the code at all. The MIT license is more suitable than the GPL for code you want broadly adopted, for exactly this sort of reason. And the benefits are real: for example, closed-source and open-source stuff can more easily interoperate if they can use the same code base. No luck, though, if the proposed code base is GPLed. A few years ago, Richard Stallman gave a talk in Toronto during which he claimed the GPL was motivated by his desire to make code as broadly adopted as possible. I pointed out this issue during the Q&A that followed the talk. Unfortunately I didn't get an answer out of him (he walked out of the room instead) but my guess is that he hopes to achieve broad adoption of code through discouraging people from writing closed-source stuff in the first place. But I don't think its working: after several decades of the GPL, closed-source is still alive and well.
The comparison doesn't hold. Wifi isn't necessarily mission-critical for an elementary school. Keeping your students alive (which is what immunizations do) is.
This may, in fact, be a rational decision by the school's administration. While the health dangers due to wifi may not be real, the (often irrational) fear that some people (e.g. parents) have of wifi is, unfortunately, very real. If enough people are sufficiently afraid, and their fear is causing a great deal of difficulty, banning wifi may be the most straightforward solution, especially if wifi isn't mission-critical for that particular school.
In the mid-1980s, I worked for a few months beside a guy whose hobby was falconry; he told me at the time that he had been employed by the Toronto Airport to use his falcon to help reduce the number of seagulls near the airport.
Try some amateur radio astronomy, now that you have the fixin`s for your very own radio telescope There`s plenty of suitable resources on the web, e.g.: http://www.signalone.com/radioastronomy/telescope/ http://www.bambi.net/sara.html http://www.nrao.edu/epo/amateur/
Pardners, lookee here -- we should git rid of this gosh darn sheriff. Why should we get our protectin' only from him? If we didn't have no darn tootin' sheriff, we could get our protectin' from the outlaws direct-like. Right now, if you don't like the protectin' the sheriff gives, yer only option is ter get outta Dodge. But without a sheriff, if you didn't like the protectin' yer get from one outlaw, you kin always switch outlaws!
It's fair for Ars to block content to those who block ads from their site, if that's what they wish: it's Ars content. It's also fair for those who use ad blockers to be annoyed at Ars for it: nobody likes having something nice taken away from them, and Ars is taking away ad-free access to the content. Ars needs to be careful about the trade-off: is the increased ad revenue (if any) worth the bad publicity?