I don't think the original MP3 players sucked. I think they suffered from what many other consumer devices did. Buttons that break, headphone jacks that were only held together by solder, with no stress relief. Apple did with media player what Sony did with cassette player. The built to a quality specification and not a price point.
I have owned and used several phones. The iphone is easier to use in many ways that any other phone that I have owned or used. Sure, to make a call does require four touches for stored numbers(slightly more if the phone is locked), but is is much easier to dial or look up new numbers. Again, it is build like a tank.
At the end of the day, Apple products tend to include features that are useful to people, rather than features that are useful to advertisers. This, above all, is why there is not Flash.
I don't really know why people are saying this is just a big ass ipod. After all, an SUV is just a big assed compact car, and although I don't understand why people who are not obese need such a vehicle, I don't confuse and Toyota Land Cruiser with a Toyota Corolla.
These processors are not necessarily going to be just for net books. Apple changes processor technologies periodically, and we would expect another change within the next few years. I think the switch to Intel was overdue, given that PowerPC was becoming an energy hog. Not how complex the desktops got, and how long we had to wait for a real notebook upgrade(G5 was never in a notebook).
Apple is moving the core OS X services to the iPhone and iPad and iPod touch. I would suspect any processor strategy would provide a series of increasing powerful products all based on the same technology, something that Intel may not be able to provide. If Apple can custom build a series of similar processors, the competitive advantage could be significant, and the reality distortion field will stay in place. Just imagine media player, phones, tablets, notebooks, desktops all running on the same basic OS. This kind of happens now,
Successfully launching a satellite is significant. Developing and building the resources for the acquisition of telemetry is significant. Storing the high resolution data is significant. I would have to disagree with anyone that says building these things from essentially nothing is not as significant feat as going to the moon or building the first microprocessor.
For those of us who really only car about what is happening now, the data from these era of satellites is proving invaluable.The Nimbus II data is being reconstructed and is providing one of a kind data sets. For those in data recovery, this will provide a lifetime of work and significant results if one is able to get the funding.
Well, I would say that there are certain crimes that do result in limitations of access to equipment. For instance, even the NRA grudgingly supports limiting supplying arms to felons, even though such impediments seem to violate the second amendment. Felons are not allowed to vote, even though one wonders how, say, a weed user is any more of a threat in the poles than a drunk.
I agree we have gone crazy thinking of ways to punish people, while pretending that we are somehow making the world safer. Ww pretty much spend all out time in fear of the most promoted enemies that we regularly let ourselves get outflanked by the people who genuinely have the ability and will to do us harm.
It is the security theatre that bothers me. For instance, last time I traveled my outbound trip was reasonable, as it always is. For some reason my home airport is rational. I was swiped for explosives, appropriately provoked, so to test for stress, and then cleared.
The return trip was pure security theatre. I carry my electronics on the plane so that no one has to search my checked bag. The TSA person made some sarcastic comment about what I was carrying, but did not really push beyond that. I did not have to explain myself at all. The reason we have TSA people, presumably, is so they have face tot face contact with the passengers and have a conversation to see if everything is kosher, not to create false positives by being sarcastic.
The it was to the body scanner. Evidently one has to hold perfectly still. In other words, if a terrorist wiggles, then the scanner is worthless. I went through twice, they could not tell anything because I have a hard time holding still, and so I had to be searched. The search would not have discovered an underwear device. BTW, the scanner requires much more time to get through than the metal detector, so one needs to increase the lead time from 30 minutes to 2 hours. All in all a useless machine only suited to perverts
As it is TSA is just a jobs program, not that I think that is a bad thing. I have respect for those people going to work everyday and doing what they can. In the US a reals day work now seems to be optional. For instance they could be organizing and attending tea parties while the rest of us working people pays their unemployment and disability benefits. But, if we are to have the TSA, we should fund it to a level that they can be well trained and genuinely effective.
On hand mail, search, chrome are free to the user products. Like broadcast TV or radio, if half the stuff is crap the one user is not going to complain all that much. For free we will use the half that we like, and generally ignore the fact that it is majority crap. The only issue is when someone comes up with a free product that has a slightly smaller percentage crap, or a product in which we pay a bit to get much less percentage crap.
OTOH, phones are not something we get for free. Even if we do not pay directly for the phone stack, we do pay for the phone. And even if Google has chosen to deny it has anything to do with the phones, the Google brand does appear on at least some phones. This means that we are now paying for a Google product, and as such have higher expectations.
Look at it this way. When everyone was getting MS products largely for free, no one cared that everything was junk. It did what we needed to do, and it was all but free. A lot of people do not believe this was the situation, but I knew of offices where there was one Office license for dozens of machines, and this was back in the very late 90's. It was only when MS began to forcefully insist that firms fully license products that everyone really began to complain about the MS crap and we saw movement.
Everyone I have seen is in blatant violation of the 'no hats' rule. I see no rules about pants or other clothing, so i don't see an issue with people taking off their pants. But do let us follow the rules and refrain from hats.
I don't know if it is a non story. It means Chrome is becoming a real browser. I suppose we now have Flash on the mac.
Now, if chrome does not have a flash blocker it will not be my browser. On the mac we have a browser with flash blocking built in.
I have been looking at chrome for one set of computers I run. The fact that it did not run reliably, i.e. Flash and Java were a big issue, meant that I can not move away from IE.
There are some things that Flash is good for. If Google had not made a big deal about Flash, then it may have been a situation in which Flash would have been a further push to move away from flash. OTOH, google does seem to like those little flash bugs that I see popping up all over my browser window. If I click them nothing happens, so I suppose they are the new incarnation of the 1X1 pixel picture bug. In that case, we suppose that google cannot live without Flash.
Perhaps it is because the phones are changing so much, but Apple does not seem to be keeping to their traditional 3 years of useful life policy. I had to replace my first gen iPhone because the 3.0 software, released only two years after the iPhone, ran like a dog. Unlike a general purpose computer, the new OS get pushed through the synch process so there is little hope of keeping it off.
With the iPad and probably a new iPhone leveraging much more computing power, I can imagine an iPhone 4.0 software that will also make the current iPhones run like dogs, and I would not be surprised to see such an OS by the end of this year. This would not be so much of an issue but most of us sign two year contracts, but the OS seems to make hardware obsolete in 18 months. I sure wish that Apple would let us pay 50 dollars for to reduce the contract terms to one year. That is what I used to with phones.
This is one of the times I get very conservative and traditional. I think there is still some value in raising men. When I was in school I was taught very directly that men have sex while animals and children fuck any thing that moved. While there are many that say boys will be boys, I think this attitude is what causes some of these problems. We expect boys to grope girls, because that is what boys will do, and for the girls just to take it.
The fact is that we have age of consent, and that below that age a person cannot consent to sex. A man who is capable of forming relationships with women, i.e two person over the age of consent, should not need to look for someone under the age of consent. If this is to be changed, the way to do it is to change the age of consent.
In any case, I would say that people need to learn that their actions have consequences, sometime extreme. For instance, there was a kid that held up a liquor store so he could get some money to go on a date and shot the clerk. Murder during a hold up, death penalty. Probably he had been so coddled his own life he never thought there were any penalties.
Lets take these hypothetical boys who think they can just go around and have sex with anyone who is not beating them off with a stick. No penalty in high school for it. No raising at home to make them into men. Go off to college the next year where people are drinking. Find a drunk girl and use her. She claims rape the next day. They find roofies in her system. The boy did give it to her, the liquor was spiked. No matter,the law say an additional maybe 20 years.
Fair, of course not, but men take responsibility for their actions. Boys complain that life is not fair, and are always justfying their unfortunate decisions, letting other pay for their mistakes.
Cyber bullying was part of it, as it is going to be in any contemporary case of chronic widespread personal assault by a group of organized criminals. One thing that is has not changed is that the authorities cannot do anything if the victim does not want to press charges, and the victim is not going to press charges if they feel like they themselves are going to be persecuted. This is especially the case in which an unpopular high school girl has had sex with popular boys. She will be told that she was delusional, no popular boy would have sex with her. Furthermore, since a underage rape victim is going to undergo the same humiliation common in the past with any single woman, few victims are going to come forward. The male teen age criminal is going to be considered a hero, while the girl is going to be considered a slut.
The other unfortunate thing is that parent of so-called popular kids think that this kind of behavior is acceptable. Equally unfortunate is that unpopular kids do not feel empowered to do something to solve the mean-kid problem, up to talking to the ones parents. Tell them what is happening, and ask for help. Since their is a cyber element, that is documentation. Show it, report it. If administration want to protect the popular kids, escalate. For instance, I recall in elementary there were a couple kids who harassed everyone, the stupid 5th grade teacher could not believe that these christians could do this. By the end of the year it became obvious that these kids were playing her. This is almost a similar simplistic case in which adults clearly have documentation, but, clearly, the parents of the criminals refuse to do anything about it. Parent should have access to their kids communications, and failure to monitor and stop criminal activity makes them accomplices.
Kids do need to figure out how to interact with peers. However, when we as adults are victims of a crime, we do not usually solve the problems ourselves. We call in help. We do need to teach our kids to the same, and when there is documentation like a twitter message, to show in, and force adults to act on it. This is not snitching, this is civilized behavior. We see this with the current crop of right wing wackos. A video on you tube threatening and elected official has landed someone in jail. Kids need to learn this lesson as well, before they actual take the it to the level of physical assault.
My libraries has popular videos. Frugal people go there and check out videos. There is no real educational purpose to it. I think it is ok because there part of what a library does is provide a cultural reference, which does include the popular tv shows and movies. Die Hard, for instance, provides a unique cultural path of America over the past 20 years or so.
Video games now serve that function and having them in libraries is probably long overdue. The only issue I see is which console to support. Unlike videos, where any DVD player will do, the library might indirectly provide promotion for a console. Also, as has been mentioned, video game makes are becoming increasingly rude about the second hand market.
Search engines are also about driving customers or marks to certain sites. Google came about because simple keyword identifiers were to easy to use to fool the search engines. Key word robots came about because the web go to big to manually organize on popular key words and such indexes missed the niches.
On one hand, MS did good because google is not very good for popular searches. Inevitably many of the front page results will include link farms, some delivering mal ware. OTOH, many people do not use google for such searches, as they know specific sites to go and find the information. What makes google useful is finding the new stuff. So what MS did wrong is put us back at the Yahoo stage of search engines, just updated to the contemporary bot situation.
I am not going to say anything about Bing. It is the default search engine on IE, and I don't like that. The good thing is that is has forced me to use bing, and for the most part it does not yet return the results I need. But Bing is young, and Google is broken, so maybe there will be a horse race and one of them will become fully functional,though I have no confidence in such a case.
But few people pay directly to use any of these. For example, people may have cable primarily to get Fox News, but until we have a la carte pricing it is unclear how many would pay for it specifically, which is the question here.
We are moving from an broadcast based model, in which there was no way to select who would receive a transmission, and little additional marginal cost when the number of listener/viewers went from10 to 1000, to a model in which access can be controlled and each user does increase costs. In the former advertising was the only way, in the later advertising may not make sense. Or it might be part of the solution as in newspapers and cable.
What is clear that consumers are going to be very sensitive to price, and when the economy is bad, and white men, the arguable base of fox news, are increasingly losing their jobs, this may not be the time to charge for something that might be able to survive on advertisers. At the very least, the two dollars spent on access for week is one less beer that the user is going to be able to afford.
A related study is Hunter-Gatherers Grasp Geometry. The conclusion of the article was the geometry learned by children in isolated culture was equivalent to the geometry learned by children in western cultures. In particular the results on the test given were all but the same for children, and only diverged in the higher level test given to adults. My interpretation is that while we must teach the formalized language of geometry, i.e. what is the formal difference between a quadrilateral and square, the concepts themselves are learned through the experience of a varied and active childhood.
Which is why I don't think most of the formal stuff that goes on in elementary school, at least prior to about 10 years old, is all that useful. If kids were more actively engaged, and not in desks, perhaps we could teach them the formalizations in middle and high school. Unfortunately not all kids, especially lower SE kids, have the opportunity to actively challenged in their non schools lives.
This may be funny, but how much did guns help the kids who were murdered, by which side is up for debate, at the so-called Branch Davidian at Waco. As much as the NRA wants us to believe they are protectors of the seconds amendment, they are really just maintaining the right for overgrown kids to keep their toys. They have caved in on the right of the average American to keep any kind of real defense.
In fact checking the gun box would merely tell the government who to take out first in the event that, according to right wing mythology, FEMA and the president were to declare martian law.
To be serious, and I am no defender of US atrocities, the two cases cited hardly indicate a trend. The first happened in a genuine time of war, and in this case people do go crazy. In the second case, it does not seem that any personal information was released, so while violating the spirit of the promise, it is hard to say if it violated the actual intention. When we talk about releasing personal information, at least in todays terms, we are probably taking about specifics on undocumented people in the US or same sex couples living together, or the like. I can go to the census web site and get a demographic profile of each region if I so wanted, so that is pretty much public information.
If this was a gecko based browser I might care. I still recall when Opera had no credible version for the Mac. Now everyone is saying how great they are because the have a browser that no one has seen for the iPhone. Opera does not even seem to have a built in flash blocker(not content blocking, I don't care about that), not useful for iPhone, but if I want a new browser I want it to do something different, not just be faster. My browser experience is just not that slow./. opens in a few seconds.
I have nearly all 11 screens full of relatively useful apps on my iPhone. Pretty soon I am going to have pick and choose. I certainly would not sub a browser.
And there can be more than one evil company. One can have MS, Google, and Apple all be evil.
I see spinning media, blu ray, CD, HD, as being used primarily for backup. Already the external hard drives I have are for backup, while anything I use regularly is solid state. Probably the small computers I buy will be solid state. I can see the time in five years when anything but a desktop computer will be solid state. The DVD player is about the least reliable and most power hungry part of on my laptop, so I can see wanting that to go as well.
I would also say the ADC on most laptops are likely pretty low fidelity. I concur that a good USB device would be best. There players that have a USB output built in. It also seems that my video camera has a audio input, and can transfer directly to the computer.
When I think of paperless, what I think of is most things that used to waste paper, like memos, policy manuals, and interdepartmental transfers not going over computers. For the most part this is happening. Brainstorming, sketches, reminders on post it notes(which by the way is a contemporary with the electronic computer) are going to stay. Think of this way. We have the electric typewriter for almost 100 years in some form, yet we still use a graphite stick, 400 year old technology.
The other thing is the speed in which the education system incorporates technology. There are people 40 and older, and some younger, who never used a computer until college or when they started working. Even today a student is lucky to get an hour or two on the computer. If we are going to have paperless office, then people must be trained to work problems using the computer. If every paper a student writes and every equation a student solve and every design a student does in on paper, then that is the way the student will primarily solve problem for life. However, if there are enough computer around so the student can write on the computer, set up in solution to equations in LaTeX, design in Sketchup or Autodesk, then we would see more people not using paper.
p.
Which does not mean paper will go away. I can do most of my work on the computer, but that does not mean that I don't have many doodles and equations and drawing on paper in addition to many paper notebooks.
When Apple joined the ebook market, however, they were able to take the same "we don't care about making a profit on content" attitude they have for music, and offer it to the publishers.
I don't know where Amazon makes a profit, but I doubt it is on 9.99 eBooks. What Amazon has done with books is what Walmart has done with so many other products. Sell some items at a loss, or demand other products be sold wholesale at a price that causes the manufacturer takes a loss, or only cover fixed costs. Even if it is Walmart or Amazon that is taking a loss, eventually consumer expect that product to be sold at the unsustainable low price and the model of the manufacturer is disrupted. This is not a bad thing, but we can't expect a manufacturer to go gladly to their demise.
The problem with Amazon, and Apple, is that they are both trying to tie publishers to exclusive contracts that meet their needs. Amazon wants to be a book seller so they can use books as, I suppose, a loss leader. Get people used to buying at Amazon, and join Amazon Prime. Apple want to be an agent so it can just take a cut of sales without having to worry about owning anything. I believe this is sort of what blockbuster did in the late 90's to drive out competition.
I don't know what a eBook should cost to keep everyone happy. I suspect it is around $15. At Apple that is what you will pay, but Amazon wants to discount, which means that Apple as an agent will sell very few books, as Apple products already have a Kindle reader. Unless the publishers add value to the book. The problem is ebook readers is that they are just books. People might pay more for added content. $15 or $25 for a book that is professionally read with images won't be so out of line.
The problem is that Apple and Amazon are not giving publishers a choice. Both want exclusivity with a model that benefits them. I don't think either are dictated wholesale price. It is the publishers that want to dictate retail price, and that has been, and should continue to be, illegal, at least in the US. I know Apple does dictate price for electronics in a sneaky way, but it is not like they are colluding with Dell to keep price high. They add value so that some people perceive the equipment is worth the cost.
I know it is fashionable to claim that all this stuff is new, and that all businesses have to do if move offshore, but nothing is that simple.
The value of stock information, AFAIR, have always been based on time. I can get all sorts of information delayed some minimum amount of time, but I have to pay to get near real time information. If I try to republish this information, I get sued. This has been the case forever. The powers that be are going to do everything they can to keep this status quo because this is how the houses generate a profit. By knowing things before the average person does.
The only way that the US would drive the financial industry out of the country is by allowing real time publication of data. It is true that some smaller businesses might be driven out, but what do we care if a few people and a few servers move to Costa Rica where they have to pay huge taxes so that everyone can get socialized health care.
The CD has not been the premium product for years. Recall that one reason the CD became so popular was that was smaller and would last longer than an LP. Some people say the CD sounded better, but there were certainly arguments when dealing with new quality recording played on good equipment. Many would say the LP was better. There were other losses like the shrinkage of cover art, but we dealt with the perceived losses and increased prices because the CD was simply so convenient. It was even more convenient than tapes. And the price was somewhat justified with increased content.
The MP3 meets all the measures we used to make the CD the premium product. The format is smaller and lasts indefinitely. The CD may sound better on quality equipment, but few people have full stereo systems anymore. I see no kids spending the thousand or so I did on a CD player, amp, and speakers.
The standard is an iPod.
The issue was not that the MP3 was not the premium product, I think it has been for at least five years, but that no one could figure out how to charge a premium price for it. So CDs have and will likely stay around in the way vinyl did not if for no reason that labels can make money off it and it is a two step process to copy. As long as computer have drives that can read the CD, the format will stay. When they go I do not see a revival as we have seen with LP, as the CD really has no acoustic advantages, and the recording on most CDs were not tailored the way there were on the LP.
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I have owned and used several phones. The iphone is easier to use in many ways that any other phone that I have owned or used. Sure, to make a call does require four touches for stored numbers(slightly more if the phone is locked), but is is much easier to dial or look up new numbers. Again, it is build like a tank.
At the end of the day, Apple products tend to include features that are useful to people, rather than features that are useful to advertisers. This, above all, is why there is not Flash.
I don't really know why people are saying this is just a big ass ipod. After all, an SUV is just a big assed compact car, and although I don't understand why people who are not obese need such a vehicle, I don't confuse and Toyota Land Cruiser with a Toyota Corolla.
Apple is moving the core OS X services to the iPhone and iPad and iPod touch. I would suspect any processor strategy would provide a series of increasing powerful products all based on the same technology, something that Intel may not be able to provide. If Apple can custom build a series of similar processors, the competitive advantage could be significant, and the reality distortion field will stay in place. Just imagine media player, phones, tablets, notebooks, desktops all running on the same basic OS. This kind of happens now,
For those of us who really only car about what is happening now, the data from these era of satellites is proving invaluable.The Nimbus II data is being reconstructed and is providing one of a kind data sets. For those in data recovery, this will provide a lifetime of work and significant results if one is able to get the funding.
I agree we have gone crazy thinking of ways to punish people, while pretending that we are somehow making the world safer. Ww pretty much spend all out time in fear of the most promoted enemies that we regularly let ourselves get outflanked by the people who genuinely have the ability and will to do us harm.
The return trip was pure security theatre. I carry my electronics on the plane so that no one has to search my checked bag. The TSA person made some sarcastic comment about what I was carrying, but did not really push beyond that. I did not have to explain myself at all. The reason we have TSA people, presumably, is so they have face tot face contact with the passengers and have a conversation to see if everything is kosher, not to create false positives by being sarcastic.
The it was to the body scanner. Evidently one has to hold perfectly still. In other words, if a terrorist wiggles, then the scanner is worthless. I went through twice, they could not tell anything because I have a hard time holding still, and so I had to be searched. The search would not have discovered an underwear device. BTW, the scanner requires much more time to get through than the metal detector, so one needs to increase the lead time from 30 minutes to 2 hours. All in all a useless machine only suited to perverts
As it is TSA is just a jobs program, not that I think that is a bad thing. I have respect for those people going to work everyday and doing what they can. In the US a reals day work now seems to be optional. For instance they could be organizing and attending tea parties while the rest of us working people pays their unemployment and disability benefits. But, if we are to have the TSA, we should fund it to a level that they can be well trained and genuinely effective.
OTOH, phones are not something we get for free. Even if we do not pay directly for the phone stack, we do pay for the phone. And even if Google has chosen to deny it has anything to do with the phones, the Google brand does appear on at least some phones. This means that we are now paying for a Google product, and as such have higher expectations.
Look at it this way. When everyone was getting MS products largely for free, no one cared that everything was junk. It did what we needed to do, and it was all but free. A lot of people do not believe this was the situation, but I knew of offices where there was one Office license for dozens of machines, and this was back in the very late 90's. It was only when MS began to forcefully insist that firms fully license products that everyone really began to complain about the MS crap and we saw movement.
Everyone I have seen is in blatant violation of the 'no hats' rule. I see no rules about pants or other clothing, so i don't see an issue with people taking off their pants. But do let us follow the rules and refrain from hats.
some people won't do for free money.
Now, if chrome does not have a flash blocker it will not be my browser. On the mac we have a browser with flash blocking built in.
I have been looking at chrome for one set of computers I run. The fact that it did not run reliably, i.e. Flash and Java were a big issue, meant that I can not move away from IE.
There are some things that Flash is good for. If Google had not made a big deal about Flash, then it may have been a situation in which Flash would have been a further push to move away from flash. OTOH, google does seem to like those little flash bugs that I see popping up all over my browser window. If I click them nothing happens, so I suppose they are the new incarnation of the 1X1 pixel picture bug. In that case, we suppose that google cannot live without Flash.
With the iPad and probably a new iPhone leveraging much more computing power, I can imagine an iPhone 4.0 software that will also make the current iPhones run like dogs, and I would not be surprised to see such an OS by the end of this year. This would not be so much of an issue but most of us sign two year contracts, but the OS seems to make hardware obsolete in 18 months. I sure wish that Apple would let us pay 50 dollars for to reduce the contract terms to one year. That is what I used to with phones.
The fact is that we have age of consent, and that below that age a person cannot consent to sex. A man who is capable of forming relationships with women, i.e two person over the age of consent, should not need to look for someone under the age of consent. If this is to be changed, the way to do it is to change the age of consent.
In any case, I would say that people need to learn that their actions have consequences, sometime extreme. For instance, there was a kid that held up a liquor store so he could get some money to go on a date and shot the clerk. Murder during a hold up, death penalty. Probably he had been so coddled his own life he never thought there were any penalties.
Lets take these hypothetical boys who think they can just go around and have sex with anyone who is not beating them off with a stick. No penalty in high school for it. No raising at home to make them into men. Go off to college the next year where people are drinking. Find a drunk girl and use her. She claims rape the next day. They find roofies in her system. The boy did give it to her, the liquor was spiked. No matter,the law say an additional maybe 20 years.
Fair, of course not, but men take responsibility for their actions. Boys complain that life is not fair, and are always justfying their unfortunate decisions, letting other pay for their mistakes.
The other unfortunate thing is that parent of so-called popular kids think that this kind of behavior is acceptable. Equally unfortunate is that unpopular kids do not feel empowered to do something to solve the mean-kid problem, up to talking to the ones parents. Tell them what is happening, and ask for help. Since their is a cyber element, that is documentation. Show it, report it. If administration want to protect the popular kids, escalate. For instance, I recall in elementary there were a couple kids who harassed everyone, the stupid 5th grade teacher could not believe that these christians could do this. By the end of the year it became obvious that these kids were playing her. This is almost a similar simplistic case in which adults clearly have documentation, but, clearly, the parents of the criminals refuse to do anything about it. Parent should have access to their kids communications, and failure to monitor and stop criminal activity makes them accomplices.
Kids do need to figure out how to interact with peers. However, when we as adults are victims of a crime, we do not usually solve the problems ourselves. We call in help. We do need to teach our kids to the same, and when there is documentation like a twitter message, to show in, and force adults to act on it. This is not snitching, this is civilized behavior. We see this with the current crop of right wing wackos. A video on you tube threatening and elected official has landed someone in jail. Kids need to learn this lesson as well, before they actual take the it to the level of physical assault.
Video games now serve that function and having them in libraries is probably long overdue. The only issue I see is which console to support. Unlike videos, where any DVD player will do, the library might indirectly provide promotion for a console. Also, as has been mentioned, video game makes are becoming increasingly rude about the second hand market.
On one hand, MS did good because google is not very good for popular searches. Inevitably many of the front page results will include link farms, some delivering mal ware. OTOH, many people do not use google for such searches, as they know specific sites to go and find the information. What makes google useful is finding the new stuff. So what MS did wrong is put us back at the Yahoo stage of search engines, just updated to the contemporary bot situation.
I am not going to say anything about Bing. It is the default search engine on IE, and I don't like that. The good thing is that is has forced me to use bing, and for the most part it does not yet return the results I need. But Bing is young, and Google is broken, so maybe there will be a horse race and one of them will become fully functional,though I have no confidence in such a case.
We are moving from an broadcast based model, in which there was no way to select who would receive a transmission, and little additional marginal cost when the number of listener/viewers went from10 to 1000, to a model in which access can be controlled and each user does increase costs. In the former advertising was the only way, in the later advertising may not make sense. Or it might be part of the solution as in newspapers and cable.
What is clear that consumers are going to be very sensitive to price, and when the economy is bad, and white men, the arguable base of fox news, are increasingly losing their jobs, this may not be the time to charge for something that might be able to survive on advertisers. At the very least, the two dollars spent on access for week is one less beer that the user is going to be able to afford.
Which is why I don't think most of the formal stuff that goes on in elementary school, at least prior to about 10 years old, is all that useful. If kids were more actively engaged, and not in desks, perhaps we could teach them the formalizations in middle and high school. Unfortunately not all kids, especially lower SE kids, have the opportunity to actively challenged in their non schools lives.
In fact checking the gun box would merely tell the government who to take out first in the event that, according to right wing mythology, FEMA and the president were to declare martian law.
To be serious, and I am no defender of US atrocities, the two cases cited hardly indicate a trend. The first happened in a genuine time of war, and in this case people do go crazy. In the second case, it does not seem that any personal information was released, so while violating the spirit of the promise, it is hard to say if it violated the actual intention. When we talk about releasing personal information, at least in todays terms, we are probably taking about specifics on undocumented people in the US or same sex couples living together, or the like. I can go to the census web site and get a demographic profile of each region if I so wanted, so that is pretty much public information.
I have nearly all 11 screens full of relatively useful apps on my iPhone. Pretty soon I am going to have pick and choose. I certainly would not sub a browser.
And there can be more than one evil company. One can have MS, Google, and Apple all be evil.
I see spinning media, blu ray, CD, HD, as being used primarily for backup. Already the external hard drives I have are for backup, while anything I use regularly is solid state. Probably the small computers I buy will be solid state. I can see the time in five years when anything but a desktop computer will be solid state. The DVD player is about the least reliable and most power hungry part of on my laptop, so I can see wanting that to go as well.
1-900-Beavis
I would also say the ADC on most laptops are likely pretty low fidelity. I concur that a good USB device would be best. There players that have a USB output built in. It also seems that my video camera has a audio input, and can transfer directly to the computer.
The other thing is the speed in which the education system incorporates technology. There are people 40 and older, and some younger, who never used a computer until college or when they started working. Even today a student is lucky to get an hour or two on the computer. If we are going to have paperless office, then people must be trained to work problems using the computer. If every paper a student writes and every equation a student solve and every design a student does in on paper, then that is the way the student will primarily solve problem for life. However, if there are enough computer around so the student can write on the computer, set up in solution to equations in LaTeX, design in Sketchup or Autodesk, then we would see more people not using paper. p. Which does not mean paper will go away. I can do most of my work on the computer, but that does not mean that I don't have many doodles and equations and drawing on paper in addition to many paper notebooks.
I don't know where Amazon makes a profit, but I doubt it is on 9.99 eBooks. What Amazon has done with books is what Walmart has done with so many other products. Sell some items at a loss, or demand other products be sold wholesale at a price that causes the manufacturer takes a loss, or only cover fixed costs. Even if it is Walmart or Amazon that is taking a loss, eventually consumer expect that product to be sold at the unsustainable low price and the model of the manufacturer is disrupted. This is not a bad thing, but we can't expect a manufacturer to go gladly to their demise.
The problem with Amazon, and Apple, is that they are both trying to tie publishers to exclusive contracts that meet their needs. Amazon wants to be a book seller so they can use books as, I suppose, a loss leader. Get people used to buying at Amazon, and join Amazon Prime. Apple want to be an agent so it can just take a cut of sales without having to worry about owning anything. I believe this is sort of what blockbuster did in the late 90's to drive out competition.
I don't know what a eBook should cost to keep everyone happy. I suspect it is around $15. At Apple that is what you will pay, but Amazon wants to discount, which means that Apple as an agent will sell very few books, as Apple products already have a Kindle reader. Unless the publishers add value to the book. The problem is ebook readers is that they are just books. People might pay more for added content. $15 or $25 for a book that is professionally read with images won't be so out of line.
The problem is that Apple and Amazon are not giving publishers a choice. Both want exclusivity with a model that benefits them. I don't think either are dictated wholesale price. It is the publishers that want to dictate retail price, and that has been, and should continue to be, illegal, at least in the US. I know Apple does dictate price for electronics in a sneaky way, but it is not like they are colluding with Dell to keep price high. They add value so that some people perceive the equipment is worth the cost.
The value of stock information, AFAIR, have always been based on time. I can get all sorts of information delayed some minimum amount of time, but I have to pay to get near real time information. If I try to republish this information, I get sued. This has been the case forever. The powers that be are going to do everything they can to keep this status quo because this is how the houses generate a profit. By knowing things before the average person does.
The only way that the US would drive the financial industry out of the country is by allowing real time publication of data. It is true that some smaller businesses might be driven out, but what do we care if a few people and a few servers move to Costa Rica where they have to pay huge taxes so that everyone can get socialized health care.
The MP3 meets all the measures we used to make the CD the premium product. The format is smaller and lasts indefinitely. The CD may sound better on quality equipment, but few people have full stereo systems anymore. I see no kids spending the thousand or so I did on a CD player, amp, and speakers. The standard is an iPod.
The issue was not that the MP3 was not the premium product, I think it has been for at least five years, but that no one could figure out how to charge a premium price for it. So CDs have and will likely stay around in the way vinyl did not if for no reason that labels can make money off it and it is a two step process to copy. As long as computer have drives that can read the CD, the format will stay. When they go I do not see a revival as we have seen with LP, as the CD really has no acoustic advantages, and the recording on most CDs were not tailored the way there were on the LP.