When I see statement like this, I often think about indoor plumbing. I can imagine the hicks saying "how day the government make me put in indoor pluming. My outhouse is good enough."
Obviously there is little benefit of indoor plumbing, especially in the south where it seldom gets cold and the rain it not that big of impediment, and there is space. The added cost of indoor plumbing does set a huge impediment to ownership of houses, and some may choose to not have it in order to have a protection from the elements.
So the benefits are societal. We have made a decision that we do not want to defecate in public, so we have spent huge amounts of money to make sure that happens. It is a public health issue. Likewise we are now in process of deciding that we do not want the power plant polluting our air any more than we want the neighbor pissing in the yard. It again is going to cost huge amounts of money to make this happen. Each of us managing our power consumption is going to part of that solution. A dryer is huge waste of electricity, and is going to be one of the big thing that gets managed.
There is no content in this article, just a statement of random unsubstantiated statistics.
And what if the random trivia is true? What if half the internet is for adults? Aren't half the people in the world adults? Why should they not have a representative portion of the internet? So we have to sanitize the world for the developmentally challenged that have never seen a real vagina or penis.
And then, what is pornographic? If I write a story with a plot and gratuitous sex scene is that pornographic? We want definitions.
This is just a useless piece of fluff intended to make people who aren't getting laid mess in their pants. Oh, think of the kids. Oh, Oh, the kids. We have to protect, the Oh, kids.
We already know that 99.99999% of the interent has no useful content. Yahoo is evidently becoming the ultimate porn site by advertising it is the place of entertainment news. Pretty soon the only safe place to be will be/. Even XKCD can't be trusted. Fuck.
What is even more of an issue is that Apple seems to be only retail outlet that is expected to sell every piece of junk given to them. Here is this guy that makes a comic, puts in some tits to increase sales, and we are supposed to cry because Apple won't sell it? It makes one not to open a business. You have all of these people telling you what to sell and not sell. If they are so concerned, why don't the go an open a business instead of complaining? Oh, because it is easier to complain?
You are such an idiot. Steve would not tell you to jump off a cliff, he would gussy it up, build a nice space, and charge you for the opportunity. How dumb do you have to be to not understand the basic of cult mentality. It is no fun if you can't make people pay to be abused.
Steve Ciarcia's who wrote the Circuit Cellar column in byte started a magazine which now simply goes by Circuit Celler. The articles tend to be related to significant embedded devices. I find it holds the spirit of Byte in that it encourages users to build custom computers rather than just settle for commodity parts. This is the closest thing I have seen for understanding a machine to the basics.
Make magazine obviously does the same at a more accesible level.
In the end Byte's value was that it provided reliable reviews and use cases computers, not based on OS, but on need. Be it Unix, MS Dos, CPM, of Mac OS, Byte honestly looked at what could and could not be done on th machine. It did not shy away from technical detail. Most of this has moved on online to sites such as Tom's Hardware.
There is no way to spin this positively. Starbucks is doing this, for example, because I have three coffeshops, 3 bars, and 4 MacDonalds that will give me free access within an area that has three starbucks that want to charge me for the access. This is why it has been forever since I have gone to Starbucks. Now that they offer free access, I might go in while traveling, but that is about it.
We hear that people just sit around and use the internet without buying anything. I don't see this. I see people sitting around and studying, often not using the internet, taking space, without buying anything. Mostly what I see is people getting coffee to go. The only time I have been to a starbucks when there are no seats is during a widespread power outage after a storm. Even so people did not linger for hours.
I like firms that give me a simple deal. Starbucks has never been this way. Even the Starbucks card, which should be useful for more than wifi, is not useful at the Starbucks branded outlets. How Lame.
Which is the same for/. Does the idle page still give us a text input box 10% of the page?
On every page I have looked at, the reader has worked wonderfully. It may be the feature, along with clicktoflash, that moves me to safari.
Saying this will never work over the long haul is like saying the Camino will never work because it includes a default flash blocker or Firefox will never work because there are too many easily installed plugin to block ads. It is a web feature, apparently an open source web feature, and browsers that want to focus on user experiences will implement it as a default feature, just like pop up blocking. Browsers that do not implement will show themselves as front ends for advertisers, not browsers for users.
There are issues. The readers removes the branding from the site. This could be considered bad. But people will use for the same reason that some choose to use ad blocking. The articles spread out over 10 pages, with long waits for ads to load between pages, and infected ads, will give some cause to bypass the predefined interface. Like other tech, websites will adjust. After all, websites serve the customers, not the other way around.
I think what Google is doing is providing technology is average users that can be supported by a primarily ad based model. Google grew up in time when the world was becoming wired up, and Google was able to use that increased networking, primarily paid for by external public and private sources, to grow a business model. In a fully connected world, with clock cycles costing infinitesimal amounts of money, it is now possible to provide centralized compter resources in exchange for ads. This provides value to the end user as he or she no longer needs to administer the resources. The technological advance, as in so many cases of large companies, is the ability to deliver a service at a lower cost.
This was what MS did in the days prior to the widespread internet. It provided software, only some of which was purchased, that could be freely installed on business machines. This provided an alternative to Unix hardware and software, all which had to be paid for, often at what we would now consider exorbitant prices. Of course, there were things that MS stuff could not do. We have gone full circle in that MS now wants $500 for software, while Apple is selling software for $30, and most stuff for Unix is free.
What people want is service, the technical details are of little concern. I can change any song into a ringtone for my iPhone. The fact that it is a fake m4a instead of an mp3 is of no concern. What is of a concern is that ringtones have never cost me a thing on the iPhone. If I am looking at $100 for a fake copy of MS Office, and $300 for MS Windows that will constantly hound me to prove that it is a legitimate copy, then perhaps running a copy of chrome with Google hosting all my documents is a rational thing to do. We can complain that it old tech, but it is only the early adopters that a fetishizing new tech enough to actually spend huge amounts of money on it.
Linux netbooks are going to have the same problem as MacBooks, that is that they are underpowered. For $1200 macbook pro, you get a full computer that can dual boot Windows for the tech ed classes that need it. HP makes some nice machines that sell to schools for about $700, but I don't know if they extend that offer to families. The HP that most schools would want would run about $800 retail.
Here is the thing about kids using computers in schools. It allows the school to model all the different things one can do with a computer. Not just write papers, but read books, use interactive maps, simulate scientific principles, analyze data, visualize data, observe graphical changes as underlying equations change, and collaborate on activities. In the absence of this molding, all kids know who to do with computers is play games and go to facebook. I am not too big to admit it. I do many useful things on computer because the adults modeled the behavior for me. They were not playing games, they were writing code, writing papers, analyzing data, and the like.
For the most part, parents will buy their kids stuff, and I am talking about parents with not much money. $200 cell phones, $200 shoes, cars, the fun stuff. There is a mentality that anything that isn't a toy, such as pencil, paper, school clothes, should be bought by the school. But we keep saying that parents need to be involved in their child's education, and one way to do this is to make them spend a grand, which might make them interested in what the child is doing.
I hope this does not degenerate to the speed wars of the PC kind. Where one could buy a 20 million GHZ computer with a 1 MHz frontside bus and hard drive with a transfer rate of 1 kb per minute $100. Then we would hear how stupid we were for buy another computer for $1,000 that only ran at 1 GHZ.
I mean, for a phone the least important spec is how fast the CPU runs. Since phone use is much more graphical, I am more interested in what the GPU is doing.
And the university gets much of it's product for free. Many of the professors cover their own salary through grants, the university only provides an office and work space. If the prof buys equipment, the university demands a cut of the grant in exchange for allowing the prof to buy the equipment. Nature can do what it does for the price is commendable. We could have public domain research journals just like we could stop university from building wasteful spaces just so some rich guy can put his name on it.
There is context to what HP is doing. It has to do with smart phones that take pictures but doesn't have built in printing capability. Form what have read, this has lead people to look at pictures but not print them. Sure there are solutions, but they are not really 'plug and play'. If it is hard to print, HP does not sell ink.
Recall what the printer manufacturers did when everyone started taking digital pictures. They put memory slots in the printer and software that would one-touch print the various picture formats. This was nothing that technical people would use, we all had computer with photo editing suites and high end printers, but for the mom wanting to print pictures of the kids is was a great way to sell ink.
This is all that is happening now. Someone has some snaps on their smart phone or feature phone with email. They want to print it but they don't really want to mess with the computer. They don't have a memory card that will work with the old printer. They don't want to go the marketplace and download the app and set up the printer. So they email. It works. One touch plug and play printing. They use ink that HP sells.
The other context to this is that ten years ago houses were not networked the way they are now, and network kit was not so cheap. Ten years ago a card or box to network a printer wold be north of $200, and a networked printer would be north of $1000. Now HP sells a network ready printer for $100 and most houses have a ethernet port to plug it into.
If you choose an ad supported App, then you are choosing to trade some of you allotted bandwidth for a free app. I only use a fraction of the 2 gig plan, but more than the 250 meg plan, so for me there is going to be no real costs to download ads, as long as my normal browsing plus the ads do not go over 2 gig. In any case I have the unlimited plan. I suspect many people are in my boat.
Let take the television example. I can watch a TV show and have 18 minutes of commercials for each hour of TV. I can invest in significantly in hardware and record the show and then watch it later without commercials. Both of these may require significant cable bills. I can watch the show on hulu with five minutes of commercials per hour of TV show, commercials using bandwidth I pay for. Or I could pay that magical 1.99 and watch the show without commercials. Frankly I often go the commercial route, though sometimes I pay the 1.99. And frankly, I feel that 18 minutes, or even five minutes, of my time is worth more than $2.
Given time nature will readjust and reach a new equilibrium. Things like this happen occasionally in nature, and the earth has yet to be critically damaged. The nuclear industry often cites the example of an area where a natural nuclear disaster occurred. The earth has been hit with meteors and survived. It is not the earth or the creatures we are protected. It is us.
Even with no damage, Florida tourism is suffering. There is no real reason why we should care that people are going to lose their jobs, as long as gas is cheap, so that is not an issue. The fishermen have no more or less right to the fish in the gulf than the oil people have to the oil, and the fish might like time to breed, so if all the fisherpeople no longer have work, that is nothing to worry about. Everyone is whining about the loss of oysters, but of course those oysters and artificially placed, not part of the natural process, so that is not an issue.
Sure some people will whine that they have been doing this for generations, and that they have a right to take from nature and others don't, but that solves nothing. It would be nice i the government might have some regulation so that all interests could share these resources, but we live in a free market economy. In such a state, those interest that are most desired by the public, in this case oil, take precedence over other interests. Unless we accept a socialist state in which resources are divided equally by the state, that is the poor with one fishing boat gets the same access to the gulf as the rich with a billion dollar rig, thes situation will remain what it is.
This was my assumption. They jack up the prices and then give you back the money. It is the same everywhere. Amazon does this on free shipping items, $5 through them free shipping, $4 through someone else. It works out.
I think MS was targeting the business user, those with expense accounts, or otherwise spending other peoples money. Buy an item on an expense account and pocket the difference. Like MS office, I think MS hoped that the work habits would transfer to home shopping. Of course people tend to be more careful with their own money, and this sounds a lot like a rebate, which is why I never use it. I want a simple clear price, and not have to go through a complicated formula.
Exactly, this is why a broadcast model does not apply. As the parent says, Broadcast has a fixed cost, the transmission towers, but it costs essentially the same to transmit to one viewer as it does to 1 million, within a geographical area that is. Cable has fixed costs to get the signal to a customer, but then the recurring costs for infrastructure are minimal. In both cases the issue, I suppose, to get enough viewers to cover the fixed costs, and then the rest is profit. The more customers the better.
Of course with content delivered over the internet there are many recurring customers costs. There is the cost of delivering the signal, and capacity must be added as customers increase. The content provider must build capacity for maximum viewership, and let excess capacity stand idle for most of the time. The infrastructure to deliver the content to the user is owned by third parties and paid for by the person receiving the content. The third party prices internet access based on assumptions that the customer is not going use it that much, and when the do, as in the case of iPhone, has to re price to limit the use.
So, what we are looking at is a system that may or may not be able to handle 42 million people watching to find out who shot J.R. I can tell you Hulu cannot handle the viewers it has now. Netflix does a much better job, but it does such on the iPad, so there is room for improvement. I am just not sure how Apple is going to do this. It takes me well over an hour to download a 40 minute show in standard def from iTunes. Apple does not seem to be set up to deliver real time content.
I know that people don' know history, so they think they have made up everything in the world. They think they made up sex. They don't know what came before, and really don't care.
Certain health and occupational risks have been known for quite a long time. For example, smoking was not just suddenly found dangerous in the 60's when the surgeon general of the US warned us that smoking would kill us, studies have been stacking up since the late 19 century. Likewise, the dangers of our industrial food supply have an equally long history. The most famous early work in called the Jungle, 1906. More recently is the 1987 Pulitzer prize winning book Diet for a New America.
The point is that we are very bad at risk assessment. We will not let our children walk the neighborhood because of the very minor threat of getting abducted(only about 60,000 kids are abducted by non family members, population US 307 million, 25% kids, 77 million kids...), but will feed them food that is guaranteed to increase their chance of cancer and diabetes. A parent will worry about cell phones and electrical cables near their house, while feeding their obeses kid hamburger2.
Chance of being kidnapped is a small fraction of 1%. Chance of a child being obese or overweight, about 33%.
The movie may be silly, but it proves that most of what we do to corporations is merely wrist slapping when we let them kill our kids.
I mean, honestly, if you are going to poison your kid with McDonald's, what is a little bit more poisoning with cadmium. Ailments allegedly related to cadmium exposure is cancer, kidney problems and weakened bones. In high quantities. How high are the quantities going to be with kids licking the yellow paint off the glass, even if the paint chips I suspect the real risk is to with the glass.
The meal itself should be what parent worry about, especially if they eat there more than once a month Most of the preservatives in the Happy meal are carcinogens as well, some will actually cause mutations. Sodium leads to hypertension, and in a country where 1/3 of the kids are overweight, and the real level of needed salt is about half of that listed on most nutritional sheets, we are setting these kids up for heart attacks at an early age. Other forms of sodium are in the meal and are toxic is high levels.
I am not saying that the glasses are safe, or should be recalled. But if a parent feeds a child this toxic cancer causing mixture of chemical that McDonald's calls food, I hardly see how they can complain about a little paint that probably is not even above current standards. The fumes coming from the SUV is probably more toxic.
Obviously voice and data a billed in this way to insure a minimum recurring cost to the user. The issue is that the over charges have always been extreme($.10 a minute, on average, for first 500 minutes, $.50 a minute thereafter). It would be better for most of us if they did just charge $.10 a minute, but then the mobile companies would have no predictable income. The per minute plans they do provide are quite ludicrous, $1 for every day you use the phone, plus a quarter per minute. In any case any analogy to electricity is quite silly because the economics are not the same.
If phone calls were treated like electricity here is what would happen. You would get your first set of data very cheap, like a nickel a minute. If you did not use the phone a minimum amount you would be charged a usage fee. As you used more data, you rate would double at each increment. This will not happen because electrical companies actually want to provide some negative pressure on use, while phone companies want to provide the illusion of unlimted resources so they can upsell plans. Later they complain that people are actually using the purchased resources.
Here is my only gripe about the new ATT plans, and it might an unfair gripe as I have not seen all the details of the plan. They are essentially getting rid of the special 'iPhone' data offer, so they should get rid of all the individual iPhone plans. Like voice, they should just have a data plan that can be bought for individual phones or for family plans. Likewise they should just sell the individual or family metered texting. If a family wants 3 iPhones they should be able to buy the 2 gig plan and then the tethering on top of that. Buying three separate plans under the new rules is silly, as it is no longer a special unlimited iPhone thing.
I think the point of the article is that no one implements all HTML standards perfectly. Chrome is an immature browser based on one of the newer rendering engines, so we expect it to mature rapidly, but hardly can expect it to match it's cousin Safari in most areas, thous we expect it would in a short time.
I think we can say at the outset that Apple's policy is outlandish, but let's look at this as we move towards the computer appliance and not back to the mainframe.
If it don't work, then don't sell it. This has been the bane of computer programs for years. No warranty, if it trashes your business, it is your fault.
I have little problem with this. It does not prevent Skype, but prevents a million look alike apps
Look and feel is why we buy Apple. We expect to do certain things in certain ways. There are some things that will always be wanted. It is like cup holders. Just because some consumers buy cars based on cup holders does not mean that we should all have to drive car with 23 cup holders.
This has been discussed ad infintum. I think battery life should take precedence over developers wanting to take the easy way out. I pay for code to be good.
I have no idea on this one. I think if people had not felt they had a god given right to infinite bandwidth ATT would still be selling unlimited plans.
Objectionable content is truly silly. Gowalla is 4+ while netflix is 12+? WTF?
Those of us who programmed in MS DOS knew that MS did not document API. We had buy books that reversed engineered those hooks. Apple was pretty open with the details, the Mac Books were a huge set of volumes. The risk with used unsupported API was that Apple would pull it without noticed. It happened a lot. I don't see why we shouldn't be able to use unsupported APIs, but when the program breaks, we can't blame Apple.
When Apple posted GPL content and then removed it, the general rational EFF cried foul, even though Apple really did nothing wrong. People assume that if it is in the Apple store, then Apple can be blamed.
I wish Apple would enforce this. It would raise the level of the Apps.
As for the rest of these, we are at a junction from WIMP to touchscreen. One thing that continues to make MS Windows so dreadful is that it never made the jump to an efficient WIMP interface. This is why we have 35 button mice, and windows does not work well with a touchpad. There are Apps that still assume they are using a pure WIMP interface. For instance the Grey's Anatomy app requires you to click a button to move to the next screen rather than just use the finger to drag. It should have been rejected until it was fixed. I can see developers in 10 years still using widget where a gesture would do, and defending it as the way we have programmed for generations.
First, We know that ATT sucks, but clearly it can deliver data. Certain cities are oversubscribed, certain cities are overpopulated. It is likely physically impossible to put enough towers in NYC to cover all the traffic. I appreciate that ATT is going to sell 2 GB of data, with tethering, for $50. That is $10 less than for verizon. Given that Verizon speeds appear to be slower, unless you live or work in a rural area that does have ATT 3G, I can't imagine what the $10 is for. This has pretty much been my impression for the past 20 years. For personal use Verizon is overpriced.
Second, why is Sprint 4G so slow? And they are not cheap either. Neither is T-Mobile. I remember when they would charge $45 for hot spot acess.
And third, I wish cricket would sell a box for home internet. I am surprised that their speeds are so good. Kind of makes you wonder if the tests are totally wack. The lame wireless carriers, ATT and Cricket are on top. In any case, for $40 unlimited you can't beat the deal. I would switch from DSL to them.
This is kind of line of thought I was going for, though not because of the ethnic issue. Spelling Bees, like baseball, are just meaningless contrived competition. They may indirectly lead to meaningful skills, but they teach lessons that are false. They teach that there are uniform rules enforced fairly. I can't tell you the number of times I have wished that some pussy football fan would quit bemoaning a bad call and just the let the game play go on. I mean it does not matter.
So I am thinking why do I care who is better at spelling bees than someone else. Sure it is more than memorization, it requires an understanding of language, but does that get the product designed? I think nat.
In any case I suspect there is one reason, I suspect the main reason, the article did not list. Language skills. While many in the US speak, at most, 2 dialects of English, India has several languages. That means a person of Indian descent, likely has more than english spoken at home. And since many words in English come from other languages, knowing other languages help spell a word. Ego, the question of the words origin. That in itself would mean that any person not raised under the mantra that English is god's language will tend to win these con-tests.
I agree that for the most part such a rootkit would be more of an annoyance than anything else. Most people don't do serious work on their phones, and so bank passwords and the like should not be an issue. However even annoyances can be an issue. Remember when everyone was up in arms because malicious web site would substitute or create additional advertising? Remember when everyone had a 'helper' browser plugin that would display pop ups and track all you web browsing then send all that data to advertisers? These really caused no problem for the user, but we didn't like then so spent a great deal of time eradicating them. Not scary, not a big problem, but not liked.
Then of course many Adroid users in the US are on verizon, and I assume many have not opted to pay for the GB plan, so are allowed MB per day, which, since Verizon is the best network in the US, has very good bandwidth. It would not be very difficult, therefore, for a marketer to set up background apps to download huge Flash adverts that would generate page views and revenue. Google is not going to care because they get a cut of all ad revenue, and Verizon won't care because they get to charge for excess data. It is win-win.
And, we can't recall one of the oldest trick in the books, which was merely an annoyance so no one really cared. The reprogramming the modem to dial an especially expensive foreign number. In the case of the Android phone, the phone could be set to dial through one of those expensive long distance services like they have at airports, where a three minute call can be billed back to your cell account for $50. It is not in the article, but if I have control of the phone, then it makes sense that I would have control of the call. And who is being called on that phone. For sale to any investigative office that is willing to pay for it.
If this were true then IE would still be the dominant browser. IE allowed a reasonably simple method of guaranteeing that the user would see a consistant produce no matter what machine the user had. HTML specifically did not make that guarantee. HTML was simply a method of insuring the user would see content in the most appropriate style, not a guaranteed consistant style.
In any case we know that the HTML standard evolved to meet designers needs, and CSS was added, and now the web standard can provide the level of control that the OCD developers and PHB need, and so now we have much of the web written for the standard based browser, not IE. Even IE has changed.
This move from IE did not happen overnight, and, arguably, was not driven by developers. It was driven by users moving away from IE and those pages not serving standard based content losing page views to those that did. I understand that it took both good standard based tools and a shifting user base. Back in the late 90's I worked on IE only sites. It was pretty necessary to gain the conformity that users and the PHB expected. OTOH, many of those sites are now out of business.
I see the same thing happening with Flash. Other standard based solutions will be possible as the work is done to package typical solutions in a simple form that the average web developer can apply to general problems. Like IE, the average developer will not move from Flash until the PHB see a drop in users due to (allegedly) Flash poor performance on the sub-compact machine drives users to sites that gives them a more positive user experience.
I don't see Flash going away soon, but I do see the several use scenarios disappearing. In particular, I see video content wrapped in a Flash package going away. As soon as people figure out how to do obnoxious ads in HTML5, I see Flash losing significant market share.
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Obviously there is little benefit of indoor plumbing, especially in the south where it seldom gets cold and the rain it not that big of impediment, and there is space. The added cost of indoor plumbing does set a huge impediment to ownership of houses, and some may choose to not have it in order to have a protection from the elements.
So the benefits are societal. We have made a decision that we do not want to defecate in public, so we have spent huge amounts of money to make sure that happens. It is a public health issue. Likewise we are now in process of deciding that we do not want the power plant polluting our air any more than we want the neighbor pissing in the yard. It again is going to cost huge amounts of money to make this happen. Each of us managing our power consumption is going to part of that solution. A dryer is huge waste of electricity, and is going to be one of the big thing that gets managed.
And what if the random trivia is true? What if half the internet is for adults? Aren't half the people in the world adults? Why should they not have a representative portion of the internet? So we have to sanitize the world for the developmentally challenged that have never seen a real vagina or penis.
And then, what is pornographic? If I write a story with a plot and gratuitous sex scene is that pornographic? We want definitions.
This is just a useless piece of fluff intended to make people who aren't getting laid mess in their pants. Oh, think of the kids. Oh, Oh, the kids. We have to protect, the Oh, kids.
We already know that 99.99999% of the interent has no useful content. Yahoo is evidently becoming the ultimate porn site by advertising it is the place of entertainment news. Pretty soon the only safe place to be will be /. Even XKCD can't be trusted. Fuck.
What is even more of an issue is that Apple seems to be only retail outlet that is expected to sell every piece of junk given to them. Here is this guy that makes a comic, puts in some tits to increase sales, and we are supposed to cry because Apple won't sell it? It makes one not to open a business. You have all of these people telling you what to sell and not sell. If they are so concerned, why don't the go an open a business instead of complaining? Oh, because it is easier to complain?
You are such an idiot. Steve would not tell you to jump off a cliff, he would gussy it up, build a nice space, and charge you for the opportunity. How dumb do you have to be to not understand the basic of cult mentality. It is no fun if you can't make people pay to be abused.
Make magazine obviously does the same at a more accesible level.
In the end Byte's value was that it provided reliable reviews and use cases computers, not based on OS, but on need. Be it Unix, MS Dos, CPM, of Mac OS, Byte honestly looked at what could and could not be done on th machine. It did not shy away from technical detail. Most of this has moved on online to sites such as Tom's Hardware.
We hear that people just sit around and use the internet without buying anything. I don't see this. I see people sitting around and studying, often not using the internet, taking space, without buying anything. Mostly what I see is people getting coffee to go. The only time I have been to a starbucks when there are no seats is during a widespread power outage after a storm. Even so people did not linger for hours.
I like firms that give me a simple deal. Starbucks has never been this way. Even the Starbucks card, which should be useful for more than wifi, is not useful at the Starbucks branded outlets. How Lame.
On every page I have looked at, the reader has worked wonderfully. It may be the feature, along with clicktoflash, that moves me to safari.
Saying this will never work over the long haul is like saying the Camino will never work because it includes a default flash blocker or Firefox will never work because there are too many easily installed plugin to block ads. It is a web feature, apparently an open source web feature, and browsers that want to focus on user experiences will implement it as a default feature, just like pop up blocking. Browsers that do not implement will show themselves as front ends for advertisers, not browsers for users.
There are issues. The readers removes the branding from the site. This could be considered bad. But people will use for the same reason that some choose to use ad blocking. The articles spread out over 10 pages, with long waits for ads to load between pages, and infected ads, will give some cause to bypass the predefined interface. Like other tech, websites will adjust. After all, websites serve the customers, not the other way around.
This was what MS did in the days prior to the widespread internet. It provided software, only some of which was purchased, that could be freely installed on business machines. This provided an alternative to Unix hardware and software, all which had to be paid for, often at what we would now consider exorbitant prices. Of course, there were things that MS stuff could not do. We have gone full circle in that MS now wants $500 for software, while Apple is selling software for $30, and most stuff for Unix is free.
What people want is service, the technical details are of little concern. I can change any song into a ringtone for my iPhone. The fact that it is a fake m4a instead of an mp3 is of no concern. What is of a concern is that ringtones have never cost me a thing on the iPhone. If I am looking at $100 for a fake copy of MS Office, and $300 for MS Windows that will constantly hound me to prove that it is a legitimate copy, then perhaps running a copy of chrome with Google hosting all my documents is a rational thing to do. We can complain that it old tech, but it is only the early adopters that a fetishizing new tech enough to actually spend huge amounts of money on it.
Here is the thing about kids using computers in schools. It allows the school to model all the different things one can do with a computer. Not just write papers, but read books, use interactive maps, simulate scientific principles, analyze data, visualize data, observe graphical changes as underlying equations change, and collaborate on activities. In the absence of this molding, all kids know who to do with computers is play games and go to facebook. I am not too big to admit it. I do many useful things on computer because the adults modeled the behavior for me. They were not playing games, they were writing code, writing papers, analyzing data, and the like.
For the most part, parents will buy their kids stuff, and I am talking about parents with not much money. $200 cell phones, $200 shoes, cars, the fun stuff. There is a mentality that anything that isn't a toy, such as pencil, paper, school clothes, should be bought by the school. But we keep saying that parents need to be involved in their child's education, and one way to do this is to make them spend a grand, which might make them interested in what the child is doing.
I mean, for a phone the least important spec is how fast the CPU runs. Since phone use is much more graphical, I am more interested in what the GPU is doing.
And the university gets much of it's product for free. Many of the professors cover their own salary through grants, the university only provides an office and work space. If the prof buys equipment, the university demands a cut of the grant in exchange for allowing the prof to buy the equipment. Nature can do what it does for the price is commendable. We could have public domain research journals just like we could stop university from building wasteful spaces just so some rich guy can put his name on it.
Recall what the printer manufacturers did when everyone started taking digital pictures. They put memory slots in the printer and software that would one-touch print the various picture formats. This was nothing that technical people would use, we all had computer with photo editing suites and high end printers, but for the mom wanting to print pictures of the kids is was a great way to sell ink.
This is all that is happening now. Someone has some snaps on their smart phone or feature phone with email. They want to print it but they don't really want to mess with the computer. They don't have a memory card that will work with the old printer. They don't want to go the marketplace and download the app and set up the printer. So they email. It works. One touch plug and play printing. They use ink that HP sells.
The other context to this is that ten years ago houses were not networked the way they are now, and network kit was not so cheap. Ten years ago a card or box to network a printer wold be north of $200, and a networked printer would be north of $1000. Now HP sells a network ready printer for $100 and most houses have a ethernet port to plug it into.
Let take the television example. I can watch a TV show and have 18 minutes of commercials for each hour of TV. I can invest in significantly in hardware and record the show and then watch it later without commercials. Both of these may require significant cable bills. I can watch the show on hulu with five minutes of commercials per hour of TV show, commercials using bandwidth I pay for. Or I could pay that magical 1.99 and watch the show without commercials. Frankly I often go the commercial route, though sometimes I pay the 1.99. And frankly, I feel that 18 minutes, or even five minutes, of my time is worth more than $2.
Even with no damage, Florida tourism is suffering. There is no real reason why we should care that people are going to lose their jobs, as long as gas is cheap, so that is not an issue. The fishermen have no more or less right to the fish in the gulf than the oil people have to the oil, and the fish might like time to breed, so if all the fisherpeople no longer have work, that is nothing to worry about. Everyone is whining about the loss of oysters, but of course those oysters and artificially placed, not part of the natural process, so that is not an issue.
Sure some people will whine that they have been doing this for generations, and that they have a right to take from nature and others don't, but that solves nothing. It would be nice i the government might have some regulation so that all interests could share these resources, but we live in a free market economy. In such a state, those interest that are most desired by the public, in this case oil, take precedence over other interests. Unless we accept a socialist state in which resources are divided equally by the state, that is the poor with one fishing boat gets the same access to the gulf as the rich with a billion dollar rig, thes situation will remain what it is.
I think MS was targeting the business user, those with expense accounts, or otherwise spending other peoples money. Buy an item on an expense account and pocket the difference. Like MS office, I think MS hoped that the work habits would transfer to home shopping. Of course people tend to be more careful with their own money, and this sounds a lot like a rebate, which is why I never use it. I want a simple clear price, and not have to go through a complicated formula.
Of course with content delivered over the internet there are many recurring customers costs. There is the cost of delivering the signal, and capacity must be added as customers increase. The content provider must build capacity for maximum viewership, and let excess capacity stand idle for most of the time. The infrastructure to deliver the content to the user is owned by third parties and paid for by the person receiving the content. The third party prices internet access based on assumptions that the customer is not going use it that much, and when the do, as in the case of iPhone, has to re price to limit the use.
So, what we are looking at is a system that may or may not be able to handle 42 million people watching to find out who shot J.R. I can tell you Hulu cannot handle the viewers it has now. Netflix does a much better job, but it does such on the iPad, so there is room for improvement. I am just not sure how Apple is going to do this. It takes me well over an hour to download a 40 minute show in standard def from iTunes. Apple does not seem to be set up to deliver real time content.
Certain health and occupational risks have been known for quite a long time. For example, smoking was not just suddenly found dangerous in the 60's when the surgeon general of the US warned us that smoking would kill us, studies have been stacking up since the late 19 century. Likewise, the dangers of our industrial food supply have an equally long history. The most famous early work in called the Jungle, 1906. More recently is the 1987 Pulitzer prize winning book Diet for a New America.
The point is that we are very bad at risk assessment. We will not let our children walk the neighborhood because of the very minor threat of getting abducted(only about 60,000 kids are abducted by non family members, population US 307 million, 25% kids, 77 million kids...), but will feed them food that is guaranteed to increase their chance of cancer and diabetes. A parent will worry about cell phones and electrical cables near their house, while feeding their obeses kid hamburger2.
Chance of being kidnapped is a small fraction of 1%. Chance of a child being obese or overweight, about 33%.
The movie may be silly, but it proves that most of what we do to corporations is merely wrist slapping when we let them kill our kids.
I am not saying that the glasses are safe, or should be recalled. But if a parent feeds a child this toxic cancer causing mixture of chemical that McDonald's calls food, I hardly see how they can complain about a little paint that probably is not even above current standards. The fumes coming from the SUV is probably more toxic.
If phone calls were treated like electricity here is what would happen. You would get your first set of data very cheap, like a nickel a minute. If you did not use the phone a minimum amount you would be charged a usage fee. As you used more data, you rate would double at each increment. This will not happen because electrical companies actually want to provide some negative pressure on use, while phone companies want to provide the illusion of unlimted resources so they can upsell plans. Later they complain that people are actually using the purchased resources.
Here is my only gripe about the new ATT plans, and it might an unfair gripe as I have not seen all the details of the plan. They are essentially getting rid of the special 'iPhone' data offer, so they should get rid of all the individual iPhone plans. Like voice, they should just have a data plan that can be bought for individual phones or for family plans. Likewise they should just sell the individual or family metered texting. If a family wants 3 iPhones they should be able to buy the 2 gig plan and then the tethering on top of that. Buying three separate plans under the new rules is silly, as it is no longer a special unlimited iPhone thing.
I think the point of the article is that no one implements all HTML standards perfectly. Chrome is an immature browser based on one of the newer rendering engines, so we expect it to mature rapidly, but hardly can expect it to match it's cousin Safari in most areas, thous we expect it would in a short time.
Second, why is Sprint 4G so slow? And they are not cheap either. Neither is T-Mobile. I remember when they would charge $45 for hot spot acess.
And third, I wish cricket would sell a box for home internet. I am surprised that their speeds are so good. Kind of makes you wonder if the tests are totally wack. The lame wireless carriers, ATT and Cricket are on top. In any case, for $40 unlimited you can't beat the deal. I would switch from DSL to them.
So I am thinking why do I care who is better at spelling bees than someone else. Sure it is more than memorization, it requires an understanding of language, but does that get the product designed? I think nat.
In any case I suspect there is one reason, I suspect the main reason, the article did not list. Language skills. While many in the US speak, at most, 2 dialects of English, India has several languages. That means a person of Indian descent, likely has more than english spoken at home. And since many words in English come from other languages, knowing other languages help spell a word. Ego, the question of the words origin. That in itself would mean that any person not raised under the mantra that English is god's language will tend to win these con-tests.
Then of course many Adroid users in the US are on verizon, and I assume many have not opted to pay for the GB plan, so are allowed MB per day, which, since Verizon is the best network in the US, has very good bandwidth. It would not be very difficult, therefore, for a marketer to set up background apps to download huge Flash adverts that would generate page views and revenue. Google is not going to care because they get a cut of all ad revenue, and Verizon won't care because they get to charge for excess data. It is win-win.
And, we can't recall one of the oldest trick in the books, which was merely an annoyance so no one really cared. The reprogramming the modem to dial an especially expensive foreign number. In the case of the Android phone, the phone could be set to dial through one of those expensive long distance services like they have at airports, where a three minute call can be billed back to your cell account for $50. It is not in the article, but if I have control of the phone, then it makes sense that I would have control of the call. And who is being called on that phone. For sale to any investigative office that is willing to pay for it.
In any case we know that the HTML standard evolved to meet designers needs, and CSS was added, and now the web standard can provide the level of control that the OCD developers and PHB need, and so now we have much of the web written for the standard based browser, not IE. Even IE has changed.
This move from IE did not happen overnight, and, arguably, was not driven by developers. It was driven by users moving away from IE and those pages not serving standard based content losing page views to those that did. I understand that it took both good standard based tools and a shifting user base. Back in the late 90's I worked on IE only sites. It was pretty necessary to gain the conformity that users and the PHB expected. OTOH, many of those sites are now out of business.
I see the same thing happening with Flash. Other standard based solutions will be possible as the work is done to package typical solutions in a simple form that the average web developer can apply to general problems. Like IE, the average developer will not move from Flash until the PHB see a drop in users due to (allegedly) Flash poor performance on the sub-compact machine drives users to sites that gives them a more positive user experience.
I don't see Flash going away soon, but I do see the several use scenarios disappearing. In particular, I see video content wrapped in a Flash package going away. As soon as people figure out how to do obnoxious ads in HTML5, I see Flash losing significant market share.