Agreed. But the reality is that at some point Apple will change base hardware. Apple has never has any long term allegiance to a hardware platform. It will move to whatever hardware will let it run the software on pretty kit.
On the embedded device, however, I can see that certain further restriction might be necessary to allow the software to be more or less independent of hardware. To go back the commonly presumed impetus for this discussion, Flash does not seem to be hardware independent by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to have to be custom written for each platform, and features apparently come and go. Though the idea that Apple may have moved from ARM is likely untrue, that Apple wants to keep their options open, and that things like Flash closes options, is plausible. They keep the platfrom options open by closing the doors to proprietary interlopers.
I don't know if I would say that older systems were incapable of doing what people wanted to do. The newton, 17 years ago, over a few year period, achieved the ability to network, browse, and even had an external keyboard by which I could type any document or create a spreadsheet. At that time everyone was into fancy fonts, and how many colors could one add to a memo, generally making thing with no real content look important. The newton could not do that, so many people did not think it was worthwhile.
I think what many of the small devices lacked 10 years ago or so was reasonable expectations and the 'killer app' In 2000 many people had not grown up with computers. They did not grow up with the 'killer app' that makes the iPad a necessity, and that is widely available WiFi that makes constant internet access almost possible. They did not have social networking apps with friends whose status updated hourly.
Additionally, when one thinks about netbooks and iPad, etc, one must not think of a transition from PC to these devices. The reason why so many PDAs flopped is because they were marketed as replacement for the computer. They could not be. MS Office would never effortlessly transfer from a PC to any hand held device. In the WYSWYG fetish world that existed at the time, and still exists, everyone wanted a continuous user experience, and when such did not exists some felt let down.
No, the reason why the iPad can exist now is that everyone has grown up with phone, and the phone cannot provide the user experience that many people want. No matter what, one can't keep up with everything on such a small screen. We want to browse, we want to check email or facebook, and as much as these things should have been designed for any size screen, they were not. So while some will buy the iPad to replace a laptop, many will use it to replace a phone. What do we do on the phone? Text, read, browse, and, of course, use skype to make phone calls. So narcissistic people require a video camera, but this is something that everyone needs. Everyone complains that they have to pay a monthly fee for telephone use. When Apple gives them a solution, $20 a month data plan, and leaves out the phone so that we don't have to pay for voice, everyone bitches. No one is every satisfied.
I hate to be the one to say it, but everyone complains when their entitlements are taken away. Be it an astronaut, a teacher, a third generation military person, or an unemployed tea party activist, the bottom line is we all think our pork is valuable.
This does not mean that I don't agree with Armstrong, just that taxes have been the lowest they have been in a very long time(bush tax cut 10 trillion, plus the bush and obama recovery packages), and if we want the deficit to fall without tax increases, then some hard decisions are going to have to be made.
Exactly. Many people don't notice, and would be perfectly happy, not to have the flash sites where menus do unexpected things and objects float around and otherwise don't let you get anything done.
And fonts are so 1990. Most of us are so over being wowed by the fact that a site has 10 fonts that should have never been allowed to be on the same page.
About the only two things that most people see as useful flash is watch movies and, maybe, google finance and the like. For kids the flash games are important. Most users would be perfectly happy with the former in a non-flash wrapper, since the only reason it is to provide some primitive form of DRM.
But, really, without the movies flash could go away and many would never notice. Except, of course, for the ad agencies.
It is because they are often late to the party. Nearly every Apple product, at least since the iPod mini, has has designer packaging that seriously encourages the unpacking video. Such videos provides tons of cheap advertising. As a company that is trying to be more environmentally friendly, OEM packaging would be both cheaper and make greenpeace happier, but at a large loss of the package fetish crowd.
That MS is finally tapping into some of it's tens of billion of assets to make a pretty product seems more of a desperate attempt to save a otherwise failed product than a genuine attempt to create a bold product. If they would have done somthing like this for xBox, it might have had some meaning.
Also, for Star Trek, lack of sales due to pricing content for the rental rather than consumer market. Voyager, a not popular title by most measure, is $250-300. Alias, a much more popular series by the person who did the new star trek, can occasionally be had for around $100. Now that is 5 season instead of 7, but it is still a difference between $20 a season and $35 a season. For old shows, and shows that want to be sold, $1 or so an episode is the price. For older show like the original Star Trek, the market is hovering around 50 cents an episode. ST:TOS is around $200.
Even Farscape eventually got sold and came down in price to something mortals could afford. And you know what? I bought it. I admit I had rips or many episodes, but when I could get DVDs I did. I must say the price gouging, at least IMHO, turned my off the whole franchise.
Here is the point, as far as I see it. In the phone industry at the moment there is health competition. We have RIM, Google, Palm, and MS as distant runner up. One might say the iPod touch and and iPad form a monopoly, and I would in some way agree, as there are no products that are competing directly. I think the iPad would provide the only impetus for the suite, but I think
In GIMP, the everything is a separate window is a window. Unlike other modern interface, like IRIX, the hovering of the mouse does not select the tools windows. This means that two mouse clicks are necessary for such simple things as moving between a pen and erase. Since I forget that I need two clicks, I often have the wrong tool selected.
On topic, there have been some talk about if CS5 is worth the money. I am sure it is, but it is a little too expensive for me, and I am not even sure what I need to buy. If there was something for $500 that adobe would sell for basic development, and then add on packages, that would be great. But they have these complex $2K packages which are really a bit intimidating for someone that isn't sure what is needed.
Somewhat on topic in terms of Apple and Adobe. I can see why Apple does not want people to use Adobe tools. They are kind of dreadful and expensive. I recall when I used code warrior. At first it provided value, but then the price just kept going up. It became an issue. Xcode and Eclipse are pretty nice.
I replaced my newton with a Palm V. Good machine. I don't really know why I did not replace it with the m500, except I just got tired of the stand alone PDA concept. I suppose if they had released a Treo a few years earlier and managed to work with a major carrier, I would have bought one.
To think of it, the problem might be interoperability. Every one wants their proprietary standard for lock in. This works until the fickle consumer wants to buy the latest thing, or needs a specific feature. If a phone is not Exchange compatible, people don't want it. Or people are so scared of being not compatible with their other stuff, if it does not have the right brand on it they won't use it. Google does mostly use open standards, so it will work with most stuff, but people will still buy a google phone thinking the others will not work with gmail. Palm has a hard time competing in this environment, even if their stuff is better.
I am more interested in who still pays for cable, much less has a TV. I thought every had netflix, hulu, or bittoerrent, streamed through a computer, with and LED projector and a 120" screen. I suppose a few on/. might still watch sports and soap operas, which does require cable, but otherwise I can't imagine why anyone would pay for cable.
This is clearly an effort to give precedence to commercial enterprises and advertisers. Take a link farm. Nothing really there, so it does not require much power to serve pages. Pages will load quickly, and, coincidently, generate revenue for Google. For legitimate businesses, those that can afford network optimizations are exactly those that will also pay for ads. OTOH, web sites that provide useful services but are slow are going to, eventually, be left in the dust. More link farms, fewer useful services, a lamer google. Too bad MS can't put together a legitimate search engine.
I am not defending the license agreement, but there is a difference between a locking of C++ and a lockin of flash. In the later case the platform is controlled by a single company, that could, in principle, change the platform to injure Apple. In the form, no such risk is relevant.
This nuance was lost on people who claimed that an Apple was more of a vendor locking than Apple. With Apple you bought a system, and then were free to buy everything else from a universe, albeit a more limited universe, of vendors. Apple made sure the basics ran. With MS, you basically only had a choice on hardware, while everything else depended on repackaged MS software, which MS did not support.
Now for Apple to do the same thing as MS, they would have to limit software to C#, which they are trying to do. I think we all agree that it would be silly for Apple to allow the iPhone to become dependent on Flash, then have to make changes, or even pay a ransom, to Adobe in order to keep adobe from sabotaging the platform.
Again, not defending the license agreement, just refuting silly statements.
I feel it really depends on the available funding and teachers, as well as maturity of the student. 'Smart' kids can finish school early, but they don't necessarily have the self discipline to succeed in an environment where they are not being coached by an adult, being parent or teacher or whatever. For some kids, an extra year before college might provide time to grow up and become ready for rigorous work. In addition this year can be used to model how to succeed in college, especially in a natural science, math, engineering and architecture.
For the student in the last year of high school, at least those that are college material, they are mostly taking near college level courses, often for dual credit. of course the two problems with this system is that high school teacher does not, in many cases, have the freedom to grade on a college level, and most students are not going to apply the appropriate effort, as most students see the last year as a time to relax rather than engage in a big finish. As such I see the last year as a time to give them a preview of what is expected in college. Though the may be required in college, more college prep work may help the up to 25% freshman drop out rate.
Here is where the Mayor is on point. There are schools that teach to the college level, but these are mostly for the top 10% of the population. These schools are in urban and suburban districts, and are cost effective because students are bussed in from 20 miles away to make up the student body of much less than 500. These will only serve the highly motivated student who will live on six hours of sleep due to homework and travel time. The question is how we deliver comparable opportunities to the local school. This requires money and trained teachers. Equipment like $50,000 computer labs with large format and 3D printers, pro 3D rendering and design software, pro circuit and aerospace simulation software. A grand of consumables per student. Funding these for the top 10% of motivated students is easy. Funding these for everyone else requires a redirection of funds. But without the funds, kids that do not have parents of friends with such equipment simply aren't ready for the required work.
Except that billing for this increases costs and causes additional friction. For example, if one has a pay per minute, then things like missed calls, default long answering machine messages, and the like becomes a problem. A firm then has to pay a person to speak with all customers who are willing to take half an hour out of their day to save a dollar. Since no money is being made on these customers, other customers have to make up the difference.
With unlimited data plans there is no issue of accidently hitting the browser and downloading a page. Or an email that is crafted to trick a user into opening a web page. Or a long email that incurs above average data cost. All of these lead to increased customer service costs which are not paid by the complaining customer, but by other customers.
The solution then is a cap that large enough for most people, but will stop the few customers that take the situation to excess. For instance, if the average iPhone user transmits 400MB of information, the cap users at 1GB per month. I actually would support such caps in exchange for tethering. That would allow a user about 3 MB for every hour of every day. This would not be enough to stream a movie, but would be enough to browse.
Here is the best example. Anything remotely sexual is taken off of the video feed site. OTOH, underage kids beating the shit out of each other are left up.
General personal computer
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I do not see the general personal computer as something that is sacrosanct. it is a solution to a problem. We might as well be crying that the car sells more than the carriage, or the laptop sells more than the desktop, or that the ice box has been replaced by the refrigerator. All of these went from simple open designs to more complex closed designs. We seemed to appreciate such a process because the products are cheaper and often more reliable.
I recall when I went from a radio kit I built myself to a store bought fully assembled receiver. Or when I went from a printer interface box I hacked to make work with my computer, to a plug and play printer. While I am as capable of as much romanticizing of the past as anyone else, there is always a new product to build, so I do not have to whine about how the good old days are gone.
In this case the GPC is evolving and there is no reason why it can't be replaced by something else. Many of us do not have stand alone Hi Fi stereos in our house, hand built of otherwise. Many of us do not have stand alone VCR or DVD players in our house. We might have one to rip DVDs, but generally the content is on a stream. The purpose of Apple was to replace old stuff with better new stuff, in the case at the time a terminal with a stand alone computer. Many people mistake this replacement for an open system with a closed system, and in part the power of Apple was that one had access to the CPU itself. But the real power of the Apple was that everyone could have a computer, even if they were not able to get a mainframe. The power of the Mac was that everyone could use a computer even if they did not know how to use a command line, though not everyone could afford it, but that is still the case. The Mac was 'closed', but that was not the point. If the iPad works, which I don't know if it will, the tablet idea has so far been a failure, it will be because hid even more complexity from the user, so that even more people can do what most people use a computer for, which is, of course, to look at p0rn, assuming the content is not in flash.
Re:But Apple is known for screwing up from time to
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The WiFi is not surprising. On the first iPhone getting a signal was a problem, at least for me. On my current Apple laptops, the WiFi is sometimes lost and only a shutdown will fix it. That the iPad has flaky wifi was to be expected. That the 3G is, maybe, indefinitely delayed is not a surprise either.
In terms of the intense inspection, that is absolutely true, but such inspection is valid. Apple sets themselves up as the gold standard in consumer electronics. Not only do competitors analyze every device to see what they can reverse engineer and implement, they also must find flaws to that they can continue to sell their own kit, which is often inferior. For instance, everyone says how closed the Apple laptop is, but no one mentions that even with all the expandability of a PC laptop, one cannot get a trackpad as efficient as the standard apple trackpad. OTOH, when Apple shipped with the dreaded puck mouse, it was easily replaced.
In fact Apple is in a precarious position, reminiscent of the newton. Most of the sync for the electronics line is through iTunes. iTunes is a program primarily concerned with DRM, and therefore design decision tend to be focused on limited transfer information rather than letting the user get to information. This means that I cannot back up my iPhone on two machines. I am arbitrarily limited because people are afraid I am going to steal music. This was an issue, in a different fashion, on the Newton. The Newton was a very well connected machine, it had full network capability. But there was a sense that it should not be too integrated. The same fear of too integrated seems to be evident on both machines.
Apple has solved this in terms of PDA. All PDA data is not synched over Mobileme, or other services, and is outside of iTunes. User generated content can be moved through other venues as well. What we see here though is that users are going to create various other content, such as office documents, and we are being thwarted by the iTunes DRM watch. If they do not fix this quickly, then the potential of using the iPad as a content generation platform will be destroyed. At the very least Apple must implement a native bridge between the WebDAV extension that iPhone OS. The MobileMe app is not sufficient. Apps must have the ability to access the filesystem. If the file format for iPhone iWork apps is different from iWork applications, then they have made a grave error indeed, just like they did with Newton.
I like the idea of an external keyboard. The Newton had this and worked loads better than anything with a built in keyboard. I hate the idea of wasted real estate on a built in keyboard, when bluetooth keyboards are a dime a dozen.
The web page problem is a curse created by overzealous web page designers. I cannot fully use my bank, amazon, and many other sites because they default to these useless mobile sites that have no functionality. Why don't they let the user choose what site to go to. For the most part, I have no problem using properly designed regular sites on my iPhone. They should at least give us a choice and set a cookie for the choice, rather than making us suffer. The iPad just exacerbates the problem. Web designers. Give up some control in exchange for user happiness.
As far s flash, I run with flash off most of the time on my Mac. Almost never do I need to enable flash, just when I am watching videos. Of course so many/. ads are flash I can see why this would be a bummer.
As long as I am at it, some of the complaints seem silly. Flash. It is heavy. Battery charging. On charging, it seems to be the same as the MacBook air, which is a dense battery in a small machine. There is just so many electrons one can push, and heat to dissipate. It does need to charge overnight. The fact that they got it working with high powered USB is significant. That is won't work with cheap machines that cut costs, and USB ports, has nothing to do with the iPad.
Another thing to consider is that there are epochs in Dr. Who. In the beginning it was a kids show. Eventually it moved into a more serious vein with layers of writings. The companions go from eye candy to genuine parts of the show. The show has survived by adapting to contemporary expectations.
Therefore to get a feel for the history of the doctor simply requires a sampling of episodes. While some would say there are very good episodes(in many City of Death is a classic, but that is because of Lala Ward), most episodes are at the minimally acceptable quality level.
If one has netflix, there are many episodes available there and for streaming. Realize on thing. The format of the episodes have evolved. Episodes are now one or two 50 something minute segments, instead of 2-5 20 something minute segments. This effects the act breaks and cliff hangers. It also means that we no longer have the third or fourth episode in a series that is mostly there for the third or fourth episode. Also, the longer format allowed for more careful story telling, somthing that many contemporary persons do not appreciate.
I agree with you. I am angry that MS makes everything so hard to use. I am trying to restore my legally purchased of XP right now. It is telling me I can't because it can't find the proper credentials. This is why Apple is my primary product. I never run into a situation where I can't upgrade or use my computer because apple all of the sudden decides it is invalid. I recall the problems with WGA and some issues I have had with Ms Windows Security Center because of a virus made my compute look like it was not in the western world.
I also agree that people who want a more open system should not buy an Apple. Despite what so many on/. believe, there is no law that says we must have an Apple. There is no law that says we must have MS. We can buy other stuff. It it like trainers. If you want Nike, buy it. Otherwise buy something else. If you do buy an Apple, quite whining like a baby. No one made you do it. Seel the machine on ebay if you don't want it. I see a 64GB for $850.
And no corporation can move us anywhere. We have McDonalds because people want cheap food, even if it destroys our environment and our health. We have Walmart because people want more stuff, even it means millions of people working at sub living wages. Take responsibility for you own actions, and stop blaming others.
I agree that core competencies should not be ignored. However, this rule should be modified if one is going to have a innovative business that lasts more than a few generations. We see this with 3M, IBM. MS is running on inertia, and games may be what it going, if it can really make this a long term prospect. The America car manufacturers were so worried about core competencies that they have made an honest profit in 25 years.
Apple has to keep a little ahead of everyone else. At first it was a relatively open computer that did what no one else could at a good price. Then it was an expensive closed computer that could do what no other computer could. Then it was desktop publishing. Then it was making movies. Now it is integration.
Apple is no longer more than 18 months ahead of Windows, and does not provide general system support above Linux. There was a time when the lead was 3 to 5 years, due to hardware costs and the lack of sophistication in MS Windows. Soon the lead may be measured in months.
Apple may not be in computers, at least as we know them, in 5 years. What is will be in is integrating various devices across the network. Search will be part of this. The hardware will be whatever is useful.
I will add one more thing to this. One problem with college calculus is it get tied up in epsilon-delta definitions, defining reiman sums, and such. Likewise, statistics gets bogged down in derivations of distributions. Then we have sets, fields, etc. If one wants to become a mathematician these things are important, but they are not necessarily critical to doing applied math.
My suggestion would be this. Perhaps there is a field that has become very interesting. Perhaps one wants to solve circuit, or transform geometry or write a physics engine for video games, or look at probability for card games or horse races. Perhaps learning calculus, or linear algebra, or statistics to solve those problems will give a framework that leads to success.
Pretty much one can walk into any college bookstore and any of the books, if used religiously, will teach the basics. For more knowledge, hire a tutor. The art and science of teaching basic college math is so well known the only thing changes is the density of pictures so that the illiterate does not feel so overwhelmed.
But, again, there may be other ways. The cartoon guide to Physics and Statistics goes a long way to teaching math. A high school calculus based physics book will may teach you calculus. So don't get fixated on a proper method and have some fun with it.
Like the no-call lists, I am sure companies would like this to get a formal definition of what is allowed and what is not. OTOH, it is unclear to me that any of the companies are concerned about privacy. Maybe the ACLU might be able to get some protective language in there. With online privacy, though, if the EFF does not support I have to assume it is astroturf, especially with Google supporting it.
To a point I agree with you. A wealthy person can easily take an unpaid internship. A wealthy person can also sit around and work at Starbuck's living off their trust fund. Or can just live a modest life off their trust fund without working. Such things do happen.
Sometimes the only way in for a person that was not born into a situation is through an unpaid internship or a low paid contract position, both of which are being limited to corporate abuse. This does not mean that they are useless, or that such deal is bad for a person who is not upper class.
For instance I volunteered my software development services in high school. It gave me experience writing production code, and every week there was a list of bugs and new features. This lead to some low paid positions, which lead to higher paid positions. I would have more money working at fast food, but that would not have taught me the skills I now use. Did I have to give up a lot to make this happen? Sure. Did my family have to sacrifice? Absolutely. I look at kids with thier $400 tennis shoes and their $300 media players and their cars,and know that thye deserve it because they work 30 hours a week after school for it. But what are they learning? To maximize short term profit? That sacrifice is worthless? What ever happened to dream that if we work had and sacrifice now, and get our degrees in math or science or engineering, the world will open up to us in the future. Now it is like if I can't buy my pair of Nikes,or my iPod, or upgrade my hard drive, life just is not worth living.
The reason that many products, specifically Linux, have not value in the consumer market is that there is no connection between the consumers wallet and the content provider. Everyone on/. may disagree, but as a software developer and a writer I expect to get paid. Maybe not huge amounts, but I need money to live and buy toys.
Not everyone wants cheap content. For those that do there are many different venues. The people that the WSJ is aimed at does not live in a world of cheap content. In fact, like doctors, they want over priced everything so they can justify their overblown salaries.
As far as ads, one thing with the iPad are ad free publication that may be cheaper than even a subscription. This is value. Another thing with ads is that they do pay for the content, and are in fact useful to many people. An individual may say that they ads are useless to them, and if that is true then the publisher does not really care if you read the journal or not. In most journals I read, the ads are educational. The local newspaper is still relevant because it connects consumers and products. So while ads on the computer are getting a bit out of line, they are not horrible. Even on netflix, where they want to spend five minutes talking to me about birth control, I just turn down the volume in that window and read something.
We really don't know what the ad and price model for the iPad is going to be. I can tell you that I would rather have the iPhone than anything with flash as it does block the ads. Since I like to get paid for I do, I don't have a moral bias against others getting paid for what they do, and therefore do not have a moral bias against ads. I know many people would not help to lift a finger to help others unless there was payment involved, but whose wallets close when anything expenditure is expected from them.
In any case, it looks like content may be expensive on the iPad, but as is said, that does not mean that one can't browse the web as normal. One might even think of become a creative agent rather than just someone who complains all the time. It is not hard to set up an ad free website that delivers original self funded content.
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On the embedded device, however, I can see that certain further restriction might be necessary to allow the software to be more or less independent of hardware. To go back the commonly presumed impetus for this discussion, Flash does not seem to be hardware independent by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to have to be custom written for each platform, and features apparently come and go. Though the idea that Apple may have moved from ARM is likely untrue, that Apple wants to keep their options open, and that things like Flash closes options, is plausible. They keep the platfrom options open by closing the doors to proprietary interlopers.
I think what many of the small devices lacked 10 years ago or so was reasonable expectations and the 'killer app' In 2000 many people had not grown up with computers. They did not grow up with the 'killer app' that makes the iPad a necessity, and that is widely available WiFi that makes constant internet access almost possible. They did not have social networking apps with friends whose status updated hourly.
Additionally, when one thinks about netbooks and iPad, etc, one must not think of a transition from PC to these devices. The reason why so many PDAs flopped is because they were marketed as replacement for the computer. They could not be. MS Office would never effortlessly transfer from a PC to any hand held device. In the WYSWYG fetish world that existed at the time, and still exists, everyone wanted a continuous user experience, and when such did not exists some felt let down.
No, the reason why the iPad can exist now is that everyone has grown up with phone, and the phone cannot provide the user experience that many people want. No matter what, one can't keep up with everything on such a small screen. We want to browse, we want to check email or facebook, and as much as these things should have been designed for any size screen, they were not. So while some will buy the iPad to replace a laptop, many will use it to replace a phone. What do we do on the phone? Text, read, browse, and, of course, use skype to make phone calls. So narcissistic people require a video camera, but this is something that everyone needs. Everyone complains that they have to pay a monthly fee for telephone use. When Apple gives them a solution, $20 a month data plan, and leaves out the phone so that we don't have to pay for voice, everyone bitches. No one is every satisfied.
This does not mean that I don't agree with Armstrong, just that taxes have been the lowest they have been in a very long time(bush tax cut 10 trillion, plus the bush and obama recovery packages), and if we want the deficit to fall without tax increases, then some hard decisions are going to have to be made.
And fonts are so 1990. Most of us are so over being wowed by the fact that a site has 10 fonts that should have never been allowed to be on the same page.
About the only two things that most people see as useful flash is watch movies and, maybe, google finance and the like. For kids the flash games are important. Most users would be perfectly happy with the former in a non-flash wrapper, since the only reason it is to provide some primitive form of DRM.
But, really, without the movies flash could go away and many would never notice. Except, of course, for the ad agencies.
That MS is finally tapping into some of it's tens of billion of assets to make a pretty product seems more of a desperate attempt to save a otherwise failed product than a genuine attempt to create a bold product. If they would have done somthing like this for xBox, it might have had some meaning.
Even Farscape eventually got sold and came down in price to something mortals could afford. And you know what? I bought it. I admit I had rips or many episodes, but when I could get DVDs I did. I must say the price gouging, at least IMHO, turned my off the whole franchise.
Here is the point, as far as I see it. In the phone industry at the moment there is health competition. We have RIM, Google, Palm, and MS as distant runner up. One might say the iPod touch and and iPad form a monopoly, and I would in some way agree, as there are no products that are competing directly. I think the iPad would provide the only impetus for the suite, but I think
In GIMP, the everything is a separate window is a window. Unlike other modern interface, like IRIX, the hovering of the mouse does not select the tools windows. This means that two mouse clicks are necessary for such simple things as moving between a pen and erase. Since I forget that I need two clicks, I often have the wrong tool selected.
On topic, there have been some talk about if CS5 is worth the money. I am sure it is, but it is a little too expensive for me, and I am not even sure what I need to buy. If there was something for $500 that adobe would sell for basic development, and then add on packages, that would be great. But they have these complex $2K packages which are really a bit intimidating for someone that isn't sure what is needed.
Somewhat on topic in terms of Apple and Adobe. I can see why Apple does not want people to use Adobe tools. They are kind of dreadful and expensive. I recall when I used code warrior. At first it provided value, but then the price just kept going up. It became an issue. Xcode and Eclipse are pretty nice.
To think of it, the problem might be interoperability. Every one wants their proprietary standard for lock in. This works until the fickle consumer wants to buy the latest thing, or needs a specific feature. If a phone is not Exchange compatible, people don't want it. Or people are so scared of being not compatible with their other stuff, if it does not have the right brand on it they won't use it. Google does mostly use open standards, so it will work with most stuff, but people will still buy a google phone thinking the others will not work with gmail. Palm has a hard time competing in this environment, even if their stuff is better.
I am more interested in who still pays for cable, much less has a TV. I thought every had netflix, hulu, or bittoerrent, streamed through a computer, with and LED projector and a 120" screen. I suppose a few on /. might still watch sports and soap operas, which does require cable, but otherwise I can't imagine why anyone would pay for cable.
This is clearly an effort to give precedence to commercial enterprises and advertisers. Take a link farm. Nothing really there, so it does not require much power to serve pages. Pages will load quickly, and, coincidently, generate revenue for Google. For legitimate businesses, those that can afford network optimizations are exactly those that will also pay for ads. OTOH, web sites that provide useful services but are slow are going to, eventually, be left in the dust. More link farms, fewer useful services, a lamer google. Too bad MS can't put together a legitimate search engine.
This nuance was lost on people who claimed that an Apple was more of a vendor locking than Apple. With Apple you bought a system, and then were free to buy everything else from a universe, albeit a more limited universe, of vendors. Apple made sure the basics ran. With MS, you basically only had a choice on hardware, while everything else depended on repackaged MS software, which MS did not support.
Now for Apple to do the same thing as MS, they would have to limit software to C#, which they are trying to do. I think we all agree that it would be silly for Apple to allow the iPhone to become dependent on Flash, then have to make changes, or even pay a ransom, to Adobe in order to keep adobe from sabotaging the platform.
Again, not defending the license agreement, just refuting silly statements.
For the student in the last year of high school, at least those that are college material, they are mostly taking near college level courses, often for dual credit. of course the two problems with this system is that high school teacher does not, in many cases, have the freedom to grade on a college level, and most students are not going to apply the appropriate effort, as most students see the last year as a time to relax rather than engage in a big finish. As such I see the last year as a time to give them a preview of what is expected in college. Though the may be required in college, more college prep work may help the up to 25% freshman drop out rate.
Here is where the Mayor is on point. There are schools that teach to the college level, but these are mostly for the top 10% of the population. These schools are in urban and suburban districts, and are cost effective because students are bussed in from 20 miles away to make up the student body of much less than 500. These will only serve the highly motivated student who will live on six hours of sleep due to homework and travel time. The question is how we deliver comparable opportunities to the local school. This requires money and trained teachers. Equipment like $50,000 computer labs with large format and 3D printers, pro 3D rendering and design software, pro circuit and aerospace simulation software. A grand of consumables per student. Funding these for the top 10% of motivated students is easy. Funding these for everyone else requires a redirection of funds. But without the funds, kids that do not have parents of friends with such equipment simply aren't ready for the required work.
With unlimited data plans there is no issue of accidently hitting the browser and downloading a page. Or an email that is crafted to trick a user into opening a web page. Or a long email that incurs above average data cost. All of these lead to increased customer service costs which are not paid by the complaining customer, but by other customers.
The solution then is a cap that large enough for most people, but will stop the few customers that take the situation to excess. For instance, if the average iPhone user transmits 400MB of information, the cap users at 1GB per month. I actually would support such caps in exchange for tethering. That would allow a user about 3 MB for every hour of every day. This would not be enough to stream a movie, but would be enough to browse.
Here is the best example. Anything remotely sexual is taken off of the video feed site. OTOH, underage kids beating the shit out of each other are left up.
I recall when I went from a radio kit I built myself to a store bought fully assembled receiver. Or when I went from a printer interface box I hacked to make work with my computer, to a plug and play printer. While I am as capable of as much romanticizing of the past as anyone else, there is always a new product to build, so I do not have to whine about how the good old days are gone.
In this case the GPC is evolving and there is no reason why it can't be replaced by something else. Many of us do not have stand alone Hi Fi stereos in our house, hand built of otherwise. Many of us do not have stand alone VCR or DVD players in our house. We might have one to rip DVDs, but generally the content is on a stream. The purpose of Apple was to replace old stuff with better new stuff, in the case at the time a terminal with a stand alone computer. Many people mistake this replacement for an open system with a closed system, and in part the power of Apple was that one had access to the CPU itself. But the real power of the Apple was that everyone could have a computer, even if they were not able to get a mainframe. The power of the Mac was that everyone could use a computer even if they did not know how to use a command line, though not everyone could afford it, but that is still the case. The Mac was 'closed', but that was not the point. If the iPad works, which I don't know if it will, the tablet idea has so far been a failure, it will be because hid even more complexity from the user, so that even more people can do what most people use a computer for, which is, of course, to look at p0rn, assuming the content is not in flash.
In terms of the intense inspection, that is absolutely true, but such inspection is valid. Apple sets themselves up as the gold standard in consumer electronics. Not only do competitors analyze every device to see what they can reverse engineer and implement, they also must find flaws to that they can continue to sell their own kit, which is often inferior. For instance, everyone says how closed the Apple laptop is, but no one mentions that even with all the expandability of a PC laptop, one cannot get a trackpad as efficient as the standard apple trackpad. OTOH, when Apple shipped with the dreaded puck mouse, it was easily replaced.
In fact Apple is in a precarious position, reminiscent of the newton. Most of the sync for the electronics line is through iTunes. iTunes is a program primarily concerned with DRM, and therefore design decision tend to be focused on limited transfer information rather than letting the user get to information. This means that I cannot back up my iPhone on two machines. I am arbitrarily limited because people are afraid I am going to steal music. This was an issue, in a different fashion, on the Newton. The Newton was a very well connected machine, it had full network capability. But there was a sense that it should not be too integrated. The same fear of too integrated seems to be evident on both machines.
Apple has solved this in terms of PDA. All PDA data is not synched over Mobileme, or other services, and is outside of iTunes. User generated content can be moved through other venues as well. What we see here though is that users are going to create various other content, such as office documents, and we are being thwarted by the iTunes DRM watch. If they do not fix this quickly, then the potential of using the iPad as a content generation platform will be destroyed. At the very least Apple must implement a native bridge between the WebDAV extension that iPhone OS. The MobileMe app is not sufficient. Apps must have the ability to access the filesystem. If the file format for iPhone iWork apps is different from iWork applications, then they have made a grave error indeed, just like they did with Newton.
The web page problem is a curse created by overzealous web page designers. I cannot fully use my bank, amazon, and many other sites because they default to these useless mobile sites that have no functionality. Why don't they let the user choose what site to go to. For the most part, I have no problem using properly designed regular sites on my iPhone. They should at least give us a choice and set a cookie for the choice, rather than making us suffer. The iPad just exacerbates the problem. Web designers. Give up some control in exchange for user happiness.
As far s flash, I run with flash off most of the time on my Mac. Almost never do I need to enable flash, just when I am watching videos. Of course so many /. ads are flash I can see why this would be a bummer.
As long as I am at it, some of the complaints seem silly. Flash. It is heavy. Battery charging. On charging, it seems to be the same as the MacBook air, which is a dense battery in a small machine. There is just so many electrons one can push, and heat to dissipate. It does need to charge overnight. The fact that they got it working with high powered USB is significant. That is won't work with cheap machines that cut costs, and USB ports, has nothing to do with the iPad.
Therefore to get a feel for the history of the doctor simply requires a sampling of episodes. While some would say there are very good episodes(in many City of Death is a classic, but that is because of Lala Ward), most episodes are at the minimally acceptable quality level.
If one has netflix, there are many episodes available there and for streaming. Realize on thing. The format of the episodes have evolved. Episodes are now one or two 50 something minute segments, instead of 2-5 20 something minute segments. This effects the act breaks and cliff hangers. It also means that we no longer have the third or fourth episode in a series that is mostly there for the third or fourth episode. Also, the longer format allowed for more careful story telling, somthing that many contemporary persons do not appreciate.
I also agree that people who want a more open system should not buy an Apple. Despite what so many on /. believe, there is no law that says we must have an Apple. There is no law that says we must have MS. We can buy other stuff. It it like trainers. If you want Nike, buy it. Otherwise buy something else. If you do buy an Apple, quite whining like a baby. No one made you do it. Seel the machine on ebay if you don't want it. I see a 64GB for $850.
And no corporation can move us anywhere. We have McDonalds because people want cheap food, even if it destroys our environment and our health. We have Walmart because people want more stuff, even it means millions of people working at sub living wages. Take responsibility for you own actions, and stop blaming others.
Apple has to keep a little ahead of everyone else. At first it was a relatively open computer that did what no one else could at a good price. Then it was an expensive closed computer that could do what no other computer could. Then it was desktop publishing. Then it was making movies. Now it is integration.
Apple is no longer more than 18 months ahead of Windows, and does not provide general system support above Linux. There was a time when the lead was 3 to 5 years, due to hardware costs and the lack of sophistication in MS Windows. Soon the lead may be measured in months.
Apple may not be in computers, at least as we know them, in 5 years. What is will be in is integrating various devices across the network. Search will be part of this. The hardware will be whatever is useful.
My suggestion would be this. Perhaps there is a field that has become very interesting. Perhaps one wants to solve circuit, or transform geometry or write a physics engine for video games, or look at probability for card games or horse races. Perhaps learning calculus, or linear algebra, or statistics to solve those problems will give a framework that leads to success.
Pretty much one can walk into any college bookstore and any of the books, if used religiously, will teach the basics. For more knowledge, hire a tutor. The art and science of teaching basic college math is so well known the only thing changes is the density of pictures so that the illiterate does not feel so overwhelmed.
But, again, there may be other ways. The cartoon guide to Physics and Statistics goes a long way to teaching math. A high school calculus based physics book will may teach you calculus. So don't get fixated on a proper method and have some fun with it.
Like the no-call lists, I am sure companies would like this to get a formal definition of what is allowed and what is not. OTOH, it is unclear to me that any of the companies are concerned about privacy. Maybe the ACLU might be able to get some protective language in there. With online privacy, though, if the EFF does not support I have to assume it is astroturf, especially with Google supporting it.
Sometimes the only way in for a person that was not born into a situation is through an unpaid internship or a low paid contract position, both of which are being limited to corporate abuse. This does not mean that they are useless, or that such deal is bad for a person who is not upper class.
For instance I volunteered my software development services in high school. It gave me experience writing production code, and every week there was a list of bugs and new features. This lead to some low paid positions, which lead to higher paid positions. I would have more money working at fast food, but that would not have taught me the skills I now use. Did I have to give up a lot to make this happen? Sure. Did my family have to sacrifice? Absolutely. I look at kids with thier $400 tennis shoes and their $300 media players and their cars,and know that thye deserve it because they work 30 hours a week after school for it. But what are they learning? To maximize short term profit? That sacrifice is worthless? What ever happened to dream that if we work had and sacrifice now, and get our degrees in math or science or engineering, the world will open up to us in the future. Now it is like if I can't buy my pair of Nikes,or my iPod, or upgrade my hard drive, life just is not worth living.
Not everyone wants cheap content. For those that do there are many different venues. The people that the WSJ is aimed at does not live in a world of cheap content. In fact, like doctors, they want over priced everything so they can justify their overblown salaries.
As far as ads, one thing with the iPad are ad free publication that may be cheaper than even a subscription. This is value. Another thing with ads is that they do pay for the content, and are in fact useful to many people. An individual may say that they ads are useless to them, and if that is true then the publisher does not really care if you read the journal or not. In most journals I read, the ads are educational. The local newspaper is still relevant because it connects consumers and products. So while ads on the computer are getting a bit out of line, they are not horrible. Even on netflix, where they want to spend five minutes talking to me about birth control, I just turn down the volume in that window and read something.
We really don't know what the ad and price model for the iPad is going to be. I can tell you that I would rather have the iPhone than anything with flash as it does block the ads. Since I like to get paid for I do, I don't have a moral bias against others getting paid for what they do, and therefore do not have a moral bias against ads. I know many people would not help to lift a finger to help others unless there was payment involved, but whose wallets close when anything expenditure is expected from them.
In any case, it looks like content may be expensive on the iPad, but as is said, that does not mean that one can't browse the web as normal. One might even think of become a creative agent rather than just someone who complains all the time. It is not hard to set up an ad free website that delivers original self funded content.