There is no doubt that we each have our area of expertise. That is not the, IMHO, the question. The question is what does a programmer, working in a contemporary setting, need to know. There are many things most of us do not need to know. We do not need to know how to write an efficient search or sort routine. We do not need to know how to manage memory. We don't even need to know how to manually debug a program.
Since so much is done for us by the languages and IDE we use, I think it is reasonable to ask us to know something about the process we program. Programming is deterministic, and this is why many of us do know much about statistics. OTOH, much of what we are asked to program has a statistical nature. Searches do not always call for exact matches. In word processing a texting predictive typing does not return exact results. In finance, we want stochastic predictors concerning where the market probably will be tomorrow. Exactness is so 2000's.
And then there is the issue that software developers should be able to, on some level, research, understand, analyze, and create a policy based solution to a problem. Ignore the fact, as stated in the previous paragraph, that not all these problems are going to have exact, or trivially reproducible solution, and we are still left with understanding the problem. The involves some knowledge of statistics and it's vagaries. Lack of knowledge can lead to massively incorrect understanding. For instance, late last year a paper was published comparing subjective and objective measures of happiness. in this paper is was shown that if, on average, a state in the US express subjective happiness, there was a good chance that state would be happy using objective data. Even my understanding of this is not great, and the explanation is oversimplified, but the basic idea is there. In fact, I look at the data and say that the correlation is not all that great, but I will admit the variables do show at least some limited correlation. The problem is that the popular media takes this graph, which is comparing two technique of measuring a variable, and does not order that variable or imply the variable has any inherent meaning, and uses the data to say that some states are "happy" and some states are "not happy". Clearly we don't expect journalist to have a sufficient graph of math or science to understand why they did was unethical, but we should have expectation that anyone above the level of code monkey would have such an understanding. Otherwise we are going to have programs that will claim to give us valid or otherwise reliable results, when in fact what we have is simply someone's faith that it is a good result, without any well know and well regarded method to back it up.
The iPhone can fit in my pocket, and I do read books on it. It does not trivially support the PDFs that I collect and would like to read. It is too small to read many things I would like.
The Kindle does not have WiFi, so I cannot read the content that I already subscribe to and have online access. I do not want a Kindle subscription to these as I want the online access, not just Kindle access.
The Mac Air and various small notebooks have the added bulk of a keyboard and trackpad, as well as the clamshell design. Presumably we can have something about few centimeters smaller in length and width, and at least a few millimeters thinner in a tablet. I don't know if we can have this for less than $1000 dollars, especially since most of us would want 64GB built in, unless Apple breaks tradition and gives us a SD slot.
Why is there hope for an Apple Tablet? Because it will likely be built for the end user as the customer, not a third party advertising or other revenue partner. It is like the iPod. Sure it was built for to generate revenue for iTMS, but that did not mean it was not very easy to rip albums and put our own music on it. Even now iTunes can be set to rip to MP3 instead of ACC. Movies are the same on the Touch and Phone. I have hope that tablet/reader will be represent an equal balance between content specifically licensed for the reader and user shifted content.
So I had a choice of using Netflix or some other rental service and getting a movie around the date of availability. Sure I had to wait for a movie to come to DVD, but that generally happens pretty quickly. It wasn't a huge deal. It feels good not to break copyright, and Netflix does compete well with free.
But now the rules have changed. Today it is a 30 day delay. Tomorrow it might 60 or 90. If one is not willing to buy a DVD, one does not get the movie. Purchase does not compete well with free.
Sure the studios have every right to do this, but it certainly opens holes for those who are not so dedicated to the copyright. Some might buy a copy of move, rip it, and then resell it to recoup some of the money. Or just give up on the whole trying to obey the law thing and just go back to downloading tapped copies the week before the film is released to theatres.
If applications can be added, then encryption of data can be done through a third party app. Someone, presumably, can write an appropriate exchange client and do whatever is needed. The only drawback is the built in apps will still be there, along with whatever security vunelerabilities exist along side their presence.
As much as many of us hate it, application signing is going to be a requirement on any corporate phone, or pretty much any phone that is not bought as hacking toy. I, for instance, expect my phone to work, and I am not willing for it to become compromised, especially since it is a communication device and tends to come into contact with many more networks than my laptop. As such if I were the boss I would not give any google phone to employees who would likely put any arbitrary maliciou software on it if it meant being sent the sports scores or soap opera updates on a regular basis. They don't care that they destroyed a phone, all they care about is that they were entertained for a minute.
Apple is arguably the last consumer GPC systems manufacturer. MS provide commodity software for commodity hardware, and has traditionally left integration issue to others. Therefore, Apple has some experience with getting components to work together, while MS only has limited experience on the Software side. I say limited because up to five years ago it did little work to make standards based software.
What MS did for most of it's life is produce good enough software for a good price. MS products were cheap enough, or could be acquired cheaply enough, so that more expensive systems made no economic sense for many common applications. What MS is doing now is trying to upscale the product. The software now costs more than the hardware, something that to many people seem unreasonable. Like IBM, MS now makes little sense for small groups. Once can buy a 3 macs for $5000, and keep them operating through 2 upgrade cycles for less than $1000, including iWork upgrades. The same three PCs of similar quantity might cost $2500, but each upgrade cycle is going to cost another $1500, assuming you don't buy the crippled OS, and don't upgrade the MS Office applications.
MS is trying to be the upscale systems manufacturer because that is where the money is. The problem is that if they compete on pice, then they alienate their hardware partners. So they have to compete on quality which means they are competing on product quality. In cell phones they have failed as the Nokia phones are just too good. In console they succeeded because they are better in many ways than the Wii, and the sony stuff is very expensive. In the tablet market we are back in the realm of alienating hardware partners and jeopardizing the MS Windows cash cow, so they are likely to be competing with Apple and Kindle, rather than the more commodity products.
I agree in that algorithms and graph theory is a big thing in computing right now. We are once again hearing 'connect the dots' on the news, so we can see that there will be work for those that do such work.
OTOH, I have done a lot of work with analysis, vectors, and euclidian spaces, all without a deep knowledge of sets.
Some courses are harder, and less useful, due to the students they are directed towards. It could be the discrete math is meant for maths majors, and therefore assume that level of dedication. A selected topics course can be more appropriate for a student who wants to learn math, but does not want to do math. There is value in listening to professors and peers. In college we all knew the classes where we learned, and those we did not, and it was not always about how much of a hard ass the professor was. Often it was about content. If it were me I would tempted to listen to advice and take the later.
The issue with the App memory is that it sounds like a design decision made in a desperate attempt to accommodate some flaw in design or reduce costs. It may or may not be a problem. On the iPhone there is no reason to separate data and code, such as in books or games. On the Nexus one it might be that data is always separate. In addition, developers can always spend more time optimizing code for size. And of course, most users are not going to need that many apps. Users will just have to be more picky about what apps to buy, rather than just doing what I do, which is spend a couple dollars on anything that looks cool.
My personal opinion is that is one of those silly decisions that sounds good in corporate, but end up causing long terms misary. I am thinking about the MS DOS decision on memory. Anyone remember the zoo of extended and expanded memory hacks? Sure it was fun to play with, but when work had to get done...
This nexus one is a good phone, and it is good for consumers. Everything that I have read has just been comparing this phone to others phones, pointing out that there are as many drawbacks here as any other phone. For example, the iPhone does not synch well with google, and the nexus one does not synch well with anything buy google, allegedly. The Nexus comes with 4 GB of memory, upgradable to 32 gb for around $100. For $300 you buy the iPhone with 32 GB. Some people do have $500 to throw away on the unlocked phone. It may go down to $400, but I doubt it. These prices are driven by what the market will bear, not what profit is necessary. Unlocked smart phones right now seem to be at $500, and not moving.
The difference between life and games is that games has rules. This is why people like them. There are trivially predictable outcomes from most situations. One can say that one is creating a laissez faire environment, but such a statement is at best naive. If a game is to function, rules still have to be entered, and as such will contain the assumptions of the people who write the rules. Since rules cannot be ignored, the rules themselves come attack, and changes get made to support the needs of the most powerful population. In this sense, the game does reflect laissez faire situations, but again not on the naive level of people who believe that such pure system are viable or useful.
Note to defend the practice, but the $40 sounds like a set up fee, which might be practical for some people. I suspect that many consumers expect the computer to just work when they get it home, and not have to go through installation of software, setting up accounts, trying to figure our which programs are useful and which are advertisement or useless free trials. While a reputable store might provide these things with purchase, we all know Best Buy is not such a store, and one goes there because one wants the cheapest price. As such, one should expect a bit of upselling.
The part of this that is that they advertise one product and them sell the same product at a higher price with mythical work done. If the work had been done, then one would be given an open box item, which is commonly sold cheaper than a NIB item. This was not listed, but even if had 'optimization' done I would want to see the factory sealed item first. Maybe other people are more trusting.
This may be a case where it may be worth a bit of cash for a consumer to walk out with a working computer, rather than just bits the the consumer may or may not be able to figure out. Sure phone support is free, but that is not good for everything. Sure one could go to a reputable store and get service, but these people are going to Best Buy.
Just to mention it, the Apple Store will set everything up before you leave with your computer. I am sure that there are stores that sell PC that will do the same thing. I double that they have the lowest advertised pice.
I understand the sentiments, but think for a second what is actually going on. The Darwin awards are publicizing fatal accidents that should not have really occurred, and they are doing so in a not so stupid way. They could have "The stupid awards for people who offed themselves in the stupidest manner possible and left there friends and family grieving as asking why things like this happen", but they don't. They have an award for people who off themselves in unexpected ways, and the hope is that since the genes were not transferred, these things never to have to happen again. In fact, by spreading the meme that stupid accidents are preventable, what they may actually be doing to saving another family from having to grieve over a family member that chooses physical possessions over life.
I do take this kind of seriously. When I was 10 and in school, one of my classmates, in fact her entire family, died instantly when they drove off an over pass or a freeway. I was brought to school over this overpass everyday. At that time there was very little traffic. To this day i wonder what the parents were thinking about, or doing, instead of driving, that was worth the life of their children. It may be disrespectful to the dead, and I admit I cannot know the circumstances around the incident, but I do certainly hold those parents in low regard.
I can't help but feel these cautionary tales are a good public service. They remind us that the world is dangerous, and the miracle is that we humans have a brain that we can use to survive. Unless we don't.
They ordered 10 million. This does not mean that they will take delivery. We might recall that Apple allegedly orders part to tie up the supply chain for other companies, and then only accepts what it actually needs to meet production. This makes a lot of sense as they can guarantee a consistent and compatible product until the next rev. One big problem I have with other vendors is it can be hard to figure out what drivers are needed for which models, as even within a model they may use several different products.
In any case, what we can say is that Apple is planning to sell up to 10 million of this initial run, which will presumably be manufactured over the calendar year 2010, if they are going to be available for quantity shipments in March.
If it follows the formula for the iPhone and iPod, there will probably be some scarcity through summer as significant defects will be found and corrected. In late summer, in time for school, there will be like a minor revision and then sales will pick up considerable. I can see them selling a couple million by mid summer, then 3 million or so for back to school, and the rest for christmas.
I will have to see the product to decide when to buy it. If it is a small screen, 7", for under $500, it might be nice to have it in the near term. If it is much more expensive, which would be likely for 10" model, then it would worth waiting for the version that will actually work.
If one works on any piece of machinery without turning it off one is likely to get maimed. Try changing the blades on a lawnmower without disabling it. Or working on the innards of the refrigerator. This has much less to with killer robots than humans that are not nearly scared enough of machinery. I always check twice.
Another piece of useless trivia. When HP acquired Compaq which acquired DEC, HP apparently became the only firm with two consecutive "/8".
It might have been 3, but Compaq was never awarded a block. I never understood why that was. Compaq was certainly the major player in the early 90's.
In any case the IPv6 seems to implemented in all major OS(I don't know if it has fully support in Windows 7), so I suspect we will be transitioned within a couple years.It is like telephone numbers. In the US we are up to 10 digits, and we have seen no disasters as a result. We even have number portability.
Touch screens are ok for older students, but tactile reinforcement of buttons is good for younger kids. What is also good is that kids are forced to abstract the button to understand that it will do somewhat different things at different times, i.e. act like a variable. Otherwise all they are doing is moving pictures around and not developing interconnects in their brains.
The biggest mistake I see in education is trying to provide the coolest and latest tech, instead of thinking what is best for concept development. Especially at lower levels teaching specific tech is not so useful. The tech will change in 10 years. When I left school was the time when we moved from command line to GUI. Fortunately I knew concepts,so it mattered little.
The $100 price point is also a major benefit. Like calculators, all classroms could have a class set. Quite a change from the time when we had a single PLATO terminal.
There are clearly a couple different levels to this questions. The first, as might come from the worker bees, is why do they get to do things that we do not? Why does this employee get flexible hours and I do not? Why does this group get new computers and we get hand me downs. It usually involves a fairness argument and usually involves the assumption that everyone will be as undisciplined in the usage of the resources as the person asking the question. In terms of certain sites, it might be a matter of distraction. An employer might not want a data entry clerk on facebook. The IT staff on/.may not be seem to be such a big issue. It isn't far. Grow up.
Second is a matter of information. IT lives on information. Much of the information is useful, if only in a peripheral manner. Right now we see a bug that has hit payment processing, a law suit for uclaimed minutes, an review of the nexus one, a article on censorship,amd an article on plant gene mutation. First we see that there is not a whole lot here for people who just want to waste an hour with mindless junk. Even the stuff that is not directly related to work does help a person become educated. IT staff should be educated, as their purpose shoudl be problem solving, not just working through an algorithm to solve common issues. And the education is not what is happening on One Life to Live, or who did well in a sports event, or what star is sleeping with who. All these things are vital entertainment to be sure, but not to the employer who is paying for 8 hours of paper pushing or answering the phone or direct customer service.
Third is the nature of power. Just because one applies rightfully acquired power does not mean one is abusing the power. As long as we have an hierarchal management system, those at certain levels with certain job responsibilities are going to be assumed to be the best at managing the related resources. On can imagine in an IT department of one person significant abuse going on, but in larger departments, such as stated in the example, it is likely just a management issue. For instance, I block many sites because these sites encourage the installation of software that will break the machine. The user will not fix the machine, but will use it as an excuse to take the day off. Other sites are blocked as the users have shown a lack of discipline when using the sites. It is all a matter of productivity. I imagine that if the IT staff starting spending all their time on fark, it might get blocked.
And fourth is simple exposure. Everyone knows what facebook it and therefore it is a target. How many people really know what fark or digg or/. is. If the PHB don't know what something is, then they won't know to do anything about it.
I don't think it is misleading. The review was overall bland. The hist is that this phones adds nothing to the current market place. It looks like an iPhone, and is only a little faster than the Motorola equivalent. It does not compete with the pre.
I suspect a good percentage of users are going to hate it. We have heard many comments on how people hate the Jobsian world of the single button device. How the lack of keyboard makes the phone useless. The phone has an advantage over the iPhone, in that for the same unsubsidized price one gets an unlokced phone, but that is more expensive that other phones.
I believe, and other people believed, that Google was going to do something interesting, not just copy the iPhone. Now we can see why Apple is no longer so buddy with Google.
The basis of capitalism, in my opinion, is that the entrepreneur provides a value added beyond the purchase price so that consumers choose to buy the product instead of using alternative means of acquisition or substitution. The mistake that firms make, of course, is to believe shier products provide inherent value, or that customer habits are so set they will not move to alternative products.
In this case, I believe that no one has an inherent right to someone else's content, any more than I have a inherent responsibility to buy product at the advertised price. Both are choices. Does the content provider want to sell content want to sell content at a price I wish to pay, and do I wish to pay that price, or is there something of better value.
The thing about books, and your story, is that many publishers and writers are a point that music and movies gave up long ago. That alternative forms of distribution is bad. In particular, books can be published with as much DRM protection as movies, so the risk is not high. Moving to ebooks will ultimately mean that printing presses are much less needed, but then publishers have to ask themselves if they are in the printing press business or book business.
Of course ebooks are going to be easier to steal, so the price must come down. And it will harder to rip artists off with loss and reject cuts. And the publishers will have to figure out new ways to drive sales.
OTOH, if every popular book is going to be on the net the day before the book officially released, then we are going to see the very capitalistic phenomenon related in this story. It is more expense to acquire than to steal, so steal it is. And for people who do not believe this, recall the recent MS Word injunction. MS realized it would be cheaper to steal and pay a settlement if caught than to buy a proper license. So this, as a capitalist firm, is what they did.
The funniest thing that could happen is that a religious person is brought up on charges. It is almost impossible to create a sermon or whatever without being blasphemous to fragment of some religions. Some Christian sermons I hear about are out right blasphemous to non-christian religions. At the very least, many mention jewish and muslim people in a very negative manner, and tend to disrespect Mohammed. On a subtler note, there is quite a bit of blasphemy between the Christian sects. if one says that the Trinity exists, that is blasphemous to Unitarians. If one says the only way to heaven is to accept Jesus, that is blasphemous to religions who do not believe that. If you force prayer in public places, that is blasphemous to anyone who takes the bible literary, in terms of Mathew 6:5-18, which, given the prevalence of pray in school in the US is few and far between.
So I would honestly hope this would cool down the rhetoric in Ireland, and for the so-called religious leaders to act like civilized persons.
I always saw bootcamp as a gimmick to encourage MS Windows users to switch to Apple Hardware. If one buys a mac, and really can't stand OS X, one can always go back to MS Windows. Or if MS Windows must be run occasionally, then Bootcamp is an effective way to do so.
While it is valid to complain that Apple missed a deadline, I am kind of surprised that Apple even made the effort to create a deadline. I cannot imagine people paying Apple prices to run MS Windows on an exclusive basis. I can imagine them paying such prices to run virtual machines with other OS.
I would rather see Apple point customers toward Parallels or Fusion rather than working on trying to get MS Windows to work as the base OS. What would be even more cool is a kernal that could then be used to run any number of OS in virtual mode.
Given that there are millions of iPhones, millions of Kindles, millions of Pre and G!, the distribution is no longer an issue. The issue is availability of content. Anything not in copyright, and available in digital form, is essentially free. One can pay a small amount so it is formated pretty, but is still essentially free. There is no money to be made in distribution.
This is why copyright is so important to the everyone who wants to make their cut. As soon as it is out of copyright, Apple can no longer make their pennies distributing it. More importantly, they can no longer distribute it in a form that forces consumers to use their platform. If movies, for example, are distributed in MKV, which the iPhone cannot even handle, then the major players are cut out.
For pop stuff, this is irrelevant. No one seriously cares if Mickey mouse or Steven King novels are in copyright. The used market makes acquisition cheap, and even new they are priced to sell.
What will be important are the pieces of art and science we use to educate the next generation. This is the thing. Education is becoming wider because it is becoming cheaper. It will not be too long until many schools will use electronic text. Right now, texts are so expensive many schools use no text at all. We would expect school to issue a reader, with most of the content the student needs preloaded, since much of the first year content can be self created using out of copyright materials. But that is not the case because, for example, math and science material that should be out of copyright will not be. But even so, there are many references that are and schools will be going in that direction.
In this way the copyright might bite the publishers in the ass. Adolescents want the newest and greatest thing, but no if they have to pay for it, and not if it is for school. We see this already with music. If a school can choose not to update the cannon of literature, and stay with material that is out of copyright so it can be given to the students for free, then most of 20th century literature is out. Since much of the great American literature is 20th century, students continue to get the idea that only European literature is good, and America sucks. People grow up reading buyting English literature rather than American.
The terrorist did win by diverting resources from activities that would increase our national prosperity to activities that at best do nothing.
Very little tangible has been done to limit the threat. For example, here is a US news report on the Saudi Link to terrorism from 2003. Recent articles state that the link is still there, for instance there may have been a 15 million transfer from Saudi fundamentalists to Yemen terrorist forces. For those who do not know, Saudi Arabia earns much of their money through oil, and almost nothing has been done to limit the amount of money they earn. In fact many people they have a right and responsibility to use as much oil as they want, thereby funding the terrorists.
A better example is the lack of training of the TSA. We have had eight years to create a professional police force. If the TSA screeners were seen as a professional force, instead of simply a work program for people who would otherwise be unemployed, I bet there would be much less protest against the body scanning machines. As it is, the airport screeners are treated as easily replaceable figureheads, not really there to do much of anything. Yet the screeners should be the most important part of airport defense, not only to prevent terrorists from entering the plane, but to prevent suicide bombers in the airport.
My concern is the TSA does not have leader, and instead of concentrating on making it a professional organization, Conservatives are bickering about unionization. Most police forces in the US are unionized. It is a non issue. This would not really have effected this case. What might have helped, and what will help, is if every country would take the screening process seriously, instead of just assuming that machines will do everything. This is something that is a human problem, and CCTV and x-rays will not solve it. Humans know how to subvert machines. The only flexible agent is another human
The Titanium powerbook was pretty cool, but looks absolutely dated now, like the tail finned cadillacs. I still believe the razr was a very good design. The only issue was that if one used the flip to answer option, the early models did not allow a caller ID. The hinge, though, was very sturdy and I was not able to break it over years of use. Not so for the often plastic sliding mechanisms on the modern slide phones. The draw back was that we still had to enter phones numbers by hand, little synch with the computer. In those terns, the palm treo was a better deal, but the integration of the 'smart phone' was simply not up to speed at that point. The huge size just did not justify leaving the tiny razr behind
There was a time when solid state was a selling point. Mechanical switches break. Solid State may burn out, but will not crack from the cheap plastic used. Every says how wonderful mechanical keyboards are, but those keyboards were expensive. I certainly want a good keyboard, but would not be willing to pay $200 for it.
Everything is a trade off. Design, build, and warranty against the defects in a keyboard, or use that money to build something innovate. With bluetooth connection, there is nothing to break on the modern solid state phone. The only thing I every see break on a modern smart phone is the slide keyboard.
If I were a search engine desperately trying to gain market share in an environment dominated by a competitor, I might look for the largest growing open market, in this case India. I might accommodate some vagaries in hopes that a positive official recommendation might help my market share. If no school allows access to google, not even colleges, if no major corporate office allows access to google, if no government office allows access to google, then one can imagine that in a generation Google will be gone as a viable entity in India. And then there is the issue of Google having offices in India(I think they do), which means that Google will not be in compliance with the law.
In this case, I don't see this as a 'Bing and Yahoo are bad' issue. If Google does not comply, that is business decision, just like Bing and Yahoo.
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Since so much is done for us by the languages and IDE we use, I think it is reasonable to ask us to know something about the process we program. Programming is deterministic, and this is why many of us do know much about statistics. OTOH, much of what we are asked to program has a statistical nature. Searches do not always call for exact matches. In word processing a texting predictive typing does not return exact results. In finance, we want stochastic predictors concerning where the market probably will be tomorrow. Exactness is so 2000's.
And then there is the issue that software developers should be able to, on some level, research, understand, analyze, and create a policy based solution to a problem. Ignore the fact, as stated in the previous paragraph, that not all these problems are going to have exact, or trivially reproducible solution, and we are still left with understanding the problem. The involves some knowledge of statistics and it's vagaries. Lack of knowledge can lead to massively incorrect understanding. For instance, late last year a paper was published comparing subjective and objective measures of happiness. in this paper is was shown that if, on average, a state in the US express subjective happiness, there was a good chance that state would be happy using objective data. Even my understanding of this is not great, and the explanation is oversimplified, but the basic idea is there. In fact, I look at the data and say that the correlation is not all that great, but I will admit the variables do show at least some limited correlation. The problem is that the popular media takes this graph, which is comparing two technique of measuring a variable, and does not order that variable or imply the variable has any inherent meaning, and uses the data to say that some states are "happy" and some states are "not happy". Clearly we don't expect journalist to have a sufficient graph of math or science to understand why they did was unethical, but we should have expectation that anyone above the level of code monkey would have such an understanding. Otherwise we are going to have programs that will claim to give us valid or otherwise reliable results, when in fact what we have is simply someone's faith that it is a good result, without any well know and well regarded method to back it up.
The Kindle does not have WiFi, so I cannot read the content that I already subscribe to and have online access. I do not want a Kindle subscription to these as I want the online access, not just Kindle access.
The Mac Air and various small notebooks have the added bulk of a keyboard and trackpad, as well as the clamshell design. Presumably we can have something about few centimeters smaller in length and width, and at least a few millimeters thinner in a tablet. I don't know if we can have this for less than $1000 dollars, especially since most of us would want 64GB built in, unless Apple breaks tradition and gives us a SD slot.
Why is there hope for an Apple Tablet? Because it will likely be built for the end user as the customer, not a third party advertising or other revenue partner. It is like the iPod. Sure it was built for to generate revenue for iTMS, but that did not mean it was not very easy to rip albums and put our own music on it. Even now iTunes can be set to rip to MP3 instead of ACC. Movies are the same on the Touch and Phone. I have hope that tablet/reader will be represent an equal balance between content specifically licensed for the reader and user shifted content.
But now the rules have changed. Today it is a 30 day delay. Tomorrow it might 60 or 90. If one is not willing to buy a DVD, one does not get the movie. Purchase does not compete well with free.
Sure the studios have every right to do this, but it certainly opens holes for those who are not so dedicated to the copyright. Some might buy a copy of move, rip it, and then resell it to recoup some of the money. Or just give up on the whole trying to obey the law thing and just go back to downloading tapped copies the week before the film is released to theatres.
As much as many of us hate it, application signing is going to be a requirement on any corporate phone, or pretty much any phone that is not bought as hacking toy. I, for instance, expect my phone to work, and I am not willing for it to become compromised, especially since it is a communication device and tends to come into contact with many more networks than my laptop. As such if I were the boss I would not give any google phone to employees who would likely put any arbitrary maliciou software on it if it meant being sent the sports scores or soap opera updates on a regular basis. They don't care that they destroyed a phone, all they care about is that they were entertained for a minute.
What MS did for most of it's life is produce good enough software for a good price. MS products were cheap enough, or could be acquired cheaply enough, so that more expensive systems made no economic sense for many common applications. What MS is doing now is trying to upscale the product. The software now costs more than the hardware, something that to many people seem unreasonable. Like IBM, MS now makes little sense for small groups. Once can buy a 3 macs for $5000, and keep them operating through 2 upgrade cycles for less than $1000, including iWork upgrades. The same three PCs of similar quantity might cost $2500, but each upgrade cycle is going to cost another $1500, assuming you don't buy the crippled OS, and don't upgrade the MS Office applications.
MS is trying to be the upscale systems manufacturer because that is where the money is. The problem is that if they compete on pice, then they alienate their hardware partners. So they have to compete on quality which means they are competing on product quality. In cell phones they have failed as the Nokia phones are just too good. In console they succeeded because they are better in many ways than the Wii, and the sony stuff is very expensive. In the tablet market we are back in the realm of alienating hardware partners and jeopardizing the MS Windows cash cow, so they are likely to be competing with Apple and Kindle, rather than the more commodity products.
OTOH, I have done a lot of work with analysis, vectors, and euclidian spaces, all without a deep knowledge of sets.
Some courses are harder, and less useful, due to the students they are directed towards. It could be the discrete math is meant for maths majors, and therefore assume that level of dedication. A selected topics course can be more appropriate for a student who wants to learn math, but does not want to do math. There is value in listening to professors and peers. In college we all knew the classes where we learned, and those we did not, and it was not always about how much of a hard ass the professor was. Often it was about content. If it were me I would tempted to listen to advice and take the later.
My personal opinion is that is one of those silly decisions that sounds good in corporate, but end up causing long terms misary. I am thinking about the MS DOS decision on memory. Anyone remember the zoo of extended and expanded memory hacks? Sure it was fun to play with, but when work had to get done...
This nexus one is a good phone, and it is good for consumers. Everything that I have read has just been comparing this phone to others phones, pointing out that there are as many drawbacks here as any other phone. For example, the iPhone does not synch well with google, and the nexus one does not synch well with anything buy google, allegedly. The Nexus comes with 4 GB of memory, upgradable to 32 gb for around $100. For $300 you buy the iPhone with 32 GB. Some people do have $500 to throw away on the unlocked phone. It may go down to $400, but I doubt it. These prices are driven by what the market will bear, not what profit is necessary. Unlocked smart phones right now seem to be at $500, and not moving.
The difference between life and games is that games has rules. This is why people like them. There are trivially predictable outcomes from most situations. One can say that one is creating a laissez faire environment, but such a statement is at best naive. If a game is to function, rules still have to be entered, and as such will contain the assumptions of the people who write the rules. Since rules cannot be ignored, the rules themselves come attack, and changes get made to support the needs of the most powerful population. In this sense, the game does reflect laissez faire situations, but again not on the naive level of people who believe that such pure system are viable or useful.
The part of this that is that they advertise one product and them sell the same product at a higher price with mythical work done. If the work had been done, then one would be given an open box item, which is commonly sold cheaper than a NIB item. This was not listed, but even if had 'optimization' done I would want to see the factory sealed item first. Maybe other people are more trusting.
This may be a case where it may be worth a bit of cash for a consumer to walk out with a working computer, rather than just bits the the consumer may or may not be able to figure out. Sure phone support is free, but that is not good for everything. Sure one could go to a reputable store and get service, but these people are going to Best Buy.
Just to mention it, the Apple Store will set everything up before you leave with your computer. I am sure that there are stores that sell PC that will do the same thing. I double that they have the lowest advertised pice.
I do take this kind of seriously. When I was 10 and in school, one of my classmates, in fact her entire family, died instantly when they drove off an over pass or a freeway. I was brought to school over this overpass everyday. At that time there was very little traffic. To this day i wonder what the parents were thinking about, or doing, instead of driving, that was worth the life of their children. It may be disrespectful to the dead, and I admit I cannot know the circumstances around the incident, but I do certainly hold those parents in low regard.
I can't help but feel these cautionary tales are a good public service. They remind us that the world is dangerous, and the miracle is that we humans have a brain that we can use to survive. Unless we don't.
In any case, what we can say is that Apple is planning to sell up to 10 million of this initial run, which will presumably be manufactured over the calendar year 2010, if they are going to be available for quantity shipments in March.
If it follows the formula for the iPhone and iPod, there will probably be some scarcity through summer as significant defects will be found and corrected. In late summer, in time for school, there will be like a minor revision and then sales will pick up considerable. I can see them selling a couple million by mid summer, then 3 million or so for back to school, and the rest for christmas.
I will have to see the product to decide when to buy it. If it is a small screen, 7", for under $500, it might be nice to have it in the near term. If it is much more expensive, which would be likely for 10" model, then it would worth waiting for the version that will actually work.
If one works on any piece of machinery without turning it off one is likely to get maimed. Try changing the blades on a lawnmower without disabling it. Or working on the innards of the refrigerator. This has much less to with killer robots than humans that are not nearly scared enough of machinery. I always check twice.
It might have been 3, but Compaq was never awarded a block. I never understood why that was. Compaq was certainly the major player in the early 90's.
In any case the IPv6 seems to implemented in all major OS(I don't know if it has fully support in Windows 7), so I suspect we will be transitioned within a couple years.It is like telephone numbers. In the US we are up to 10 digits, and we have seen no disasters as a result. We even have number portability.
The biggest mistake I see in education is trying to provide the coolest and latest tech, instead of thinking what is best for concept development. Especially at lower levels teaching specific tech is not so useful. The tech will change in 10 years. When I left school was the time when we moved from command line to GUI. Fortunately I knew concepts,so it mattered little.
The $100 price point is also a major benefit. Like calculators, all classroms could have a class set. Quite a change from the time when we had a single PLATO terminal.
Second is a matter of information. IT lives on information. Much of the information is useful, if only in a peripheral manner. Right now we see a bug that has hit payment processing, a law suit for uclaimed minutes, an review of the nexus one, a article on censorship,amd an article on plant gene mutation. First we see that there is not a whole lot here for people who just want to waste an hour with mindless junk. Even the stuff that is not directly related to work does help a person become educated. IT staff should be educated, as their purpose shoudl be problem solving, not just working through an algorithm to solve common issues. And the education is not what is happening on One Life to Live, or who did well in a sports event, or what star is sleeping with who. All these things are vital entertainment to be sure, but not to the employer who is paying for 8 hours of paper pushing or answering the phone or direct customer service.
Third is the nature of power. Just because one applies rightfully acquired power does not mean one is abusing the power. As long as we have an hierarchal management system, those at certain levels with certain job responsibilities are going to be assumed to be the best at managing the related resources. On can imagine in an IT department of one person significant abuse going on, but in larger departments, such as stated in the example, it is likely just a management issue. For instance, I block many sites because these sites encourage the installation of software that will break the machine. The user will not fix the machine, but will use it as an excuse to take the day off. Other sites are blocked as the users have shown a lack of discipline when using the sites. It is all a matter of productivity. I imagine that if the IT staff starting spending all their time on fark, it might get blocked.
And fourth is simple exposure. Everyone knows what facebook it and therefore it is a target. How many people really know what fark or digg or /. is. If the PHB don't know what something is, then they won't know to do anything about it.
I suspect a good percentage of users are going to hate it. We have heard many comments on how people hate the Jobsian world of the single button device. How the lack of keyboard makes the phone useless. The phone has an advantage over the iPhone, in that for the same unsubsidized price one gets an unlokced phone, but that is more expensive that other phones.
I believe, and other people believed, that Google was going to do something interesting, not just copy the iPhone. Now we can see why Apple is no longer so buddy with Google.
In this case, I believe that no one has an inherent right to someone else's content, any more than I have a inherent responsibility to buy product at the advertised price. Both are choices. Does the content provider want to sell content want to sell content at a price I wish to pay, and do I wish to pay that price, or is there something of better value.
The thing about books, and your story, is that many publishers and writers are a point that music and movies gave up long ago. That alternative forms of distribution is bad. In particular, books can be published with as much DRM protection as movies, so the risk is not high. Moving to ebooks will ultimately mean that printing presses are much less needed, but then publishers have to ask themselves if they are in the printing press business or book business.
Of course ebooks are going to be easier to steal, so the price must come down. And it will harder to rip artists off with loss and reject cuts. And the publishers will have to figure out new ways to drive sales.
OTOH, if every popular book is going to be on the net the day before the book officially released, then we are going to see the very capitalistic phenomenon related in this story. It is more expense to acquire than to steal, so steal it is. And for people who do not believe this, recall the recent MS Word injunction. MS realized it would be cheaper to steal and pay a settlement if caught than to buy a proper license. So this, as a capitalist firm, is what they did.
So I would honestly hope this would cool down the rhetoric in Ireland, and for the so-called religious leaders to act like civilized persons.
While it is valid to complain that Apple missed a deadline, I am kind of surprised that Apple even made the effort to create a deadline. I cannot imagine people paying Apple prices to run MS Windows on an exclusive basis. I can imagine them paying such prices to run virtual machines with other OS.
I would rather see Apple point customers toward Parallels or Fusion rather than working on trying to get MS Windows to work as the base OS. What would be even more cool is a kernal that could then be used to run any number of OS in virtual mode.
This is why copyright is so important to the everyone who wants to make their cut. As soon as it is out of copyright, Apple can no longer make their pennies distributing it. More importantly, they can no longer distribute it in a form that forces consumers to use their platform. If movies, for example, are distributed in MKV, which the iPhone cannot even handle, then the major players are cut out.
For pop stuff, this is irrelevant. No one seriously cares if Mickey mouse or Steven King novels are in copyright. The used market makes acquisition cheap, and even new they are priced to sell.
What will be important are the pieces of art and science we use to educate the next generation. This is the thing. Education is becoming wider because it is becoming cheaper. It will not be too long until many schools will use electronic text. Right now, texts are so expensive many schools use no text at all. We would expect school to issue a reader, with most of the content the student needs preloaded, since much of the first year content can be self created using out of copyright materials. But that is not the case because, for example, math and science material that should be out of copyright will not be. But even so, there are many references that are and schools will be going in that direction.
In this way the copyright might bite the publishers in the ass. Adolescents want the newest and greatest thing, but no if they have to pay for it, and not if it is for school. We see this already with music. If a school can choose not to update the cannon of literature, and stay with material that is out of copyright so it can be given to the students for free, then most of 20th century literature is out. Since much of the great American literature is 20th century, students continue to get the idea that only European literature is good, and America sucks. People grow up reading buyting English literature rather than American.
Very little tangible has been done to limit the threat. For example, here is a US news report on the Saudi Link to terrorism from 2003. Recent articles state that the link is still there, for instance there may have been a 15 million transfer from Saudi fundamentalists to Yemen terrorist forces. For those who do not know, Saudi Arabia earns much of their money through oil, and almost nothing has been done to limit the amount of money they earn. In fact many people they have a right and responsibility to use as much oil as they want, thereby funding the terrorists.
A better example is the lack of training of the TSA. We have had eight years to create a professional police force. If the TSA screeners were seen as a professional force, instead of simply a work program for people who would otherwise be unemployed, I bet there would be much less protest against the body scanning machines. As it is, the airport screeners are treated as easily replaceable figureheads, not really there to do much of anything. Yet the screeners should be the most important part of airport defense, not only to prevent terrorists from entering the plane, but to prevent suicide bombers in the airport.
My concern is the TSA does not have leader, and instead of concentrating on making it a professional organization, Conservatives are bickering about unionization. Most police forces in the US are unionized. It is a non issue. This would not really have effected this case. What might have helped, and what will help, is if every country would take the screening process seriously, instead of just assuming that machines will do everything. This is something that is a human problem, and CCTV and x-rays will not solve it. Humans know how to subvert machines. The only flexible agent is another human
The Titanium powerbook was pretty cool, but looks absolutely dated now, like the tail finned cadillacs. I still believe the razr was a very good design. The only issue was that if one used the flip to answer option, the early models did not allow a caller ID. The hinge, though, was very sturdy and I was not able to break it over years of use. Not so for the often plastic sliding mechanisms on the modern slide phones. The draw back was that we still had to enter phones numbers by hand, little synch with the computer. In those terns, the palm treo was a better deal, but the integration of the 'smart phone' was simply not up to speed at that point. The huge size just did not justify leaving the tiny razr behind
That said, there does appear to be a VIM plugin for eclipse.
Everything is a trade off. Design, build, and warranty against the defects in a keyboard, or use that money to build something innovate. With bluetooth connection, there is nothing to break on the modern solid state phone. The only thing I every see break on a modern smart phone is the slide keyboard.
In this case, I don't see this as a 'Bing and Yahoo are bad' issue. If Google does not comply, that is business decision, just like Bing and Yahoo.