Just to clear this up, pressing the reset button is never sufficient. At least on the Ti-83 and 84, there was a program that is run from a second known secure calculator that will cause an unknown calculator be wiped clean. It is well known that the 'reset' is incomplete and can be trapped. If this is not done, to all unknown calculators, then it might be argued that the school is not worried about calculators. What we do, and the only secure method I can think of, is to supply ramdom calculators.
In the case of hacking the TI, the only logical reason I can think to do this is to cheat on exams. Otherwise one would have a real calculator, like the HP, which is way more fun.
One can either leave the gate to the garden open or the gate to the garden closed. A closed and secured gate is a known security model with known consequences and benefits. If the gate is open, then it is important to show that other security measures, like limited access once is inside the garden to limit damage, provides sufficient security. If your garden is so uninteresting that no one ventures inside, then there is no evidence of security, just lameness.
Therefore if the Android OS is to be shown to be secure, even against apps that user load on the phone, because there is no way a priori to know if an App is malicious, developers must write potentially malicious apps and test if they will cause harm or not. We already know from this conference that "Jackeeey Wallpaper" collects and publishes phone numbers and browser history from the phone, not a huge data breach, but shows the open garden is not fully protected.
So like Windows 7 they will put out several SKUs, the affordable one so gutted to not be useful, the useful one so expensive that no one can afford it. The hardware vendors will have to use components that fall off the back of trucks to make the product affordable. Because several OEM makes the products, there is an illusion of no vendor lock in.
Or they make the product themselves, like xBox, which might work, but then we are dealing with an operating system that may be tuned for MS corporate needs rather than user needs.
MS is not able to compete at equal price point. A MS tablet will have to run under $300, which will mean much less hardware, or MS not charging $50-$100 for the OS.
A generation was introduced to the online world through AOL. As young people were introduced to the web, the relevance of AOL went away, and it failed. Now young people are introduced to the web through services like Facebook. If this continues, through groups of young people, it won't matter that they migrate away as they become more sophisticated. There will always be a new group of young people who want to feel popular.
The primary danger to Facebook is that something simler comes along. The attractiveness of Facebook is not only the social content, but also the ability to generate and, more importantly, consume content. The secondary danger is that Facebook is not able to monitize content. Data for children is not so valuable. Data for 25-40 is. So the issue will be to have a sizable number of post college people, who are worried about their careers, continue to use the service.
Most schools have a canon that must be transversed to graduate. At a good school the canon is not random. It is meant to insure that the students speak the same vocabulary, have simliar assumptions, and similar methods to the professors. One might have a familiarity with a subject, but if there is little common ground in the way one talks about a subject, then the student is wasting his or her time. Two big reasons why people drop out of college is that they are bored with the introductory canon, or get frustrated because they tink they are in high school where teachers will work put big concepts in imprecise language that the students already knows, instead of requiring the student to learn the precise language used in the field.
US high schools make a significant effort to insure that every student has the opportunity to learn the skills the college, but most colleges are not going to make an effort to hold a students hand once in college, especially if the student is paying, especially if the student is paying with student loans. After all, there is another freshmen class next year, and they have the money from last years freshman class whether they earned it or not.
The second issue is much more interesting. The students at a college provide as much value as the professors. I did not go to any kind of high level college, but I met some good people who really enhanced my experience. People who could hold a conversation, work a problem, accept that ideas different from their own might still be valid. If one does not have such people in their college life, this beyond anything else is a sign that one might be in the wrong place, or perhaps that one is not effort in the most efficient directions.
It is not just it is highly competitive, it is also the expectations of the people coming in. With game development, some people want to do because they have fun writing video games. They may have some skill, and may get a job, but what they don't realize is that to earn the money they have to write the games that others enjoy, not just the elements they enjoy, and have to do it such a time frame that the game gets released in a reasonable time.
So in some ways it is like Hollywood, in some ways it is not. In some ways it is like other industries, mostly not. A financier is in it to make money, and is not going to throw a fit because the grue is the wrong color. An engineer is mostly not going to have a temper tantrum because someone modifies his truss. In most other industries there are measurable. We might get frustrated but life goes on.
This is mostly a case of not confusing a hobby with a job. If one wants total creative control, have a hobby. If one wants revenue, get a job. I think many game developer think they can maximize revenue and simultaneously keep it as a hobby.
Just like MS, Google is versioning browser to catch up, not because they do anything new. Google can't even get a product out of beta in less than two years, so why should it be expecting a major upgrade every quarter? Only one reason. To create the impression that the browser is better than Safari 5 (though it uses the same rendering engine) and to reduce the market impression that it is worse than IE 8.
As it is, Chrome 2.0 should have been the 1.0 RTM, with everything before being a 0.x public release candidate(probably 0.5 onward). 3.0 simply added initial support for HTML 5 and improved code, a point release. 4.0 seems pretty real, so that might be have been a 2.0 in traditional terms. Probably by the upcoming version is a credible for real 3.0.
Version numbering really does not matter, but to assert that releasing a version every six weeks is necessary to release features more often is silly. What Google is in fact saying is that Chrome is a very immature browser with a very immature feature set, and they are wiling to sacrifice everything else that once made Chrome a legitimate browser in an effort to make it buzzword compliant.
The theory was that people hated Apple and ATT so much that they would accept any piece of junk under any terms. That Google was such a brand that people would instantly purchase any product. Of course, Google has no consumer hardware experience, and mostly it is popular because it provides service that essentially free to the user.
So when Google puts out a phone that costs more than similar phones, with a $350 cancelation fee, people wonder what Google is up to. We are told that the Apple iPhone costs $200 to build, so why is Google trying to make a huge profit on a product that is supposed to introduce a new concept in communications to themasses and solidify Googles ad market in the mobile sphere?
Even so, why is Google saying the phone that promoted is not a Google phone? Why are they not providing support. it is like a bank that mails an offer to it's customers, such as credit insurance, and then says that it never made the offer, a third party is responsible. This is the definition of a scam. And that is what the Nexus One was. A flat attempt to scam users.
This is why I have no sympathy for the GPS companies, like TomTom who is currently has the banner ad on the page I am writing. For years they made good money selling GPS navigation units. They made huge amounts of money by selling map cds. Predictably, when hardware became cheaper and the technology became commoditized, they were essentially made irrelevant by competition making all in one devices. So now they offer updates for free and celebrity voices. What innovation.
Here is what i would like to see. More options in planning trips. What is the safest route that avoids, for instance, single lane mountain roads or highways with no median. Or how can I get from a to b without going through neighborhoods. Google lets you change your path, but you must know what the conditions are like before hand. This would be very expensive to implement, but would differentiate better than celebrity voices.
Inflation adjusted tickets are much cheaper. Flights that I took 15 years ago cost about the same, or less, than they did. For people who are young, and did not live trough the inflationary periods prior to the early 90's, this is what is expected. Technology has made prices relatively stable for many products. Of course due to gross incompetence during the early years of this century, such good livelihood is not continuing as we like, but air travel prices are really the least of our problems.
As far as the idea of charging by weight, one must remember that planes are public transport, plain and simple. You buy a seat. If one can fit in the seat, then that is ok. The weight of the passenger only becomes significant when combines with the many bags some carry. Also, each bag is a discrete unit that must be handled and carries discrete liability. Limiting bags significantly reduces staff and liability, while limiting passengers only reduces revenues. Mass is not the issue.
To put it another way, note that until 2001 people could pretty much carry as much as they could carry onto a plane. The rules were not strictly enforced. If could be stored somewhere, it was. People did not check in bags. A garment bag, a rolling bag, and shoulder bag wes a very common combination. We had weight and bag limits, but there were pretty liberal and people did not run up against them often.
After that checkpoints insured that it was not convenient or possible to carry all your stuff on a plane, so more people began to check stuff in. This was when the airlines put in the latest rules. The main cause of this, in my mind, is that the bags had to be inspected more and the airlines had to pay for it. The easiest way to minimize this cost was to pass it on to the consumer. We will inspect one o two bags for free, if you want anymore pay for it. The weight limits are to insure that they can higher an average person to do the work, and they don't have to compete with UPS for strong persons.
I must agree with you. As far as I can tell, TI makes calculators specifically to school specifications. As part of this, TI has to make sure the calculator will only every do things within the defined limited set of operations.
The reason that people are so familiar with TI is that many people have used it in school, so it is a vicious cycle. TI is used in school because the calculator is limited. Students can't mod the calculator because it is designed for school.
Another thing to remember is that the the handheld calculator is a major part of the TI company. They were made to push the integrated circuit, and they continue to be seen much as they were 45 years ago, as integrated bits on silicon. Unlike other major handheld calculator players, such as HP, TI is not the hackers calculator. Just look at how easy it is to get an HP ROM, and how hard it is to get a TI ROM, and how many emulators are out there for HP. So TI playing hardball is nothing new. The only thing new is we have a couple of generations of kids who only know TI.
Bjarne Stroustrup is part of C++. C++ assumes that developers are not smart. That any person who should be coding can also handle manual memory management, and can decide situations in which things need to be encapsulated, and when the should not. That anyone who should code can plan the code out and know what kind of data they need.
People do not code in Java just because it is cross platform. It is because Java assumes that developers are morons, and allows them to code that way.
Apple assumed that anyone who should be developing comercial application were unlikely to be mono-linguist. That asking them to learn Objective C would not be a huge issue, and asking them to use a reliable MVC method would help the competent programmers.
MS simplified the development process and assumed that people were morons, and look at the success.
Apple assumes that requiring persons to use XCode is not an unreasonable for the iPhone. Google wants children to write applications to pad the Android App store.
One thing about Apple is there are skilled people writing applications that make my life easier, not just more automated. It is true that Apple treats users like morons, but that is the way it should be. Any competent developers know that one must idiot proof the machine or software. If one does not then the user will blame the designer. After all, asking a competent person to hold a phone a certain way is not unreasonable. It is only the idiots who can't learn basic skills that we need to protect against. What Stroustrup is saying is that bad things happen when you treat your developers like morons. I think Windows Vista and the Kin illustrates this.
Licensing agreements can say anything. Therefore either this is another case of Google having no experience in a market and making a huge mistake, or Google understanding the market and leaving the opportunity for closed devices to exist in an effort to grow market share.
In any case it is Googles fault because they could have written the license to prevent this, and for some reason, either through ignorance or not caring, explicitly or implicitly chose to allow phone hardware to become closed.
OTOH, it is not googles fault because until Apple opened up the App store and allowed a level of freedom, the American phone market has been closed, so Google is just following the status quo. It is true that several months later, Blackberry opened it App store, but it is essentially had the same limitations as the Apple App store, in that Apps had to be approved, be commercial, and not contain obscenity.
The whole brouhaha over the Apple store was silly because the phone was much more open. The only reason to complain was by the carriers as it transfered power from them to the Apple and the user. Before this the carriers charged obscene fees to download content, such as ringtones(ringtones can be made free in garageband), in the same way they still charge obscene fees to text.
The brouhaha over Android is also silly. The only thing Android promised was an opened app development process, which it has provided. Obviously, to anyone who is objective, Android returns the some power to the carrier in exchange to allowing the user to play games and watch porn. The carriers, not Google, designs the phone that will maximize profit to the carrier, not Google or Apple.
I will say that if it requires a paid trip to the carrier to unbrick the phone this is a significant decline in phone quality. Most people I know who brick their iphones can unbrick it with going to Apple.
Another advantage of the east coast is that Louisiana is evidently not enforcing turtle exclusion devices for the fishing boats. Even most of the gulf coast seems to be more concerned with maximizing fish productivity at any cost. It may that the some turtles might survive the oil. It could be that some turtles might not be caught in fishing nets. It may not be that they survive both. Therefore moving east is a good thing.
Well, BP did collaborate with terrorists. That is fact, so they are no beyond putting business interests ahead of the well being of the cousins across the pond.
But I agree that there are cultural and geographical distances that caused BP to really screw up the public relations. For instance, though everyone in Texas knows on which side their bread is buttered, but we like our coast line only as oily as necessary. This means that we likely would not have wasted time trying to save the hole. We like drilling holes. It makes us a lot of money. Recall, the rig was insured. Plug the hole, build a new rig, drill a new hole, a thousand engineers don't lose their jobs. Texas is all about engineering jobs. England is a nation of shopkeepers paranoid about keeping stock, not creating it. Half of BP problems was an unwillingness to give up on the hole.
Also, Texas would have never given into the fishing and tourists interests. The fishing industry will not admit that they kill more in bycatch and destroy their livelihood by overfishing way more than an oil spill ever will. Let the fishing industry sue for loss of income. As we have seen in the articles, many of them do cash business, so cannot substantiate income, or at least not substantiate without getting in trouble with internal revenue. Louisiana in particular would have a hard time whining given that they support killing sea turtles to get shrimp.
Of course the tourist industry psychotically believes that it can exist without cheap energy. Florida might make a ruckus in congress, but Texas has the craziest congress people of all. These are the people who complain about the deficit while maximizing it by insuring clear lake always has high paying government jobs, and fighting for contract for their fishing buddies. One word from them and energy goes up 25%. Look at it this way. Texas has it own personal grid. Not hooked up to the national grid. It is like we are the Brits that did not cave into the EU.
Palm did not have handwriting recognition. Palm used gesturers to represent letters.
What palm does has, as been mentioned, is patents. Palm, along with Apple, is practically the only independent innovator in the PDA market, which we now see fully formed in the from of smartphone, a device with was instrumental in creating.
HP was probably a little more motivated as they have seem have set a path to growth of snapping up good hardware companies with good portfolios that can then be used to create products.
I suspect that Apple and RIM simply wanted to cut out the competition. Google, being a young company with little wisdom, would have benefitted from the hardware experience Palm.
And remember, companies like Motorola generally do not do things like this unless asked by the carriers. Just remember what Motorola had to do to get the Razr and similar products acceptable for Verizon and, to be fair, ATT.
This is likely a verizon ploy to gain control over what should be the more open choice in phones. Until the US courts establish that phones should not be tied to a carrier, possibly even not allowing subsidized phones, this behaviour will continue. Remember that this is one of the things that the original ATT in trouble, forcing customers to rent their phones, and pay the rent indefinitely. The carriers do the same thing. They say they are subsiding the phone, they say the charges help pay for the phone, but the charges do not drop when the contract ends, and the charges do drop if one buys the phone, only the contact is dropped.
If we were allowed to use whatever phone we wanted, then customers would save money and have better phones. Of course the carrier profits would decline, and companies like Verizon would be forced to find even more creative ways to nickel and dime their customers to death.
What would also be an interesting case is the exclusivity argument. At least in the US exclusivity is a function of the carriers, not the manufacturers. For instance, the Razr on the ATT née cingular network was at least a year delayed because singular did not the phone to do everything it could do. Nokia does not supply phones of any significance to US carriers due to their interference in design. I don't know if a chip is available that will work with all the networks, and how much that would add to the costs. Or it it is possible to economically and simply build different phones for different carriers, and then logistically possible to sell through Apple stores.
What I do know is that carrier quality is a regional issue and the world does not revolve around NYC or LA/SF. When I travel I do have some problems with ATT. They certainly only work well in the mid populated areas, not super heavily populated areas, or rural areas. But becasue they work for me, and becasue Verizon has even worse customer service, every time I have gone it to check on a phone they think they are doing me a favor, I wil stick with ATT.
Apple has a minority of the market. If they broke 50%, sure, I would say let them be sued. Most agree it is not even that great of a phone. If one want something different, but a Android phone or a Blackberry. That is the way the free market works. Firms should not be forced to do something until they are approaching a monopoly. Apple is not, and has never been, near that mark. It's stuff simply does not have enough bells and whistles to make the average consumer feel like they are getting the best value. It is why CU seldom rankes the products very highly, even though I have Apple equipment 10 years old that still works.
Most people take on debt to survive. They have mortgages, car loans, credit cards. At the end of the month, after paying all debts and necisities, most people have no money left. Even after years of work, one might have a few non liquid assets, but most people have net debt.
Why celebrities should be so special as to take huge loans and live lavishly and then end up ahead is a question no one seems to want to ask. If I were allowed to take a multimillion dollar loan against future earnings my life might be much better. I certainly would have difficult paying it back, but even living off the investment I would have more money. Such a loan might return more in investment than the average income
So record labels are loan sharks giving away money in exchange for future earnings. Some might not be able to pay back the loan. Well, boo hoo. Millions of Americans are in the same boat, with things such as pay day loans, but don't have the life style that these guys do. It is why people see how much Madonna has, and how little they have, and find it hard to understand how listening to one of her songs without a license is stealing. Does she still have a house?
There is no app porn on the iphone. When the iphone came out, there little web porn that would work on it. That is no longer the case.
I am not sure how Apple users are free from criticism or competition. Even if Apple is censoring their web site, that is only a small portion of the web. I think we would agree that the vast majority of information the average user receives is through google or bing searches, not by going to the Apple web site. I think we can all agree that these searches bring up all sorts of criticism and information on other phones, such as RIM and Android and Kin. And whatever one may want to believe I have seen many more Android and Kin commercials than iPhone. As an aside, I have seen more Chrome commercials than Safari of Firefox.
Hyperbole is fun, but hardly part of an objective discussion. Part of the reason many political pundits, and politicians, cannot be taken seriously is because, like you, they make radical metaphors that have no basis in fact.
As computers get more powerful, and cheaper, we end up with higher levels of interpretation and abstraction. We say this as we moved from switches, to assembly to fortran/cobal to basic. For years we have had reletivel simple cross platform interpreted solution, some with sophisticated interfaces that allow the non programmer to develop at least the front end of the application.
Here is what hypercard did. It provided a method for the inexperience user to organize data. This is one of the most complex tasks in programming. Data management. This is why everyone loves garbage collection, because managing memory yourself is expensive. It is cheaper to use machine resources. Hypercard was all about letting the people organize huge amounts of data. This was also the great thing about the RAD environment in FoxPro. I say apps that managed small bits of data, but nothing on how this might be made simpler for large bits of data.
One can get a group of teenage students, boy and girls, to become familiar enough with a language such as python so they can many of these things by writing simple scripts. That is well and good. And it is good that the kids can write applications. That is empowering.
Here is my gripe. At the high school and early college level we should be teaching general skills, not specific applications. This is the problem with schools only using MS Word. When I leaned to program, I learned about variable, and structure, and loops, and functions. That meant I could program anything in any language with a small learning curve. This was in high school. I learned how to type, and how to edit, and the basics of WYSWYG editing. The goal was to get words down, not, as the MS commercials ask kids to do, change fonts and colors which has little to do with writing a poem.
When kids learn programming in this way they learn the abstraction skills they need for math, and the analysis and prediction skills they need for science. It can be made simple, as with Alice. I know that the article only mentions the schools to show how simple it is, but that is my point as well. Kids are really smart and can pick things up much easier than adults. If 40 year old MBA can do, then maybe that is impressive.
Because the people need to know and we need to record the process.
This is same reason why newspapers report how unwise people are with money when they get greedy. It is no surprise that SCO has such success in Utah given that people have been able to steal millions of dollars just by putting fancy fliers on cars promising huge returns.
I recall many were saying that the problem with iPhone was that it was too hard to use as a phone. Well, at least, if you went through all the hoops, the iPhone actually works. The biggest issue is dropped calls, in which case you just call the person back.
A reboot indicates something like a memory leak. Hardware problems would not be reliably fixed. This is certainly some brain dead software error, a case of development focusing on the bells and whistle, and not core functionality. Everyone is so wrapped up in the tethering and Apps, that they forgot they were building a phone.
The discussion is not about science, or openness of data. Science is open. Access to data is expensive but not prohibitive. For a few thousand dollars a year, or a trip to your local university library, anyone can access any peer reviewed science they want. The issue is who gets to say what reality is, and who gets to implement policy based on the definition of reality
Up until the time of Galileo in Europe, the Pope pretty much got to say what was and was not true. If the Pope said that moon was made of shit, that was the truth. Galileo , and the scientist that followed, OTOH, pretty much said that Goad made the world, and an average person could know the world and the nature of god by careful observation, and even formulate that nature through mathematics. Since the creator and creation were the same, any discrepancy between previous writing ad observations had to be in the interpretation of the writing, since god and the creation were the same, and words were subject to error. Note that this was the same thing that was being said by the emerging protestant. That the pope was not infallible.
The problem was that the Pope and the Church were political institutions, so were not interested in reality, only power, so they could not let the scientists take the power. This is pretty much is happening today with various religious institutions. There is too much money to be made in telling people what to believe. This is why they catholic church lies about condoms. This is why many protestant churches lie about the nature of evolution of people. God and the Creation are one. God is not going to lie to us, only men born of original sin are going to do that. No matter how holy a man thinks he is, there is still original sin that prevents him from being as honest as the observable fact and repeatable experiment. When I tell a child that he acceleration is proportional to force applied, that is knowledge given to us directly from the creation. When the church says the earth is only a few thousand years old, that is lie given directly from corrupt men who would rather have a ignorant laborer that will tithe to the church and let the priest hire gigolos than a productive creative person who can make all our lives better.
This is no says anything about the various religions as an institution, merely the corrupt men who cannot see the sin within themselves.
Then there is the secular side of greed and corruption. The people who put money and wordily goods in front of everything else, including annoying facts based in reality. These are the people who say smoking causes no significant damage. Or oil is not fossil-fuel and therefore there will be an endless supply. Or that McDonalds is food. Of that the Germans in WWII did not kill nearly as many people as some say. These lies are often wrapped in religion, because a lie wrapped in a perceived truth is easier to swallow, and because the church is always willing to form alliances that will increase it's power, but this has nothing to do with religion. This has to do with people who want money at any cost. If we are affecting climate, then we should do something about, which could put the powerful out of business. Other people will become wealthy, but the current aristocracy will but put in jeopardy. If is just like when people no longer believed that King was chosen by god. We all benefited, but the King suffered. This is the nature of the world. The few in power will lie and cheat and steal and watch the peasant suffer, all the while claiming devine intervention.
Which is not to say that human has any significant influence over climate change, only more research will show the validity of that. No, this is just to say that the church and the cooperate aristocracy have a lot to lose anything there is shift in social norms, and therefore they will go to any means to stop it, and they have many more resources, in form of brainwashed people and money, than the few that are simply trying to study and understand the creation.
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In the case of hacking the TI, the only logical reason I can think to do this is to cheat on exams. Otherwise one would have a real calculator, like the HP, which is way more fun.
Therefore if the Android OS is to be shown to be secure, even against apps that user load on the phone, because there is no way a priori to know if an App is malicious, developers must write potentially malicious apps and test if they will cause harm or not. We already know from this conference that "Jackeeey Wallpaper" collects and publishes phone numbers and browser history from the phone, not a huge data breach, but shows the open garden is not fully protected.
Or they make the product themselves, like xBox, which might work, but then we are dealing with an operating system that may be tuned for MS corporate needs rather than user needs.
MS is not able to compete at equal price point. A MS tablet will have to run under $300, which will mean much less hardware, or MS not charging $50-$100 for the OS.
The primary danger to Facebook is that something simler comes along. The attractiveness of Facebook is not only the social content, but also the ability to generate and, more importantly, consume content. The secondary danger is that Facebook is not able to monitize content. Data for children is not so valuable. Data for 25-40 is. So the issue will be to have a sizable number of post college people, who are worried about their careers, continue to use the service.
US high schools make a significant effort to insure that every student has the opportunity to learn the skills the college, but most colleges are not going to make an effort to hold a students hand once in college, especially if the student is paying, especially if the student is paying with student loans. After all, there is another freshmen class next year, and they have the money from last years freshman class whether they earned it or not.
The second issue is much more interesting. The students at a college provide as much value as the professors. I did not go to any kind of high level college, but I met some good people who really enhanced my experience. People who could hold a conversation, work a problem, accept that ideas different from their own might still be valid. If one does not have such people in their college life, this beyond anything else is a sign that one might be in the wrong place, or perhaps that one is not effort in the most efficient directions.
So in some ways it is like Hollywood, in some ways it is not. In some ways it is like other industries, mostly not. A financier is in it to make money, and is not going to throw a fit because the grue is the wrong color. An engineer is mostly not going to have a temper tantrum because someone modifies his truss. In most other industries there are measurable. We might get frustrated but life goes on.
This is mostly a case of not confusing a hobby with a job. If one wants total creative control, have a hobby. If one wants revenue, get a job. I think many game developer think they can maximize revenue and simultaneously keep it as a hobby.
As it is, Chrome 2.0 should have been the 1.0 RTM, with everything before being a 0.x public release candidate(probably 0.5 onward). 3.0 simply added initial support for HTML 5 and improved code, a point release. 4.0 seems pretty real, so that might be have been a 2.0 in traditional terms. Probably by the upcoming version is a credible for real 3.0.
Version numbering really does not matter, but to assert that releasing a version every six weeks is necessary to release features more often is silly. What Google is in fact saying is that Chrome is a very immature browser with a very immature feature set, and they are wiling to sacrifice everything else that once made Chrome a legitimate browser in an effort to make it buzzword compliant.
So when Google puts out a phone that costs more than similar phones, with a $350 cancelation fee, people wonder what Google is up to. We are told that the Apple iPhone costs $200 to build, so why is Google trying to make a huge profit on a product that is supposed to introduce a new concept in communications to themasses and solidify Googles ad market in the mobile sphere?
Even so, why is Google saying the phone that promoted is not a Google phone? Why are they not providing support. it is like a bank that mails an offer to it's customers, such as credit insurance, and then says that it never made the offer, a third party is responsible. This is the definition of a scam. And that is what the Nexus One was. A flat attempt to scam users.
Here is what i would like to see. More options in planning trips. What is the safest route that avoids, for instance, single lane mountain roads or highways with no median. Or how can I get from a to b without going through neighborhoods. Google lets you change your path, but you must know what the conditions are like before hand. This would be very expensive to implement, but would differentiate better than celebrity voices.
There is also a next step for creative companies.
As far as the idea of charging by weight, one must remember that planes are public transport, plain and simple. You buy a seat. If one can fit in the seat, then that is ok. The weight of the passenger only becomes significant when combines with the many bags some carry. Also, each bag is a discrete unit that must be handled and carries discrete liability. Limiting bags significantly reduces staff and liability, while limiting passengers only reduces revenues. Mass is not the issue.
To put it another way, note that until 2001 people could pretty much carry as much as they could carry onto a plane. The rules were not strictly enforced. If could be stored somewhere, it was. People did not check in bags. A garment bag, a rolling bag, and shoulder bag wes a very common combination. We had weight and bag limits, but there were pretty liberal and people did not run up against them often.
After that checkpoints insured that it was not convenient or possible to carry all your stuff on a plane, so more people began to check stuff in. This was when the airlines put in the latest rules. The main cause of this, in my mind, is that the bags had to be inspected more and the airlines had to pay for it. The easiest way to minimize this cost was to pass it on to the consumer. We will inspect one o two bags for free, if you want anymore pay for it. The weight limits are to insure that they can higher an average person to do the work, and they don't have to compete with UPS for strong persons.
The reason that people are so familiar with TI is that many people have used it in school, so it is a vicious cycle. TI is used in school because the calculator is limited. Students can't mod the calculator because it is designed for school.
Another thing to remember is that the the handheld calculator is a major part of the TI company. They were made to push the integrated circuit, and they continue to be seen much as they were 45 years ago, as integrated bits on silicon. Unlike other major handheld calculator players, such as HP, TI is not the hackers calculator. Just look at how easy it is to get an HP ROM, and how hard it is to get a TI ROM, and how many emulators are out there for HP. So TI playing hardball is nothing new. The only thing new is we have a couple of generations of kids who only know TI.
People do not code in Java just because it is cross platform. It is because Java assumes that developers are morons, and allows them to code that way.
Apple assumed that anyone who should be developing comercial application were unlikely to be mono-linguist. That asking them to learn Objective C would not be a huge issue, and asking them to use a reliable MVC method would help the competent programmers.
MS simplified the development process and assumed that people were morons, and look at the success.
Apple assumes that requiring persons to use XCode is not an unreasonable for the iPhone. Google wants children to write applications to pad the Android App store.
One thing about Apple is there are skilled people writing applications that make my life easier, not just more automated. It is true that Apple treats users like morons, but that is the way it should be. Any competent developers know that one must idiot proof the machine or software. If one does not then the user will blame the designer. After all, asking a competent person to hold a phone a certain way is not unreasonable. It is only the idiots who can't learn basic skills that we need to protect against. What Stroustrup is saying is that bad things happen when you treat your developers like morons. I think Windows Vista and the Kin illustrates this.
In any case it is Googles fault because they could have written the license to prevent this, and for some reason, either through ignorance or not caring, explicitly or implicitly chose to allow phone hardware to become closed.
OTOH, it is not googles fault because until Apple opened up the App store and allowed a level of freedom, the American phone market has been closed, so Google is just following the status quo. It is true that several months later, Blackberry opened it App store, but it is essentially had the same limitations as the Apple App store, in that Apps had to be approved, be commercial, and not contain obscenity.
The whole brouhaha over the Apple store was silly because the phone was much more open. The only reason to complain was by the carriers as it transfered power from them to the Apple and the user. Before this the carriers charged obscene fees to download content, such as ringtones(ringtones can be made free in garageband), in the same way they still charge obscene fees to text.
The brouhaha over Android is also silly. The only thing Android promised was an opened app development process, which it has provided. Obviously, to anyone who is objective, Android returns the some power to the carrier in exchange to allowing the user to play games and watch porn. The carriers, not Google, designs the phone that will maximize profit to the carrier, not Google or Apple.
I will say that if it requires a paid trip to the carrier to unbrick the phone this is a significant decline in phone quality. Most people I know who brick their iphones can unbrick it with going to Apple.
Another advantage of the east coast is that Louisiana is evidently not enforcing turtle exclusion devices for the fishing boats. Even most of the gulf coast seems to be more concerned with maximizing fish productivity at any cost. It may that the some turtles might survive the oil. It could be that some turtles might not be caught in fishing nets. It may not be that they survive both. Therefore moving east is a good thing.
But I agree that there are cultural and geographical distances that caused BP to really screw up the public relations. For instance, though everyone in Texas knows on which side their bread is buttered, but we like our coast line only as oily as necessary. This means that we likely would not have wasted time trying to save the hole. We like drilling holes. It makes us a lot of money. Recall, the rig was insured. Plug the hole, build a new rig, drill a new hole, a thousand engineers don't lose their jobs. Texas is all about engineering jobs. England is a nation of shopkeepers paranoid about keeping stock, not creating it. Half of BP problems was an unwillingness to give up on the hole.
Also, Texas would have never given into the fishing and tourists interests. The fishing industry will not admit that they kill more in bycatch and destroy their livelihood by overfishing way more than an oil spill ever will. Let the fishing industry sue for loss of income. As we have seen in the articles, many of them do cash business, so cannot substantiate income, or at least not substantiate without getting in trouble with internal revenue. Louisiana in particular would have a hard time whining given that they support killing sea turtles to get shrimp.
Of course the tourist industry psychotically believes that it can exist without cheap energy. Florida might make a ruckus in congress, but Texas has the craziest congress people of all. These are the people who complain about the deficit while maximizing it by insuring clear lake always has high paying government jobs, and fighting for contract for their fishing buddies. One word from them and energy goes up 25%. Look at it this way. Texas has it own personal grid. Not hooked up to the national grid. It is like we are the Brits that did not cave into the EU.
What palm does has, as been mentioned, is patents. Palm, along with Apple, is practically the only independent innovator in the PDA market, which we now see fully formed in the from of smartphone, a device with was instrumental in creating.
HP was probably a little more motivated as they have seem have set a path to growth of snapping up good hardware companies with good portfolios that can then be used to create products.
I suspect that Apple and RIM simply wanted to cut out the competition. Google, being a young company with little wisdom, would have benefitted from the hardware experience Palm.
This is likely a verizon ploy to gain control over what should be the more open choice in phones. Until the US courts establish that phones should not be tied to a carrier, possibly even not allowing subsidized phones, this behaviour will continue. Remember that this is one of the things that the original ATT in trouble, forcing customers to rent their phones, and pay the rent indefinitely. The carriers do the same thing. They say they are subsiding the phone, they say the charges help pay for the phone, but the charges do not drop when the contract ends, and the charges do drop if one buys the phone, only the contact is dropped.
If we were allowed to use whatever phone we wanted, then customers would save money and have better phones. Of course the carrier profits would decline, and companies like Verizon would be forced to find even more creative ways to nickel and dime their customers to death.
What I do know is that carrier quality is a regional issue and the world does not revolve around NYC or LA/SF. When I travel I do have some problems with ATT. They certainly only work well in the mid populated areas, not super heavily populated areas, or rural areas. But becasue they work for me, and becasue Verizon has even worse customer service, every time I have gone it to check on a phone they think they are doing me a favor, I wil stick with ATT.
Apple has a minority of the market. If they broke 50%, sure, I would say let them be sued. Most agree it is not even that great of a phone. If one want something different, but a Android phone or a Blackberry. That is the way the free market works. Firms should not be forced to do something until they are approaching a monopoly. Apple is not, and has never been, near that mark. It's stuff simply does not have enough bells and whistles to make the average consumer feel like they are getting the best value. It is why CU seldom rankes the products very highly, even though I have Apple equipment 10 years old that still works.
It would also be nice if our infant mortality rate were not comparable to Croatia.
Why celebrities should be so special as to take huge loans and live lavishly and then end up ahead is a question no one seems to want to ask. If I were allowed to take a multimillion dollar loan against future earnings my life might be much better. I certainly would have difficult paying it back, but even living off the investment I would have more money. Such a loan might return more in investment than the average income
So record labels are loan sharks giving away money in exchange for future earnings. Some might not be able to pay back the loan. Well, boo hoo. Millions of Americans are in the same boat, with things such as pay day loans, but don't have the life style that these guys do. It is why people see how much Madonna has, and how little they have, and find it hard to understand how listening to one of her songs without a license is stealing. Does she still have a house?
I am not sure how Apple users are free from criticism or competition. Even if Apple is censoring their web site, that is only a small portion of the web. I think we would agree that the vast majority of information the average user receives is through google or bing searches, not by going to the Apple web site. I think we can all agree that these searches bring up all sorts of criticism and information on other phones, such as RIM and Android and Kin. And whatever one may want to believe I have seen many more Android and Kin commercials than iPhone. As an aside, I have seen more Chrome commercials than Safari of Firefox.
Hyperbole is fun, but hardly part of an objective discussion. Part of the reason many political pundits, and politicians, cannot be taken seriously is because, like you, they make radical metaphors that have no basis in fact.
Here is what hypercard did. It provided a method for the inexperience user to organize data. This is one of the most complex tasks in programming. Data management. This is why everyone loves garbage collection, because managing memory yourself is expensive. It is cheaper to use machine resources. Hypercard was all about letting the people organize huge amounts of data. This was also the great thing about the RAD environment in FoxPro. I say apps that managed small bits of data, but nothing on how this might be made simpler for large bits of data.
One can get a group of teenage students, boy and girls, to become familiar enough with a language such as python so they can many of these things by writing simple scripts. That is well and good. And it is good that the kids can write applications. That is empowering.
Here is my gripe. At the high school and early college level we should be teaching general skills, not specific applications. This is the problem with schools only using MS Word. When I leaned to program, I learned about variable, and structure, and loops, and functions. That meant I could program anything in any language with a small learning curve. This was in high school. I learned how to type, and how to edit, and the basics of WYSWYG editing. The goal was to get words down, not, as the MS commercials ask kids to do, change fonts and colors which has little to do with writing a poem.
When kids learn programming in this way they learn the abstraction skills they need for math, and the analysis and prediction skills they need for science. It can be made simple, as with Alice. I know that the article only mentions the schools to show how simple it is, but that is my point as well. Kids are really smart and can pick things up much easier than adults. If 40 year old MBA can do, then maybe that is impressive.
This is same reason why newspapers report how unwise people are with money when they get greedy. It is no surprise that SCO has such success in Utah given that people have been able to steal millions of dollars just by putting fancy fliers on cars promising huge returns.
A reboot indicates something like a memory leak. Hardware problems would not be reliably fixed. This is certainly some brain dead software error, a case of development focusing on the bells and whistle, and not core functionality. Everyone is so wrapped up in the tethering and Apps, that they forgot they were building a phone.
Up until the time of Galileo in Europe, the Pope pretty much got to say what was and was not true. If the Pope said that moon was made of shit, that was the truth. Galileo , and the scientist that followed, OTOH, pretty much said that Goad made the world, and an average person could know the world and the nature of god by careful observation, and even formulate that nature through mathematics. Since the creator and creation were the same, any discrepancy between previous writing ad observations had to be in the interpretation of the writing, since god and the creation were the same, and words were subject to error. Note that this was the same thing that was being said by the emerging protestant. That the pope was not infallible.
The problem was that the Pope and the Church were political institutions, so were not interested in reality, only power, so they could not let the scientists take the power. This is pretty much is happening today with various religious institutions. There is too much money to be made in telling people what to believe. This is why they catholic church lies about condoms. This is why many protestant churches lie about the nature of evolution of people. God and the Creation are one. God is not going to lie to us, only men born of original sin are going to do that. No matter how holy a man thinks he is, there is still original sin that prevents him from being as honest as the observable fact and repeatable experiment. When I tell a child that he acceleration is proportional to force applied, that is knowledge given to us directly from the creation. When the church says the earth is only a few thousand years old, that is lie given directly from corrupt men who would rather have a ignorant laborer that will tithe to the church and let the priest hire gigolos than a productive creative person who can make all our lives better.
This is no says anything about the various religions as an institution, merely the corrupt men who cannot see the sin within themselves.
Then there is the secular side of greed and corruption. The people who put money and wordily goods in front of everything else, including annoying facts based in reality. These are the people who say smoking causes no significant damage. Or oil is not fossil-fuel and therefore there will be an endless supply. Or that McDonalds is food. Of that the Germans in WWII did not kill nearly as many people as some say. These lies are often wrapped in religion, because a lie wrapped in a perceived truth is easier to swallow, and because the church is always willing to form alliances that will increase it's power, but this has nothing to do with religion. This has to do with people who want money at any cost. If we are affecting climate, then we should do something about, which could put the powerful out of business. Other people will become wealthy, but the current aristocracy will but put in jeopardy. If is just like when people no longer believed that King was chosen by god. We all benefited, but the King suffered. This is the nature of the world. The few in power will lie and cheat and steal and watch the peasant suffer, all the while claiming devine intervention.
Which is not to say that human has any significant influence over climate change, only more research will show the validity of that. No, this is just to say that the church and the cooperate aristocracy have a lot to lose anything there is shift in social norms, and therefore they will go to any means to stop it, and they have many more resources, in form of brainwashed people and money, than the few that are simply trying to study and understand the creation.