The problem is that some people believe that anything new is dangerous and other believe that the benefits of anything new outweigh the risks. This combined with a lack of basic risk assessment, for instance many of us are more afraid of being blown up on plane that being killed in a car, and we have a situation where there is hardly any rationality in any decisions.
For instance, vaccinations is one part of keeping our children healthy. So is sanitation. Some may complain how dirty cars are, but it better than having horse shit everywhere. In the mid 20th century many tens of thousands of kids in the US were infected every year. Since most parents of young children currently needing immunizations did not see such trouble, they may not believe the real risk to their child. By comparison, only a few thousand children a year are injured in car accidents, yet many modern parents would go wild if their kid were held in passenger seat, even though the risk is arguably less. Better to ignore them in back seat.
in this case, I think autism have a negative connotation. In particular, if it is extreme, and it genetic, some might think it says something about the parents. Much better to believe that some evil doer gave a child the condition rather than just natural genetic variability.
The chemical case is a gray area. Certainly one could argue that it a fear of technology. One could also argue that it is a healthy respect for risk assessment in a world that matured from the one where we believed that new tech would cure all our ills with no negative consequences. If there is an alternative to feeding our kids unnecessary stuff with unknown effects, then we should take it. Sure it means that some companies may go under, but so what. Profit is not a right, and the economic engine is driven by change, not by forcing people to but the same old stuff, something that has been forgotten in the US. Will the new thing be worse. We don't know. Only time will tell. But saying that we should not change plastics because there is a risk is just like saying we should stop vaccinations because there is a risk.
We can't be afraid to change, but we can't go back either. We must move forward. Some things will get better, and some things will get worse.
There is an old story involving a very poor family who could not afford to buy or make fresh bread. The one pleasure they had was walking home from synagogue and passing a bakery. There they would stand for a time and take in the wonderful smells of the bakery. Eventually, after stopping and luxuriating in the smells of fresh bread a number of times, the owner finally noticed them. He asked them what they were doing. The father answered just standing outside and enjoying the smells of his wonderful breads. The owner grew enraged and asked them to leave. The father asked why. The owner said because they had no right to steal his smells.
Clearly there have been previous text readers. Clearly someone is going to lose money on this because Audio books are rather expensive, so someone is extremely afraid of this technology becoming assessable, reliable, and of high quality. But I do think complaining of this is equivalent of stealing smells.
The only thing I can think of that might be a problem is if the contracts signed by the right holder with Amazon somehow limited the rights of Amazon to read the books. Perhaps the right to display text on the Kindle is assigned to Amazon, but the commercial right to the audio of the book is assigned to someone else. It sounds silly, but it could be.
This also gives me pause in the purchase of an otherwise good product, simply because one can imagine that authors might pull the right to publish, or limit future rights, over this issue. The DRM could in fact limit the books that could be read aloud, or, since the Kindle is in real time connection, already purchased books could be disabled.
Re:Another biased, hate inspired article
on
I'm a PC and I'm 4-1/2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
For a lot of us, the issue is risk assessment. Because we have some skill, and because we do not use any application that requires MS Windows, there is no reason for us to expose ourselves to the risks and added costs of using MS Windows. In my career, such costs and risks have escalated. Ten years ago MS started sending the BSA troops to audit even small businesses, install spyware, and disrupt development for days. This continues with WGA which prevents users from conveniently accessing even critical upgrades to the OS, and increasingly complicated licensing terms that can lead to sudden lack of access to machines. Personally, the risk of my machine not working during a presentation is simply not compensated by the 'ease of use' of windows.
So, when some one talks about the EULA as a reason not to use MS Windows, that is a valid concern, just like when the complaint is targeted at Apple. The solution in both cases is the same. If the EULA is the issue, don't use the product. In this case, the four year old can't accept the liability, so the parents do. And when the four year old does something to break the license, like when the kid is 10 installs the software on two machines, then the parents will be liable. Frankly the risk of having to pay $250 thousands dollars in fines for my kid stealing software is a good reason to use unencumbered software or if, the EULA is not too scary, pay Apple for a family pack($200 complete set of OS and applications) that can be used on up to five machines around the house. Simply risk assessment.
The new ipod touch has bluetooth and apparently line in capability, so this is feasible. But is this going to back a hacked solution, or is the application going to be on the App store. Since it will not work over the cell network, I can see that it might be.
Even so it this a reasonable solution. The iPod touch is a $200 gadget. One has to assume that some use outside of the spec are going to be used. For instance, if Apple is not saying it can support a microphone, then one assumes that feature cannot be tested, and the iPod touch cannot be returned on that basis if it does not work. I can see this as a cool tech thing, and might do it, but would not depend on it to work, for instance as a primary home phone through comcast, and certainly would not build a business around it.
This is where I get a bit annoyed with style over substance. I use apple products because the generally perform for me, and I buy what I need and can afford. If I could not afford an iPhone, I would not get a touch and pretend it was an iPhone just to be cool. If the iPhone did not work in my locale, I wouldn't be one of those trying to figure out how to make it work. I would just buy something else.
I am not saying this is not true, but it were true why was Apple not able to build a G5 powerbook? At full speed these things eat on the order of 100 watts. A flat screen LCD is more like 30 watts, I suppose much of this is the backlighting, which I supposed has been reduced by the new LED displays. The numbers I have seen on the Intel Core 2 duo are in the line of 30 watts. The power supply is only 85 watts, which includes battery charging overhead, so a back of the envelope approximation is about half the power is the processor, and half goes to the screen, harddrive, and other components.
In the average PC world this may be quite different. The screens may use more than the processor, but they do not have to. If a machine is designed to minimize power consumption, the screen is not likely to be a huge power consumer.
There are a couple different things here. First, the ability to download an application does not equal the ability to use the application. Many of these require quite a bit of configuration, location of dependencies, and the like. Developers are buying the Mac because Apple, as a system builders, is handling all those things i house. All I need to do is buy a mac and I have a web server, an database server, etc.If one does not need those things, they are simple to turn off. From my work in Linux,the ease of adding components is variable. I have not used Ubuntu, so perhaps there is plug and play there.
Second, there are always practical limits to how many apps can run before the user begins to call customer service. While I do not know why MS would want to limit the number of Apps that can run, one reason might be that the hardware vendors don't want the customer service called. Hey, I bought this netbook, and am running OO.org, downloading movies in Gnutella, chatting in Pidgin, and checking my mail every minute, watching a DVD, and hey, the computer is slow. It might be that the netbook people are doing the same thing that Apple did with the iPhone. Making a multitasking OS a single tasking OS until the cheap hardware becomes advanced enough to go back to multitasking.
I am not MS booster, but the one thing that MS Windows has is applications. They may be applications that I think are dumb and a waste of bits, but there are applications. And by in large they are one click installs, fully configured, ready to run. If they have made one mistake, it is building excessive number of these utilities into the base OS instead of leveraging the ease of installing new functionality.
When we burn a bunch of fossil fuel, we are burning mass that was laid down a very long time ago, and take a long time to recreate. This time is not measured in hundreds of years, but hundreds of thousands years. This means two things. First, once it is consumed, it is consumed. Second, we are raising carbon levels bu reintroducing carbon that was removed perhaps a million years ago.
The situation with renewable energy is different. Yes when it takes energy to manufacture biomass into fuels. But if is done right, we are taking carbon out of the atmosphere one year, and putting it back in the next, creating a steady state. Clearly there are some issues now, but that is political. In the US, instead of using weeds, the corn growers, which have been pushing the US for years to a deadly philosophy of monoculture, is using food crops. On the other point, I don't think that biofuels is causing food prices to increase any more than lack of oil is causing the current high prices at the pump. demand for luxury food is increasing, the economic expansion of the past several years means that people are buying more, and there is much less focus on the needs of those that have no food.
As far as rare metals, these are not consumed. All these products can be remanufactured. The issue is political. In my US town, trash is picked up once a week at every house, but recycling is picked up only every other week at some houses. Houses are allowed to throw away dangerous materials without any fine. The only way to send electronics for remanufacture to go to the drop off on a work day. Of course a lot of this has to do with the costs involved. it is cheaper to mine new material rather than reuse old. for these materials the economics might be reversed, and we might the trend reversed.
It is worse than that. If you have an older XP, you have dig for a key, then download the WGA, then let WGA root around in your legally purchased and installed software, all before you can download the updates that protect the computer. This all while connected to the internet because WGA and activation are over the internet. If one does not have a hardware firewall, the computer is completely exposed. This in a world where the time from clean install to infection for such an unprotected system in measured in minutes.
This is kind of interesting, because christian religions tend to minimize what we call adulthood, and maximize survival of even the weakest beings. For instance, the idea that priests don't have children. Priests are pretty smart guys, yet the religion takes all those good genes out of the pool? Ludicrous. How about polygamy in a society that is pretty equally male and female. You reduce our survival by creating what is ultimately a weak inbred population.
A lot of the anti drinking people say what of the children, what of the family life. Again, if a child is not smart enough to not get itself killed before adulthood, well, what did I say above. It is not hard to not to stay off the hard stuff. I grew up around, and I did. My friends of all background and races did the same. Even those who did not were smart enough to manage and off themselves. If a bunch of kids want to party after cheerleading, and go off and off themselves several other people, and an unborn child, I might say there is benefit to that happening sooner rather than later, and it might be an indication that the parents might want to reconsider their family values. There have always been test for kids who want to make it into adulthood. Now the test is not offing yourself in a traffic accident or an overdose. Most of us pass these tests. I live in fear of those who are so protected that they never have to pass these trials and tribulations, yet still get to call themselves adults.
It seems that religion is about killing those we don't like, keeping those we do, no matter how suited,and damning the world to a lame existence that is indistinguishable from hell.
Let us think this through. Say that MS allowed anyone to use it Windows updates, something that would make immense sense. Let us further assume that MS, quite reasonable, stated that if one was use the service, then the code would have to go through a MS test lab to insure the code did not have malicious behavior. For each update, the lab would have to test the code, at a nominal fee. I feel this would be reasonable as MS would assume at least some liability if malware started automatically updating via it's service, or if malware was injected into existing applications via it's service.
Now, let us look at reality. MS has a program that will allow developers to certificate their applications. For the most part, no one seems to using it. Apple has such a universal download and update program for the iPhone, but no one likes it, mostly because many think they have gone too far in regulating the market, but i think such danger is the exact reason why such a universal update resource is not available. And one might talk about Android, but while one might talk about open application development, I have seen nothing about automatic updating, which would make the most sense of all, yet it does not appear to exist.
About the only place such a situation exists is in real OSS, where responsibility is shared, and there is no one target to sue if all the machines become infected.
Actually, the way I understand digital it is unlikely the rural viewer will get anything at all. In the past, rural areas could get a signal just by mounting a large receiving antenna. Now, with the way digital works, it is unlikely that anyone who did not get excellent analog coverage is going to get nothing without either a station that retransmits content or a satellite service. Even in the city, there are stations that I have trouble receiving. The least of the rural worries are interference. It is seems they will be lucky if there is something to interfere with.
When I was young and poor, I kept my electricity use very low. Why? Because there was one rate for low users, and another for high users. The amount of electricity I could use was unlimited, if I wanted to pay for it. By not crossing that limit, I kept my bill absurdly low.
Of course people today are used to using unlimited service, even me. But there is always a limit, as no resource is infinite. The question usually is do we have to enforce that limit explicitly, or will the market tend to enforce it. For instance, in garbage collection I grew up with unlimited garbage collection. There were practical limits on what could be collected, and I suppose that sometime garbage would not be collected, and i would not call that fraud, but for the most part it worked rather well. But eventually people got lazy, greedy, and wasteful, and a formal limit had to be set. For most of us the limit was not a problem, and we were happy that the parasites who leeched off our taxes were contained.
I think that is what is going on here. I do not think that what amounts to a 142 MB limit per hour of every day is anything that most people would consider a limit. I do not think most services actually effectively feed more than 2 or 3 MB per minute, and least not every minute of day all year. I think that most people would be happy to know that cost are being contained so they are not forced to forced for some other persons p0rm habit. I think it would be more fraudulent to raise rates just to insure other people can run a cheap P2p service, not matter how noble such a service might be.
I also understand that many would say this is just anticompetitive behavior to prevent streaming TV and movies which are becoming more popular. To this I would say, how much tv do you watch? If you are talkiing about downloading extremely good quality movies, at 1 GB a piece, yes, that will eat up the limit, but if you are doing that I would think you would spring for the high speed unlimited service. Otherwise the stuff coming off, say netflix, seems pretty small and one would have to watch a hell of lot of TV to reach that limit. Again, i would not want to subsidize such use. On regular TV, the more you watch the more ads you see. On the web this is not the case.
In most cases, install is done once, and most users will never to an install from scratch. Minimizing install time is best akin to making sure you keyboard input routines are blazingly fast, because, you know, on modern computers we have the problem of people typing faster than those input routines can handle.
Boot up and Shutdown times are equally irrelevant. I shut the PCs down on weekends. Am I going to notice or care that it takes a few more seconds for a machine to boot up or shut down. Also, these times are highly variable. Even on the same machine I suspect the variation is way outside the differences between the OS. 30 years ago we cared a little bit about boot up times. But then, we were reading from disk or tape, so these times were significant, and we might shut down a machine several times a day. When Apple made the Mac a super fast boot up machine, it was to solve a problem. Now it is just to win a juvenile contest. if there is not an order of magnitude difference, it does not really matter.
File copy time can be an issue, but not for everyone. I am going to make what may be a controversial statement. When I copy a multi Gigabyte set of files, and it takes a half an hour, that does not bother me. Neither do I care that for a large movie one OS might take a 30 seconds, while the next might take two minutes. What annoys me are those little daily copies of a small file that take a minute or so. Clearly there is some overhead. Sure, know how long to copy 1000 files is cool, but when does that happen.
What we don't have is how long it takes to set up a printer, something that I find I do way too often. Or how long it take to print to a printer, which has some OS dependence. Or how long it takes a save a file in MS Office versus OO.org. Or how long it takes to setup email. Or how long it takes to load a web browser. You know, the things that people do every day and tends to eat away at a persons limited time.
Camino with no add ons seems to work very well as well. No pop ups. Flash on demand only. The only thing it can't do is sync bookmarks to a server. I know there are really fancy things it can't do, but for my use, it does all I need. Thanks again for the good work.
CBS was fine half a million for that act. I would hope that comcast would be fined the same. Even if this was an accidental thing, it shows the unreliability of the comcast equipment, and if it was malicious, it shows a lack of security. One reason I do not have cable is the lack of reliability. It was a routine event to be days without cable. Anything that forces the cable company to be more reliable and responsive will help.
While it can make sense to give every server a descriptive name, such as production server, etc, I used find it is easier to give groups of servers a name based on a common theme. This sucks for people who are not familiar with the popular culture. For instance, while I might name all productions servers based on the Jetson, this might not work so well for a modern admin who might prefer Family Guy. I did, for a while, keep a South Park Cluster.
Of course we are not so United States centric, so I think we are moving towards names like PS23, GW32, etc. More efficient, but at what cost.
It is important to distinguish between schools that educate those that are interested in receiving an education and comprehensive schools. In general, successful education is much more likely if one even has a minimal requirement, for instance information sessions in which parents are required to attend, than if the school simply admits anyone who is in the area. In this case, the Bronx School has only 420 students, say one third of those open in any given year. I would presume that they take the best 100-150 of the students that attend the information session, and very few if any from the general community.
KIPP basically does the same thing. They open up in areas that where public schools or a private school already attracts the best of the best then claims to be providing a community service because they serve a diverse SSE. The social status of a student really makes little difference. A kid can be poor or rich, have one parent or two. What is important is that the student has been brought up to take school seriously. Another big issue in New York and other areas are students who have never had formal schooling, and are now forced into a compulsory educational system.
So this is what most people who get into education do not understand. The problem of educating those who wish to be educated has been solved. More money can be useful to attract more diverse teachers and buy equipment and supplies to enhance student learning. A large format printer, or an editing studio, or a the services of a very good writing coach, is not cheap. Students how want to be educated will work, will maximize the equipment and teachers, not matter if they are gifted and talented or not, whether they have money or not.
What, I believe, we don't know how to do, and where the Gates and similar foundations fail, is educating the student that does not have a cultural imperative to be educated, either because they have no interest in it or because the family does not see the value of it. Many times they say the teacher has to be more interested, the activities need to be more hands on, the school needs to be more inviting. While all these are true, it does not address of transforming the child from a victim of education to a student of education. It is one thing to study a subject because on it interested or because the teacher is cute, it is quite another to learn for the sake of gaining knowledge and becoming a educated adult. I don't think anyone knows how to do this. I also don't think anyone is seriously studying how to do this, rather focusing on changing the teacher to meet the level that the student wishes to work. This is not education.
For some applications, like Labview and igor, there are alternatives if you want to code. These applications, and those like it, are tightly intergrated packages that allowed automated workflow in the lab with minimal understading of the processes actually being used. For control this is not neccearily a big deal. For data aq and analysis, I think the researcher should know what is actually happening to convert raw data(for instance a voltage) to the pretty picture.
It is quite possible to take to open source modules, glue them together, and do almost everything that Labview and igor does. Whether this is cost effective is another question. A long time ago, when these tools were less developed and quite a bit more expensive, I was responsible for writing the data aq and control systems for some of our experiments. As a lowly paid student, it was cost effective.
As far as Inventor, that is a fish of another color. Like solid works, there is nothing else like it. It is a highly polished professional product that is not allowed to stagnant. Therefore, open source is not allowed to catch up, as it has in field of office applications. I am told that sketchup has many of the capabilities of Solidworks and Inventor. I am not sure how permissive the free license is.
He has a lot of good books, but it would be hard for hollywood to make them into a two hour film. Short stories are better.
His later works could be made indie of hollywood. Job, A comedy of manner comes to mind. Friday would sell tickets, or To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Some action, compressible.
I think we are all waiting for A Stranger in a Strange Land miniseries.
Starter - Ritalin - for the tweeny or parent who just wants to use a controlled substance without getting too caught up in the culture.
Home Basic - OxyContin - You still aren't going to make a commitment to the drug culture, but you need a stronger fix. Because it comes as a part of package, you don't need to find a dealer. If you are arrested, you can always claim it was prescibed or that the arrest is politically motivated.
Home Premium - Meth - You are know a dedicated member of the drug culture, maybe supporting pro drug use sites. Maybe you manufacture a few extra copies in your barn and deal them up on ebay, hoping the copyright police don't catch you.
Business - Cocaine - You are moving up in the big league. Money is not a problem, uoi just need the fix. You have dealer contacts, and long term contracts. Life is good.
Ultimate - Trip to Amsterdam - You have an office to make the plans, an expense account to pay for the trip, all you have to do is fly high.
But seriously, I know I am going to have to move from XP at some point, just like I had to move from NT and before that 95. It just does not give me a lot of confidence when more work may have been done creating various and arbitrary builds to meet certain price points than creating a stable OS. I mean, creating a single stable OS is hard enough. In Windows 7, MS has to build, debug, and correct dependencies of 5 different OS.
It was all about DRM, and non compatible players, and near monopoly status. MS could not really complain because it has been playing this game for years, with, for example,the embrace and extend HTML. Then there is the random changes in format. This worked well for MS Office, as it forced everyone to move from one version to the next, but did not do any good for the Zune when MS decided that it would randomly develop a new DRM system and ignore playforsure. Then, as it was feeling the pressure of competition, it followed the drop of support for IE on Mac with the non release of Zune Drivers for Mac.
So, MS only drivers, no Playforsure support and no Apple protected ACC support. Of course of this would have been a non issue if MS supported universal standards(a media player does not need customer drivers if it is just treated as removable drive) and if MS focused on DRM free music. In fact the primary driver that kept Apple in the forefront for so long is the music industry insistence on DRM and the computer industries support of that position. We will see how apple fares now that Amazon has cheaper drm free music, but I think Apple will be ok now that people are used to used going to iTunes.
But I don't think that MS has to exit the market, just remember that the pupose of MS is to provide the low cost option. The Xbox is successful because it is the cheaper than a PS3, as the xbox has no HD media capability. The Zune is not cheaper than any iPod, except for the touch, so why buy it. If a PC were as expensive than the mac, how many people would buy it? Sell a zune for $100, and it will be on the top of the charts, just like the xbox. Or they could do something innovative and include wireless cell phone access, like the Kindle, and inlcude one year of subscription service. But that would innovative, not what MS does.
Exactly. In addition there was an old fashion price cut. old fashioned price cut. The complete set which elsewhere has sold for 100+ dollars now sells for around $60 on amazon, and has been on sale for as low as $40. The release online might have helped sales, but i think a fraction of customers would have bought if the set had cost twice as much.
This is not true. It is possible to create documentation that is very complete. In the almost 30 years of writing code, I have found MS to be the worst. Worse, in terms of technical accuracy, than O'Reilly. The later provides better explanations, but the errors in both are annoying.
In the DOS days, MS documentation was unusable. To do anything, one had to have a secondary unauthorized source. In the same timeframe, I also used DEC VMS Fortran and the IMSL library. I found the documentation of both of these very good. I never found a case where the DEC and official IMSL documentation did not match the behavior. Though the VMS Fotran documentation was just a sample, the VAX VMS documentation sat on a talbe 8 feet long. In a more modern case, I have used many libraries, such as the Boost C++ libraries, that put the MS documentation to shame.
In terms of OSS, external human readable documentation become much less of an issue. The source code is there. if something does not behave as expected, one can look at the code and figure out why. If one is really nice, since most OSS documentation is collaborative, one could even change the documentation to match the true behavior or add a not about unexpected behavior under certain conditions. If MS provided free and unfettered access to source code, so that at minimum any person who bought a copy of MS Visual Studio received a copy of the source code without having to sign any non disclosure agreements or the like, then I would agree. These complaints would be meaningless. After all, if you can't read code and figure out what is going on, then why are you programming in the first place?
But MS does not provide access to code to the common programmer. Nor does it have a history of provided reliable documentation to the common programmer. It does have a history of limiting what non-partner companies can do. So, all that is being asked is that it reliably documents it's API. To believe that it can't is to believe that we are basing our IT infrastructure on products from an incompetent company, so we choose to believe that it won't.
How many times has Google been sued or criticized for linking directly to copyrighted orginal work, bypassing weak security or ad generated home pages. Also, I just checked to confirm and the Britannica home page is mostly flash. Does Google do a good job at indexing flash? The is no text content presented immediately on the home page.
If one is to complain about Google, and accept that it is a Google world, then one should learn the rules and figure out how to make them work for you. In it's simplicity, Wikipedia does this. Most other sites do this. Birtanica, not being relevant in the post trivia book world, does not. I grew up on britannica, I know the books very well. But when I can search the internet for more current, more detailed, and often more accurate work, why would I go to Britannica? Certainly if I had a kid, I might have the kid use it as a safe destination, but outside of that it seems quaint.
The problem with Bush/Cheney was that they did not understand they were public servants. Rather, Bush still thought as he was in Texas where only locals cared that he ripped off the tax payers through his sweetheart deal on the Texas Rangers. Cheney treated the US government as his personal corporation, refusing to justify his actions to the people through the normal open government policies. Instead they both hid behind equivocation and various fraudulent tactics that we can only assume are commonly taught in an MBA program.
And now we are told that Obama 'promises' to only use his blackberry for personal communications. I am sure he has every good intention to comply, but, as with Palin, we see that routine use of personal assets while in a government job can lead to a confusion and misuse between the personal asset and government property. One can imagine Palin logged onto her yahoo account simply writing a government note because it was more efficient that logging into the proper account, or thinking that since she was staying in her own home on government business, that the taxpayers should help her pay her mortgage.
Which is to say that we cannot trust that our officials are always doing the right thing, no matter how moral or trustworthy we think they are. If Obama uses the blackberry, then it still has to fall under the FOIA. If that means we get hundreds of pages of 'thinking of you dear', that is fine. At least we will know that he is not plotting to defraud the American consumers by colluding with oil company executives.
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For instance, vaccinations is one part of keeping our children healthy. So is sanitation. Some may complain how dirty cars are, but it better than having horse shit everywhere. In the mid 20th century many tens of thousands of kids in the US were infected every year. Since most parents of young children currently needing immunizations did not see such trouble, they may not believe the real risk to their child. By comparison, only a few thousand children a year are injured in car accidents, yet many modern parents would go wild if their kid were held in passenger seat, even though the risk is arguably less. Better to ignore them in back seat.
in this case, I think autism have a negative connotation. In particular, if it is extreme, and it genetic, some might think it says something about the parents. Much better to believe that some evil doer gave a child the condition rather than just natural genetic variability.
The chemical case is a gray area. Certainly one could argue that it a fear of technology. One could also argue that it is a healthy respect for risk assessment in a world that matured from the one where we believed that new tech would cure all our ills with no negative consequences. If there is an alternative to feeding our kids unnecessary stuff with unknown effects, then we should take it. Sure it means that some companies may go under, but so what. Profit is not a right, and the economic engine is driven by change, not by forcing people to but the same old stuff, something that has been forgotten in the US. Will the new thing be worse. We don't know. Only time will tell. But saying that we should not change plastics because there is a risk is just like saying we should stop vaccinations because there is a risk.
We can't be afraid to change, but we can't go back either. We must move forward. Some things will get better, and some things will get worse.
Clearly there have been previous text readers. Clearly someone is going to lose money on this because Audio books are rather expensive, so someone is extremely afraid of this technology becoming assessable, reliable, and of high quality. But I do think complaining of this is equivalent of stealing smells.
The only thing I can think of that might be a problem is if the contracts signed by the right holder with Amazon somehow limited the rights of Amazon to read the books. Perhaps the right to display text on the Kindle is assigned to Amazon, but the commercial right to the audio of the book is assigned to someone else. It sounds silly, but it could be.
This also gives me pause in the purchase of an otherwise good product, simply because one can imagine that authors might pull the right to publish, or limit future rights, over this issue. The DRM could in fact limit the books that could be read aloud, or, since the Kindle is in real time connection, already purchased books could be disabled.
So, when some one talks about the EULA as a reason not to use MS Windows, that is a valid concern, just like when the complaint is targeted at Apple. The solution in both cases is the same. If the EULA is the issue, don't use the product. In this case, the four year old can't accept the liability, so the parents do. And when the four year old does something to break the license, like when the kid is 10 installs the software on two machines, then the parents will be liable. Frankly the risk of having to pay $250 thousands dollars in fines for my kid stealing software is a good reason to use unencumbered software or if, the EULA is not too scary, pay Apple for a family pack($200 complete set of OS and applications) that can be used on up to five machines around the house. Simply risk assessment.
Even so it this a reasonable solution. The iPod touch is a $200 gadget. One has to assume that some use outside of the spec are going to be used. For instance, if Apple is not saying it can support a microphone, then one assumes that feature cannot be tested, and the iPod touch cannot be returned on that basis if it does not work. I can see this as a cool tech thing, and might do it, but would not depend on it to work, for instance as a primary home phone through comcast, and certainly would not build a business around it.
This is where I get a bit annoyed with style over substance. I use apple products because the generally perform for me, and I buy what I need and can afford. If I could not afford an iPhone, I would not get a touch and pretend it was an iPhone just to be cool. If the iPhone did not work in my locale, I wouldn't be one of those trying to figure out how to make it work. I would just buy something else.
In the average PC world this may be quite different. The screens may use more than the processor, but they do not have to. If a machine is designed to minimize power consumption, the screen is not likely to be a huge power consumer.
Second, there are always practical limits to how many apps can run before the user begins to call customer service. While I do not know why MS would want to limit the number of Apps that can run, one reason might be that the hardware vendors don't want the customer service called. Hey, I bought this netbook, and am running OO.org, downloading movies in Gnutella, chatting in Pidgin, and checking my mail every minute, watching a DVD, and hey, the computer is slow. It might be that the netbook people are doing the same thing that Apple did with the iPhone. Making a multitasking OS a single tasking OS until the cheap hardware becomes advanced enough to go back to multitasking.
I am not MS booster, but the one thing that MS Windows has is applications. They may be applications that I think are dumb and a waste of bits, but there are applications. And by in large they are one click installs, fully configured, ready to run. If they have made one mistake, it is building excessive number of these utilities into the base OS instead of leveraging the ease of installing new functionality.
The situation with renewable energy is different. Yes when it takes energy to manufacture biomass into fuels. But if is done right, we are taking carbon out of the atmosphere one year, and putting it back in the next, creating a steady state. Clearly there are some issues now, but that is political. In the US, instead of using weeds, the corn growers, which have been pushing the US for years to a deadly philosophy of monoculture, is using food crops. On the other point, I don't think that biofuels is causing food prices to increase any more than lack of oil is causing the current high prices at the pump. demand for luxury food is increasing, the economic expansion of the past several years means that people are buying more, and there is much less focus on the needs of those that have no food.
As far as rare metals, these are not consumed. All these products can be remanufactured. The issue is political. In my US town, trash is picked up once a week at every house, but recycling is picked up only every other week at some houses. Houses are allowed to throw away dangerous materials without any fine. The only way to send electronics for remanufacture to go to the drop off on a work day. Of course a lot of this has to do with the costs involved. it is cheaper to mine new material rather than reuse old. for these materials the economics might be reversed, and we might the trend reversed.
It is worse than that. If you have an older XP, you have dig for a key, then download the WGA, then let WGA root around in your legally purchased and installed software, all before you can download the updates that protect the computer. This all while connected to the internet because WGA and activation are over the internet. If one does not have a hardware firewall, the computer is completely exposed. This in a world where the time from clean install to infection for such an unprotected system in measured in minutes.
A lot of the anti drinking people say what of the children, what of the family life. Again, if a child is not smart enough to not get itself killed before adulthood, well, what did I say above. It is not hard to not to stay off the hard stuff. I grew up around, and I did. My friends of all background and races did the same. Even those who did not were smart enough to manage and off themselves. If a bunch of kids want to party after cheerleading, and go off and off themselves several other people, and an unborn child, I might say there is benefit to that happening sooner rather than later, and it might be an indication that the parents might want to reconsider their family values. There have always been test for kids who want to make it into adulthood. Now the test is not offing yourself in a traffic accident or an overdose. Most of us pass these tests. I live in fear of those who are so protected that they never have to pass these trials and tribulations, yet still get to call themselves adults.
It seems that religion is about killing those we don't like, keeping those we do, no matter how suited,and damning the world to a lame existence that is indistinguishable from hell.
Now, let us look at reality. MS has a program that will allow developers to certificate their applications. For the most part, no one seems to using it. Apple has such a universal download and update program for the iPhone, but no one likes it, mostly because many think they have gone too far in regulating the market, but i think such danger is the exact reason why such a universal update resource is not available. And one might talk about Android, but while one might talk about open application development, I have seen nothing about automatic updating, which would make the most sense of all, yet it does not appear to exist.
About the only place such a situation exists is in real OSS, where responsibility is shared, and there is no one target to sue if all the machines become infected.
Actually, the way I understand digital it is unlikely the rural viewer will get anything at all. In the past, rural areas could get a signal just by mounting a large receiving antenna. Now, with the way digital works, it is unlikely that anyone who did not get excellent analog coverage is going to get nothing without either a station that retransmits content or a satellite service. Even in the city, there are stations that I have trouble receiving. The least of the rural worries are interference. It is seems they will be lucky if there is something to interfere with.
Of course people today are used to using unlimited service, even me. But there is always a limit, as no resource is infinite. The question usually is do we have to enforce that limit explicitly, or will the market tend to enforce it. For instance, in garbage collection I grew up with unlimited garbage collection. There were practical limits on what could be collected, and I suppose that sometime garbage would not be collected, and i would not call that fraud, but for the most part it worked rather well. But eventually people got lazy, greedy, and wasteful, and a formal limit had to be set. For most of us the limit was not a problem, and we were happy that the parasites who leeched off our taxes were contained.
I think that is what is going on here. I do not think that what amounts to a 142 MB limit per hour of every day is anything that most people would consider a limit. I do not think most services actually effectively feed more than 2 or 3 MB per minute, and least not every minute of day all year. I think that most people would be happy to know that cost are being contained so they are not forced to forced for some other persons p0rm habit. I think it would be more fraudulent to raise rates just to insure other people can run a cheap P2p service, not matter how noble such a service might be.
I also understand that many would say this is just anticompetitive behavior to prevent streaming TV and movies which are becoming more popular. To this I would say, how much tv do you watch? If you are talkiing about downloading extremely good quality movies, at 1 GB a piece, yes, that will eat up the limit, but if you are doing that I would think you would spring for the high speed unlimited service. Otherwise the stuff coming off, say netflix, seems pretty small and one would have to watch a hell of lot of TV to reach that limit. Again, i would not want to subsidize such use. On regular TV, the more you watch the more ads you see. On the web this is not the case.
Boot up and Shutdown times are equally irrelevant. I shut the PCs down on weekends. Am I going to notice or care that it takes a few more seconds for a machine to boot up or shut down. Also, these times are highly variable. Even on the same machine I suspect the variation is way outside the differences between the OS. 30 years ago we cared a little bit about boot up times. But then, we were reading from disk or tape, so these times were significant, and we might shut down a machine several times a day. When Apple made the Mac a super fast boot up machine, it was to solve a problem. Now it is just to win a juvenile contest. if there is not an order of magnitude difference, it does not really matter.
File copy time can be an issue, but not for everyone. I am going to make what may be a controversial statement. When I copy a multi Gigabyte set of files, and it takes a half an hour, that does not bother me. Neither do I care that for a large movie one OS might take a 30 seconds, while the next might take two minutes. What annoys me are those little daily copies of a small file that take a minute or so. Clearly there is some overhead. Sure, know how long to copy 1000 files is cool, but when does that happen.
What we don't have is how long it takes to set up a printer, something that I find I do way too often. Or how long it take to print to a printer, which has some OS dependence. Or how long it takes a save a file in MS Office versus OO.org. Or how long it takes to setup email. Or how long it takes to load a web browser. You know, the things that people do every day and tends to eat away at a persons limited time.
Camino with no add ons seems to work very well as well. No pop ups. Flash on demand only. The only thing it can't do is sync bookmarks to a server. I know there are really fancy things it can't do, but for my use, it does all I need. Thanks again for the good work.
CBS was fine half a million for that act. I would hope that comcast would be fined the same. Even if this was an accidental thing, it shows the unreliability of the comcast equipment, and if it was malicious, it shows a lack of security. One reason I do not have cable is the lack of reliability. It was a routine event to be days without cable. Anything that forces the cable company to be more reliable and responsive will help.
Of course we are not so United States centric, so I think we are moving towards names like PS23, GW32, etc. More efficient, but at what cost.
KIPP basically does the same thing. They open up in areas that where public schools or a private school already attracts the best of the best then claims to be providing a community service because they serve a diverse SSE. The social status of a student really makes little difference. A kid can be poor or rich, have one parent or two. What is important is that the student has been brought up to take school seriously. Another big issue in New York and other areas are students who have never had formal schooling, and are now forced into a compulsory educational system.
So this is what most people who get into education do not understand. The problem of educating those who wish to be educated has been solved. More money can be useful to attract more diverse teachers and buy equipment and supplies to enhance student learning. A large format printer, or an editing studio, or a the services of a very good writing coach, is not cheap. Students how want to be educated will work, will maximize the equipment and teachers, not matter if they are gifted and talented or not, whether they have money or not.
What, I believe, we don't know how to do, and where the Gates and similar foundations fail, is educating the student that does not have a cultural imperative to be educated, either because they have no interest in it or because the family does not see the value of it. Many times they say the teacher has to be more interested, the activities need to be more hands on, the school needs to be more inviting. While all these are true, it does not address of transforming the child from a victim of education to a student of education. It is one thing to study a subject because on it interested or because the teacher is cute, it is quite another to learn for the sake of gaining knowledge and becoming a educated adult. I don't think anyone knows how to do this. I also don't think anyone is seriously studying how to do this, rather focusing on changing the teacher to meet the level that the student wishes to work. This is not education.
For some applications, like Labview and igor, there are alternatives if you want to code. These applications, and those like it, are tightly intergrated packages that allowed automated workflow in the lab with minimal understading of the processes actually being used. For control this is not neccearily a big deal. For data aq and analysis, I think the researcher should know what is actually happening to convert raw data(for instance a voltage) to the pretty picture.
It is quite possible to take to open source modules, glue them together, and do almost everything that Labview and igor does. Whether this is cost effective is another question. A long time ago, when these tools were less developed and quite a bit more expensive, I was responsible for writing the data aq and control systems for some of our experiments. As a lowly paid student, it was cost effective.
As far as Inventor, that is a fish of another color. Like solid works, there is nothing else like it. It is a highly polished professional product that is not allowed to stagnant. Therefore, open source is not allowed to catch up, as it has in field of office applications. I am told that sketchup has many of the capabilities of Solidworks and Inventor. I am not sure how permissive the free license is.
His later works could be made indie of hollywood. Job, A comedy of manner comes to mind. Friday would sell tickets, or To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Some action, compressible.
I think we are all waiting for A Stranger in a Strange Land miniseries.
Home Basic - OxyContin - You still aren't going to make a commitment to the drug culture, but you need a stronger fix. Because it comes as a part of package, you don't need to find a dealer. If you are arrested, you can always claim it was prescibed or that the arrest is politically motivated.
Home Premium - Meth - You are know a dedicated member of the drug culture, maybe supporting pro drug use sites. Maybe you manufacture a few extra copies in your barn and deal them up on ebay, hoping the copyright police don't catch you.
Business - Cocaine - You are moving up in the big league. Money is not a problem, uoi just need the fix. You have dealer contacts, and long term contracts. Life is good.
Ultimate - Trip to Amsterdam - You have an office to make the plans, an expense account to pay for the trip, all you have to do is fly high.
But seriously, I know I am going to have to move from XP at some point, just like I had to move from NT and before that 95. It just does not give me a lot of confidence when more work may have been done creating various and arbitrary builds to meet certain price points than creating a stable OS. I mean, creating a single stable OS is hard enough. In Windows 7, MS has to build, debug, and correct dependencies of 5 different OS.
So, MS only drivers, no Playforsure support and no Apple protected ACC support. Of course of this would have been a non issue if MS supported universal standards(a media player does not need customer drivers if it is just treated as removable drive) and if MS focused on DRM free music. In fact the primary driver that kept Apple in the forefront for so long is the music industry insistence on DRM and the computer industries support of that position. We will see how apple fares now that Amazon has cheaper drm free music, but I think Apple will be ok now that people are used to used going to iTunes.
But I don't think that MS has to exit the market, just remember that the pupose of MS is to provide the low cost option. The Xbox is successful because it is the cheaper than a PS3, as the xbox has no HD media capability. The Zune is not cheaper than any iPod, except for the touch, so why buy it. If a PC were as expensive than the mac, how many people would buy it? Sell a zune for $100, and it will be on the top of the charts, just like the xbox. Or they could do something innovative and include wireless cell phone access, like the Kindle, and inlcude one year of subscription service. But that would innovative, not what MS does.
Exactly. In addition there was an old fashion price cut. old fashioned price cut. The complete set which elsewhere has sold for 100+ dollars now sells for around $60 on amazon, and has been on sale for as low as $40. The release online might have helped sales, but i think a fraction of customers would have bought if the set had cost twice as much.
In the DOS days, MS documentation was unusable. To do anything, one had to have a secondary unauthorized source. In the same timeframe, I also used DEC VMS Fortran and the IMSL library. I found the documentation of both of these very good. I never found a case where the DEC and official IMSL documentation did not match the behavior. Though the VMS Fotran documentation was just a sample, the VAX VMS documentation sat on a talbe 8 feet long. In a more modern case, I have used many libraries, such as the Boost C++ libraries, that put the MS documentation to shame.
In terms of OSS, external human readable documentation become much less of an issue. The source code is there. if something does not behave as expected, one can look at the code and figure out why. If one is really nice, since most OSS documentation is collaborative, one could even change the documentation to match the true behavior or add a not about unexpected behavior under certain conditions. If MS provided free and unfettered access to source code, so that at minimum any person who bought a copy of MS Visual Studio received a copy of the source code without having to sign any non disclosure agreements or the like, then I would agree. These complaints would be meaningless. After all, if you can't read code and figure out what is going on, then why are you programming in the first place?
But MS does not provide access to code to the common programmer. Nor does it have a history of provided reliable documentation to the common programmer. It does have a history of limiting what non-partner companies can do. So, all that is being asked is that it reliably documents it's API. To believe that it can't is to believe that we are basing our IT infrastructure on products from an incompetent company, so we choose to believe that it won't.
If one is to complain about Google, and accept that it is a Google world, then one should learn the rules and figure out how to make them work for you. In it's simplicity, Wikipedia does this. Most other sites do this. Birtanica, not being relevant in the post trivia book world, does not. I grew up on britannica, I know the books very well. But when I can search the internet for more current, more detailed, and often more accurate work, why would I go to Britannica? Certainly if I had a kid, I might have the kid use it as a safe destination, but outside of that it seems quaint.
And now we are told that Obama 'promises' to only use his blackberry for personal communications. I am sure he has every good intention to comply, but, as with Palin, we see that routine use of personal assets while in a government job can lead to a confusion and misuse between the personal asset and government property. One can imagine Palin logged onto her yahoo account simply writing a government note because it was more efficient that logging into the proper account, or thinking that since she was staying in her own home on government business, that the taxpayers should help her pay her mortgage.
Which is to say that we cannot trust that our officials are always doing the right thing, no matter how moral or trustworthy we think they are. If Obama uses the blackberry, then it still has to fall under the FOIA. If that means we get hundreds of pages of 'thinking of you dear', that is fine. At least we will know that he is not plotting to defraud the American consumers by colluding with oil company executives.