Ethanol can be a significant savings over fossil fuels. It depends on the raw product used and the process. In the last analysis I saw, in the journal Science I believe, Corn ethanol broke even with fossil fuels. The reason we use corn, and not sugar cane, in the US is that the US is a corn economy, and we have the infrastructure and resources to exploit corn. Due to the number of other products, corn might be profitable in the long run. I have seen no analysis in which corn ethanol is significantly less efficient than fossil fuel, and corn has the advantage that is renewable.
That said, we should not have tariffs on any ethanol. The US can compete on a number of fronts. Texas used to be a sugar cane capital, and they can be again. Texas can continue their energy dominance by growing and exploited sugar cane for energy. Furthermore, there are several prairie grasses that can be used for ethanol. Such grass is not only better in some ways that corn, but may not be nearly as harsh on the soil. Midwest farmers can still makle a good living growing these grasses, though I do not know what the environmental impact on the machinery for these grasses are.
While such games are good for introducing concepts, they are often not good for abstracting concepts, which is the critical skill in programming. Understanding that the variable represents a physical entity, and that the variable is going to model how that entity works, is best done by working abstractly. The biggest problem I see is that kids are not forced to move from the playing with blocks phase to the generalizing concept phase. At one time, and still in some places, such generalizations are required by the time on hits the teens years. Now, for most people, it is never required.
Indeed, teach them when they are young. My first computer class was nearly a score and half years ago. I was fortunate, however, in that the games ended pretty quickly and we were expected to hunker down and learn abstract thinking.
I think the books can go. Even now, I can read academic material as easily on a monitor as in a book.
Largely I agree with argument. The main issue I have with it is the equivalence of sex and nudity. The exposure of a breast is not the same as simulated sex, and definitely no worse than the ritualized violence we see on the American Football field. In any case, if confusion was the issue, we would not have anyone consume alcoholic beverages on primetime. I think every teen knows the best way to get sex is to get drunk, PArt of growing up is understanding that the rules change based on social position. Such change can be as simple as giving up my seat on the bus for an older person or the ability to the bathroom on my own.
The increasing violence on TV is a deeper issue. At least in the US, it is the departure from the honorable values that has served us so well. These values define us as a generally civilized peaceful people and have been in effect ever since General Washington ruled that, no matter what the evil british do, we will take care of all prisoners, feed them, and shelter them. It continued through Kennedy's unwillingness to launch a suprise attack. Such moral values has helped the US keep massacres and retaliations to a minimum. What we see know, unfortunately, is the masses so scared that they will lose their god given right to drive and SUV that they are willing to ignore the moral basis of the USA and condone torture or what ever means are necessary to oppress the people that jeopardize out life style. Such moral failing are reflected on TV, I guess the FCC thinks that it can fix by legislation what is fundamentally a social issue caused by people greed and lack of faith.
Killing a domain is not a political issue. It is a bussiness issue. One cannot run a reliable service if there is a chance that your domain might be pulled for arbitrary "offensive content"
That said, I have had no trouble with godaddy. The only reason I began to switch was thier increasing annoying registration process. It was just easier to register at another provider, a provider that gave extras for almost the same money. In particular I did not like the fact that godaddy encouraged people to register domains for the sole purpose of flipping them. I hate to want a domain only to find that someone has picked it up just to flip it.
It was in fact that process of looking for a less hostile registration process that lead me away form Godaddy. One of the places I tried, cheapnames.con, looked very similar to Godaddy. On surmise,with no evidence, this lead me to believe that godaddy might be losing lots of customers due to customer service issues, and rather than fix the service, they created another firm to try to catch them on the backend.
In the spirit of not putting all ones eggs in one basket, I have been using two registrars for the past year. I am now happy with the new provider, and recetly tried to move my last domain to the new provider. In spite of all my efforts, godaddy will not let me transfer. No matter. The domain expires soon, and I will not be in a hurry in go back.
You see, there are no political issues, just customer service issues. Although I was happy at godaddy, another service gives me a better value with less annoyances. All too often the paranoid business community creates these conspiracies to cover up their own incompetence and greed. They think that the liberals or conservatives are out to get them, when in fact the business leaders have just let their personal political beliefs distract them from the core function of a firm, which is to provide a good value in goods and service to the customer. Pretty much more of the US is agnostic enough not to care if the CEO is worrying the sheep, as long the value is good. It is, more often than not, the short sighted firms that brand themselves as "christian" or "conservative" or whatever in hopes of attracting those few people that shop on solely on the basis of politics. It can be a good strategy, because those people will buy the goods and services no matter the quality of price. Just look at Whole Food market, which I also like, but has gone down since it has become hip and mainstream political.
It can be argued that such data, if amalgamated, belongs to the ISP. They are the only ones that can reliably collect such information, and it can help them and other services maximize the end user experience. Complaining that they collect this data is like complaining about the people who pick the trash for recyclables and antiques.
And there is reason to complain in both cases. If the trash digger causes a disturbance, or the ISP forces the user to install software, or causes delays by redirected all requests to a proxy, then this is a problem. Just like the problem of websites that loads images from 10 different ad servers before loading any content. In all cases the service is on the border of no longer providing a net service to the end user. For example, in the case where an ISP demands that user load spyware prior to connection, and many of the Bells once did, is self serving and provides little benefit to the user.
The profit side really is not an iaaue. Neither is privacy as nothing is private on the internet. The analogy I like to use for situations like this is the grocery store affinity card. Grocery stores provide these cards to better personally track customers. Credit cards work almost as well, but the affinity card guantees that every purchase is registered to a specific person. To make people use the cards, the stores inflate prices on many products, and then allows a "discount" if the customer has a card. To make customers feel like the affinity card has some value, the grocery stores provides significant discounts on few items, items that would have simply been loss leaders in pre-affinity card times. Like all data tracking, most of the benefit is to the service provider, and only a marginal benifit is provided tot the customer. Yet customers seem to love this stores, and have no problem with the grocery store, it agents, and anyone who is sold the data, to know that he or she buys 8 pints of ben&jerry's, 3 packs of condoms, and 1 box of hemorrhoid creme per month. I, OTOH, don't want to deal with having to present my papers every time I check out, so i go to a store that will give me the best prices just because they have the ability to compete without a gimmick.
These points can be put into a simple statement. Most hardware manufacturers, since they compete on cost, have to have the flexibility to put the cheapest parts into a product. In most cases, the windows drivers are available, or can be develops, and the costs of these drivers can be amortized over a million units. I don't think any manufacturer is going to say we are only going to use these specified components, because they will have to raise to the price $20 and in the process lose half of the market share. It is much better to use whatever components fall out of the back of a lorry, develop drivers as one is able to, then blame MS when things do not work.
As long as everything is running MS Windows, everything is fine. A machine breaks, it can easily be replaced by another machines, if that the other machine has differenet parts. The PC is just an interchangeable cog in a vast network, and it makes little sense to spend real money on an individual cog. However, as the specifications of the cog becomes more tight, the cost of the cog increases. It is no longer possible to use the cheapest crap available. It is no longer possible to accept slightly out of true products. Now things must work, and we are no longer manufacturing to a throw away spec.
As long as the mentality of *nix community is that it is a cheap solution, MS will continue to sell. MS is a cheap solution, it is a known solution, and and it is a solution that provides the millions of cogs needed for the information age. However, if people are willing to spend $100 more for a better product, then there is a change. We know that people are not willing to spend more for a better product becuase we all hear the whining about the high cost of macs, or that Dell wants more money for *nix box, or how unfair it is that the box built from the stuff found in the dumpster won't boot *nix.
For *nix to succeed, it must be seen as a premium product, something that will cost more, but will deliver better performance. Have a hardware consistent set of machines must be a benifit to an IT department. I have worked in all sorts of places, and the IT field is the only one where no one wants to pay to get the best quality. Most would rather buy the cheapest thing and then work out the problems later.
Amid the rising use by business customers of Microsoft software on micro computers, IBM has put out a press release concerning the upstart firm. Sources at IBM are quoted as saying that the growth of Microsoft was 'Insane" and any notion that the firm had a bright future was "ridiculous". The source was further quoted as saying "the only reason MS can sell products so cheap, is that the development costs are low due to the fact that they steal computer time worth millions of dollars from the US taxpayer. As soon as the taxpayer is no longer subsidizing the development, Microsoft will be no more. Furthermore, the Intel platform cannot compete with our recently developed RISC technology"
IBM is confident of it position as the dominant supplier to the Business market. Although it plans to supply microcomputers, using the Intel/Microsoft platform, it sees the bulk of the market continuing to use IBM mainframes, rather than the microcomputer toy. The home computer, while interesting, will continue to operate primarily as a terminal. IBM sees a time when the home computer will dial into a mainframe in which all applications and data will be safely and securely stored. IBM does not see the home user as having the technological skills to maintain or secure a home computer, and therefore dial in access will continue to dominate. IBM plans to be in the forefront of such dial in services, as the company that has the foresight to capitalize on such services will the company that controls the home market. By contrast, companies that arrive late to the party, will be left behind.
While I in no way want to denigrate the importance of the right of a person to broadcast the latest cocktail recipe to 10 of his or her closest friends, and in fact feel that low power radio stations are a basic means of insuring that the public airwaves remain public, the villain in this story is not NPR or any other volunteer run donation funded radio stations. By definition, these donations funded radio stations serve the people, because the people care enough to actually donate funds and time to these stations, as opposed to commercial stations that which may serve no public purpose, or a LPFm station which may only serve the purpose of a single person.
The reason that we do not have room for LPFM stations is that the FCC over-licensed the commercial bandwidth, and did not leave enough in reserve for station that verifiably serve a public purpose. The commercial stations then managed to frame the argument so that the public would complain not about the over-licensing of redundant commercial interests, but about the public stations enacting a protectionist stand. The public stations have to be protectionist. No one is threatening to remove a commercial license, and most commercial stations can afford to increase their power. In fact, by putting forth such a arguments one is effect lobbying for the pure commercialization of the airwaves, leaving no room for public radio, much less LPFM.
The issue is greater than LPFM, greater than NPR, greater than Pacifca, greater than the ACN or whatever your favorite Christian network is. Such stations have limited funds and loads of enemies. On a crowded dial, it would be all too easy to create a network of LPFM transmitters that would block the signals of such public stations. Again, I am not saying that NPR is correct in it's actions. I am not generating a scary scenario so to use fear to move people to my position. All I am saying is that the dial is crowded. In some places, there is a scant half megahertz between stations. In some markets a single entity owns much of the commercial licenses. In some markets, the exact same single is broadcast over multiple commercial stations. There is enough bandwidth available for public, commercial, semi-commercial, and LPFM. The problem is that FCC does not take the public airwaves seriously, and allows the private corporations to do whatever they like. Then the private corporations have enough media access so that people believe that it is the public radio fault.
As has been clearly shown in the previous few years, peer review and government regulation are not resilient against willful cases of fraud. For instance, if the researchers followed appropriate procedures, but failed to include all data i the analysis, or otherwise doctored the data, such fraud would not emerge until the study was repeated. Furthermore, since most medical research is so difficult to repeat exactly, if the effect of organ damage is small, and the fraud is sophisticated enough, there is really no one of knowing if the researchers were the victim of a statistical anomaly or in fact hid data.
This is why, IMHO, these studies should be independent and any oversight at arms length. The FDA should ask the NIH to award the research to a qualified lab based on competence and independence, and the award should be funded through the NIH using the funds of the firm that needs the research. A second lab would in charge of reviewing the result. Though this would be add an unfortunate level of bureaucracy, it would also help improve the reputation of these firms, a reputation that has been tarnished over the past decade by an effort to put goods on the market that do not provide a net benefit, as defined by the FDA.
From what we have seen, these are not licensing deals. These are sales of the catalogs for specific use. For an example that has nothing to do with this case, the Beatles catalog is worth north of billion dollars, and I suspect that any deal to sell the music in digital form, even with DRM, will require a significant fraction of the price up front. After all, once the music is out there, how are they going to be able to sell the same song for the thousandth time?
I would assume the terms Google was offered was the same. Buy the catalog for the right to private viewing, or no sale. This is certainly the right of the content owner, but just like the MTV attacks by the music labels, quite counter productive. The safeguards are now in place, and the one minute clips are free advertising for the network. In any case, this case will move forward, the laws will be clarified, and google will end up paying extraordinary amounts of money in legals fees and fines, which is, I believe, as it should be. These fines will keep the buggy whip company that is Viacom in coke and booze and girls for a number of years, if, of course, they can survive long enough to reap the payoff. Ultimately, since most of the assets are in very old media, and it has few modern blockbusters, Viacom is going to be hit quite hard when the market for dead stock media is no longer viable.
(And yes, we should be aware of the irony of a company suing for copyright abuse when in fact it profits from the same. But such is much to commonplace for it to ironic.)
MS is where it is today because it allowed people to copy software. Even now, the home user can often get a copy of office from work. I know people who bought a PC because the software was free and easy to use. Other machines would have incurred some additional software cost or time.
There are only a couple change from the long ago is the present. The first is the demand that new PCs come with a properly licensed version of Windows. As far as I can tell, this program helps cover the fixed costs at MS, and was probably necessary due to extreme inefficiencies in the organization. MS thrived for years giving away the OS. The second change is the formalization of take home a copy policy. Employees can now, at least sometime, legally do what they were doing anyway. This is useful to MS as it keeps employees from user other OS then infecting the office with the other OS.
The big issue was corporate, and MS cracked down on corporate in the 90's. This needed to be done as people were becoming enormously wealthy on the back of MS products, and not paying MS the proper considerations. The sad thing was that firms that followed all MS rules, bought all the software, were still punished with expensive and useless audits, expensive not only in terms of real costs, but untold costs in terms of customer loyalty. I for one grew to like Windows NT quite a lot, but after seeing the place I was working suffer, never upgraded to 2000 for my personal machine.
The reporting was vague because the terms of the move are vague. The corporate headquarters will be in Dubai, but the global headquarters will remain in houston. This will likely mean that certain things that are now under US jurisdiction will be no longer be so.
In any case it is silly to think that Haliburton pays any taxes that they do not choose to pay. All this will likely mean is that they may be able to avoid some of the new laws that have popped up in the past few years. The republican congress knew that such laws would force even more businesses off shore, and now it is happening.
IN my experience, the right leaning folks tend not to want to pay for things that are not seen as status items. Now, left leaning folks are often the same, but some creative types do see Macs as a status item, and therefore worth paying for.
What I have noticed over the years, however, is that some of the most aggressive pirates of software are some of the most conservative people I know. They need the software to make money, and therefore it is a good investment, but they want pay for it. I had one guy demand that I 'loan' him my copy of MS Office, and leave in great offense when I refused. This guy also kept a loaded gun in his truck, and moved it from the glove compartment to the seat when he got to close to the city.
One problem with the mac, especially in the 90's, was that everything cost money. One could not just go out, spend $1000 on a box, and then steal all the software. One had to pay for not only the software, but also premium prices on upgrades. This of course meant that liberals, who often are not obsessed with money, were often also those willing to invest in the hardware.
I am a fiscal conservative, so appreciate the fact that Mac will now run OSS software, and my fiscal conservatism also allows me to appreciate that fact that the Mac provide value. I pay them money and immediately get treated like a honest customer, without having to jump hoops like WGA.
I think the power thing has to do more with who has the money. Look at the U.S. deficit over time. It is higher with a conservative government, and the deficit merely reflects the amount that the average person owes. With a high deficit, one in effect limits the power of the government to perform the function of providing services to the people, and insures that taxes are not spent on social services, but in fact pushed back into the pockets of the rich. If we could get rid of the deficit, and collect taxes from those traitors that refuse to pay their taxes, we could implement all the tax reduction plans put forth by the president, and even pay for the war without whoring ourselves out to unfriendly foreign governments.
I have often thought of this. If I was to buy a computer for an employee, who was just a cog in the vast machine that was my enterprise, what would I buy? It would be a rather disposible, simple, and generic product. It would be an interchangeable as the employee. One does not buy the best pencils and pens for the worker bees, and one does not buy the best customized notepads for the worker bees. One does not even supply an office with nice furniture to the worker bees, or even a high end company car. One supplies the basic necessities that are required for the work. In computers, this is now basic generic interchangeable product that matches the interchangeable employee is Windows on a generic box. Both are highly subject to competitive pressure, and at least in the private sector can be acquired very near cost. Paying any more, for something that a worker bee could destroy tomorrow, makes no sense.
What we have seen is producing PCs is only hugely profitable for MS, Intel, and AMD. Otherwise the competition is so great that very most machines appear to profitable only with subsidies from MS and Intel. It is silly to want Apple in the corporate market. What I want is the computer to work together, specifically MS to no longer encourage developers to write interfaces that are hostile to other OS. This way the worker bees can be given the generic equipment they need, and I can use the specilized equipment I need to efficiently work.
I see virtualization as a means to use the excess cycles in the modern microsprocessors. Like over aggressive GUI and DRM, it creates a need for the ever more expensive and complex processors. I am continuously amazed that while I can run most everything I have on a sub GHZ machine, everyone is clamoring about the need for 3 and 4 GHZ machines. And though my main machine runs at over a GHZ, it still falters at decoding DRM compressed Video, even though a DVD plays fine on my 500 MHZ machine.
But it still is useful. Like terminals hooked up to big mainframes, it may make sense to run multiple virtual machines off a single server, or even have the same OS run for the same user in different spaces on a single machine. We have been heading to this point for a while, and now that we have the power, it makes little sense not to use it.
The next thing I am waiting for are very cheap machines, say $150, with no moving parts, only network drivers, that will link to a remote server.
You know, the auto manufacturers offered employee benefits to attract the best workers. If you were the best worker, would you work for the person that offered the least compensation? Likewise, experience is worth something. Do you want your car built by a bunch of 18 year old kids that are thinking about their next orgy, or a 30 years person who knows everything that can go wrong, and needs to keep the job to support his or her family.
I have worked in the private sector, government, and academia. In all cases, the make or break criteria is customer service. The american auto companies illustrates this very well. They were profitable, they were dominant, but when we tried to buy a car in the 70's, they were arrogant and unresponsive. Anytime I have dealt with an American car company, the experience has been the same. One can complain about high costs of healthcare, but when compensation for individuals is 8 and 9 figures, how can you claim that the company is not making enough profit? Can these people not be paid 7 figures instead?
Accountability is about the same everywhere. I worked in one office where the guys went and did drugs on thier lunch breaks. Teachers can't do that. I worked in private offices where office staff were using the company card for personal auto fuel. That is much more difficult to get away with in schools. Everyone steals from the office supply cabinet, but not in schools. Every situation has a unique set of rules, and it merely the lack of empathy that makes a person a jealous that others do not have follow the exact same rules.
While unions are imperfect, they do some good. For instance, a firm could create a situation in which a worker is simple used until they are so sick they cannot work. Then lay the worker off in such a way that the government has to foot the bill for social security and medicare. Or force a worker to work 12 hour days with 8 hours of pay. Or create some much paperwork that no teaching gets down. While some points are valid, in the real world employers will try to maximize short term gain and minimize short term pay, while workers are trying to maximize long term gain while minimizing work. Clearly these goals are incompatible, and unions can help find a compromise.
On the last point, any certification requires the attendance of boring courses. For instance, no matter how good of a programmer you are, it is difficult to get a job without a certification. The certification is largely meaningless, I have seen people get these sheets of paper just by taking the test a number of times. The certifications are put up merely as a barrier to maximize the already excessive pay of coders and serve no real purpose to one that really knows the trade of computer work. If it weren't for certification course in computers, we would have real people coding, and not just those that want the money so bad that they take the exam.
As far as the doctorate in a subject, how many times on/. have we heard people complain about their professors. Do you really think a PhD mathematician has the skill to teach a middle school math course? One goo thing about the NCLB, is that teachers are now test for subject area content and how to deal with the kids. There are some minor skills necessary. It kind of reminds me of a person I once knew that hated to pay the plumber, but had no idea of take apart pipe. It is easy to think that things one are completely ignorant of are simple. After all, how hard could it be to cut silicon. One just needs a saw a a polisher. Anyone could do it. yeah.
Right now the US has the highest technology, most detailed surveillance, and most money. Yet we are tricked into believing false intelligence by the allegedly backwards countries of N. Korea and Iraq. The low tech Iraqi's regularly destroy our truck and planes, killing thousands of US citizens, all without a technological infrastructure. This proves one again that people and ingenuity can at least significantly annoy the high tech automatic systems. Dependence on automated system merely gives us the illusion of security, and encourages to take increasingly contraindicated risks, as is shown by our current war on two front, soon to be three or four.
For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection
Such reliance on automated intelligence, and the false sense of security, is shown in the above quote. There are any number of ways to use the system against the government. Leave the car in a location for a different random locations over a number of weeks. Find the blind spot in the system and switch cars. Perhaps you make it appear that the car came from an embassy. It would not be so hard to do. Homeland security would be running around chasing false leads while the real terrorist are free to plan another event.
Sometimes I hear good thing from the Bush administration, things like the importance of humint, but then I hear something like this and my faith falls back to zero.
It rather depends on what the job of the teacher is, and what the long term of expectations of the students are. One could say that the job of the teacher is to keep students out of the job market, or at least out of the parents hair. It in this case, the job of the teacher is to babysit kids and then give enough home work so the student cannot hold a job. This is consistent with the parents view. It would do little good to keep the kids busy during the day just to let them have afternoon off.
Now, if the parent is taking the radical view of actually teaching kids, and not baby-sitting, then the situation becomes more complex. It is possible to combine the teaching and practice of basic skills into the school day, if the kids are motivated, if the kids are bright enough, and if the kids are at or around grade level. Such kids can probably achieve the required 8th grade education by the end of high school with little more than classroom work.
But such students are not common, and such low expectations are hardly worth the huge amounts of money we spend educating our kids. For the average kid that can learn for 10-15 per session, another 10-15 minutes of reinforcing practice can make all the difference in the world. And it is not a matter of whether the teacher taught the material, it is simply a matter of the student making the effort of internalizing the material. Internalization is a very personal, sometimes painful, process, but little learning goes on for students who choose to not so do. For the lower grades, this might involve 10 minutes of reading and 5 minutes of practicing letters. Not much work, but the payoff can be great.
OTOH, I know the consequences of excessive homework. For most students, homework should increase from 20 minutes per night to a few hours of homework per night over the course of the k-12 progressions. Even outside the pedagogical benefits, such work is necessary for college and life. A last year student should have a comparable workload as the freshmen college student, and more important have the skills to manage their own time. The most lacking skill of any student is the ability to do work without being watched and prodded. While the high school student spends 7 hours in class and a few hours on homework, the college student spends a few hours in class and 7-10 hours on homework. For life, I have seen many examples of young adults forced out of a job because they did not have the skills to schedule their time. On a more recent note, I have left a number of sales people without commission because they felt that the job was too much work.
Re:And this is news how?
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Is Vista a Trap?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Really, this is only an issue because MS is trying to drive sales, and keep the current desktop monopoly, by marketing Vista as an upgrade while technically defining it as a whole new OS. As a new OS, these problems are to be expected, while as a simple upgrade the problems are not acceptable. They are between a rock and a hard place. Admit it is a new OS and lose customers. Keep the fiction of upgrade, and have uphappy customers.
There is also the issue of trying to run a new OS. Certainly, no one that is faint of heart should install Vista today, or even in the next year. The PC makes should not even be shipping Vista mandatory for the next six months. It is new, and customers should not be forced to buy it.
This reminds me of trying to install any OS, especially in old hardware. I could never get a my build of Linux to install on my old Compaq, because I could never get the machine to recognize enough RAM. I had to do clean install of OS X on a pre-2000 machine because the installer crashed the machine. both of these were totally acceptable because I was installing a new OS on an old machine. The only news here is MS is not being honest with the product capabilities.
I think this is like the MTV debacle. Unsatisfied with the massive amount of sales that MTV created by advertising their products, the music labels wanted even more money. As a result, the spring break video became more popular than the music video, reality television was born, and music labels last massive amounts of cheap adverts.
Apple and others are providing a means to compensate for loss of sales due to the decrease in popularity of the CD due to the relative high cost and inconvenient form factor. Instead of welcoming such help, they are again to shoot the messenger because they fell the they feel it will make them marginally more money, at least short term. Not that they don't have the right to make that choice, but if the owner of the music wants to release it without DRM, there are any number of services that would be willing to comply, and I am sure that any label could put such a service together for a nominal fee.
Outside of the fantasy land of the naîve peter pan type, most "volunteering" is corporate base. Even situations that seem obvious. For exmaple, many people the to the corporal entity that is the church, not out an obvious sense of volunteering, but to receive the tenfold reward. I doubt that United Way would not receive anywhere near they money they get, and built their many corporate branches in many major cities, without the pressure of local employers upon the employees, all fearful of losing their jobs. Likewise, most volunteer based community events are voluntarily sponsored by a large doner, staffed by other corporate based for profit based organizations, all in hopes of free publicity, which the event happily provides with huge banners, announcements, and other publicity.
The cool thing about this situation is that the OS does not pop up a banner ad every time a piece of code from IBM is used. You do not have to click through a number of pages acknowledging the work that each company contributed. Simply because so much of the contributions are annonymous indicates that this is truly a volunteer effort.
The computer retail store has been consolidating for a long time. Part of it has to do with internet and mail order. Part of it has to do with the decision to stock only high volume parts and accessories. I recall when CompUSA took over a store a I used to shop at. They removed all the cool stuff.
So now they can't compete. When I need to simply replace a failed part, Microcenter provides a better experience and selection. The salespeople are always willing to help, and the cashiers always give them credit. If I can wait a day, I order the product and get it the next day. In either case, I end up ordering what I want anyway because no one in town has it.
The last time I was at Compusa, I went there specifically because I had a coupon for an LCD Monitor. It took me about 15 minutes to get the monitor, and about 15 minutes to check out with the advertised price. That was the last time I dealt with them. In fact, the complicated coupon/rebate problem is why I just mail order so many things. I can deal with reputable people where the advertised price is the price.
Not a good comparison. 20 years ago, this was the calculator, which is pretty similar to what we use today. Even 25 years ago, the calculator was a significantly powerful computing machine capable of mass storage, and still fit in a pocket. To get to really massive machines, one has to go back to the pre transistor days, when the mechanical machines were 40 pounds.
Agreed. a others have mentioned, the Newton was the first consumer attempt at a PDA, and it was flawed enough, and the emerging big enough, for others to fix those problems. One of the biggest problem was that it was an Apple, and the world was quickly moving to MS products, and Apple seemed incompatible.
In fact most of the other PDAs were not much better. At the time I was consulting, used many of the them, and most were further below the mark than the Newton, which could plug into the LAN, print, and was in many ways a full featured computer. What the others had, and what the newton critically did not, was what we know call integration with the desktop. Apple had little software at the time, and the Newton was a device that did not integrate with much.
In fact what finally made me give up the Newton was the Palm V. It was small, it had good integration, and although inferior to the newton in many respects, it made a good replacement for the Filofax.
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That said, we should not have tariffs on any ethanol. The US can compete on a number of fronts. Texas used to be a sugar cane capital, and they can be again. Texas can continue their energy dominance by growing and exploited sugar cane for energy. Furthermore, there are several prairie grasses that can be used for ethanol. Such grass is not only better in some ways that corn, but may not be nearly as harsh on the soil. Midwest farmers can still makle a good living growing these grasses, though I do not know what the environmental impact on the machinery for these grasses are.
Indeed, teach them when they are young. My first computer class was nearly a score and half years ago. I was fortunate, however, in that the games ended pretty quickly and we were expected to hunker down and learn abstract thinking.
I think the books can go. Even now, I can read academic material as easily on a monitor as in a book.
The increasing violence on TV is a deeper issue. At least in the US, it is the departure from the honorable values that has served us so well. These values define us as a generally civilized peaceful people and have been in effect ever since General Washington ruled that, no matter what the evil british do, we will take care of all prisoners, feed them, and shelter them. It continued through Kennedy's unwillingness to launch a suprise attack. Such moral values has helped the US keep massacres and retaliations to a minimum. What we see know, unfortunately, is the masses so scared that they will lose their god given right to drive and SUV that they are willing to ignore the moral basis of the USA and condone torture or what ever means are necessary to oppress the people that jeopardize out life style. Such moral failing are reflected on TV, I guess the FCC thinks that it can fix by legislation what is fundamentally a social issue caused by people greed and lack of faith.
That said, I have had no trouble with godaddy. The only reason I began to switch was thier increasing annoying registration process. It was just easier to register at another provider, a provider that gave extras for almost the same money. In particular I did not like the fact that godaddy encouraged people to register domains for the sole purpose of flipping them. I hate to want a domain only to find that someone has picked it up just to flip it.
It was in fact that process of looking for a less hostile registration process that lead me away form Godaddy. One of the places I tried, cheapnames.con, looked very similar to Godaddy. On surmise,with no evidence, this lead me to believe that godaddy might be losing lots of customers due to customer service issues, and rather than fix the service, they created another firm to try to catch them on the backend.
In the spirit of not putting all ones eggs in one basket, I have been using two registrars for the past year. I am now happy with the new provider, and recetly tried to move my last domain to the new provider. In spite of all my efforts, godaddy will not let me transfer. No matter. The domain expires soon, and I will not be in a hurry in go back.
You see, there are no political issues, just customer service issues. Although I was happy at godaddy, another service gives me a better value with less annoyances. All too often the paranoid business community creates these conspiracies to cover up their own incompetence and greed. They think that the liberals or conservatives are out to get them, when in fact the business leaders have just let their personal political beliefs distract them from the core function of a firm, which is to provide a good value in goods and service to the customer. Pretty much more of the US is agnostic enough not to care if the CEO is worrying the sheep, as long the value is good. It is, more often than not, the short sighted firms that brand themselves as "christian" or "conservative" or whatever in hopes of attracting those few people that shop on solely on the basis of politics. It can be a good strategy, because those people will buy the goods and services no matter the quality of price. Just look at Whole Food market, which I also like, but has gone down since it has become hip and mainstream political.
And there is reason to complain in both cases. If the trash digger causes a disturbance, or the ISP forces the user to install software, or causes delays by redirected all requests to a proxy, then this is a problem. Just like the problem of websites that loads images from 10 different ad servers before loading any content. In all cases the service is on the border of no longer providing a net service to the end user. For example, in the case where an ISP demands that user load spyware prior to connection, and many of the Bells once did, is self serving and provides little benefit to the user.
The profit side really is not an iaaue. Neither is privacy as nothing is private on the internet. The analogy I like to use for situations like this is the grocery store affinity card. Grocery stores provide these cards to better personally track customers. Credit cards work almost as well, but the affinity card guantees that every purchase is registered to a specific person. To make people use the cards, the stores inflate prices on many products, and then allows a "discount" if the customer has a card. To make customers feel like the affinity card has some value, the grocery stores provides significant discounts on few items, items that would have simply been loss leaders in pre-affinity card times. Like all data tracking, most of the benefit is to the service provider, and only a marginal benifit is provided tot the customer. Yet customers seem to love this stores, and have no problem with the grocery store, it agents, and anyone who is sold the data, to know that he or she buys 8 pints of ben&jerry's, 3 packs of condoms, and 1 box of hemorrhoid creme per month. I, OTOH, don't want to deal with having to present my papers every time I check out, so i go to a store that will give me the best prices just because they have the ability to compete without a gimmick.
As long as everything is running MS Windows, everything is fine. A machine breaks, it can easily be replaced by another machines, if that the other machine has differenet parts. The PC is just an interchangeable cog in a vast network, and it makes little sense to spend real money on an individual cog. However, as the specifications of the cog becomes more tight, the cost of the cog increases. It is no longer possible to use the cheapest crap available. It is no longer possible to accept slightly out of true products. Now things must work, and we are no longer manufacturing to a throw away spec.
As long as the mentality of *nix community is that it is a cheap solution, MS will continue to sell. MS is a cheap solution, it is a known solution, and and it is a solution that provides the millions of cogs needed for the information age. However, if people are willing to spend $100 more for a better product, then there is a change. We know that people are not willing to spend more for a better product becuase we all hear the whining about the high cost of macs, or that Dell wants more money for *nix box, or how unfair it is that the box built from the stuff found in the dumpster won't boot *nix.
For *nix to succeed, it must be seen as a premium product, something that will cost more, but will deliver better performance. Have a hardware consistent set of machines must be a benifit to an IT department. I have worked in all sorts of places, and the IT field is the only one where no one wants to pay to get the best quality. Most would rather buy the cheapest thing and then work out the problems later.
IBM is confident of it position as the dominant supplier to the Business market. Although it plans to supply microcomputers, using the Intel/Microsoft platform, it sees the bulk of the market continuing to use IBM mainframes, rather than the microcomputer toy. The home computer, while interesting, will continue to operate primarily as a terminal. IBM sees a time when the home computer will dial into a mainframe in which all applications and data will be safely and securely stored. IBM does not see the home user as having the technological skills to maintain or secure a home computer, and therefore dial in access will continue to dominate. IBM plans to be in the forefront of such dial in services, as the company that has the foresight to capitalize on such services will the company that controls the home market. By contrast, companies that arrive late to the party, will be left behind.
The reason that we do not have room for LPFM stations is that the FCC over-licensed the commercial bandwidth, and did not leave enough in reserve for station that verifiably serve a public purpose. The commercial stations then managed to frame the argument so that the public would complain not about the over-licensing of redundant commercial interests, but about the public stations enacting a protectionist stand. The public stations have to be protectionist. No one is threatening to remove a commercial license, and most commercial stations can afford to increase their power. In fact, by putting forth such a arguments one is effect lobbying for the pure commercialization of the airwaves, leaving no room for public radio, much less LPFM.
The issue is greater than LPFM, greater than NPR, greater than Pacifca, greater than the ACN or whatever your favorite Christian network is. Such stations have limited funds and loads of enemies. On a crowded dial, it would be all too easy to create a network of LPFM transmitters that would block the signals of such public stations. Again, I am not saying that NPR is correct in it's actions. I am not generating a scary scenario so to use fear to move people to my position. All I am saying is that the dial is crowded. In some places, there is a scant half megahertz between stations. In some markets a single entity owns much of the commercial licenses. In some markets, the exact same single is broadcast over multiple commercial stations. There is enough bandwidth available for public, commercial, semi-commercial, and LPFM. The problem is that FCC does not take the public airwaves seriously, and allows the private corporations to do whatever they like. Then the private corporations have enough media access so that people believe that it is the public radio fault.
This is why, IMHO, these studies should be independent and any oversight at arms length. The FDA should ask the NIH to award the research to a qualified lab based on competence and independence, and the award should be funded through the NIH using the funds of the firm that needs the research. A second lab would in charge of reviewing the result. Though this would be add an unfortunate level of bureaucracy, it would also help improve the reputation of these firms, a reputation that has been tarnished over the past decade by an effort to put goods on the market that do not provide a net benefit, as defined by the FDA.
I would assume the terms Google was offered was the same. Buy the catalog for the right to private viewing, or no sale. This is certainly the right of the content owner, but just like the MTV attacks by the music labels, quite counter productive. The safeguards are now in place, and the one minute clips are free advertising for the network. In any case, this case will move forward, the laws will be clarified, and google will end up paying extraordinary amounts of money in legals fees and fines, which is, I believe, as it should be. These fines will keep the buggy whip company that is Viacom in coke and booze and girls for a number of years, if, of course, they can survive long enough to reap the payoff. Ultimately, since most of the assets are in very old media, and it has few modern blockbusters, Viacom is going to be hit quite hard when the market for dead stock media is no longer viable.
(And yes, we should be aware of the irony of a company suing for copyright abuse when in fact it profits from the same. But such is much to commonplace for it to ironic.)
There are only a couple change from the long ago is the present. The first is the demand that new PCs come with a properly licensed version of Windows. As far as I can tell, this program helps cover the fixed costs at MS, and was probably necessary due to extreme inefficiencies in the organization. MS thrived for years giving away the OS. The second change is the formalization of take home a copy policy. Employees can now, at least sometime, legally do what they were doing anyway. This is useful to MS as it keeps employees from user other OS then infecting the office with the other OS.
The big issue was corporate, and MS cracked down on corporate in the 90's. This needed to be done as people were becoming enormously wealthy on the back of MS products, and not paying MS the proper considerations. The sad thing was that firms that followed all MS rules, bought all the software, were still punished with expensive and useless audits, expensive not only in terms of real costs, but untold costs in terms of customer loyalty. I for one grew to like Windows NT quite a lot, but after seeing the place I was working suffer, never upgraded to 2000 for my personal machine.
In any case it is silly to think that Haliburton pays any taxes that they do not choose to pay. All this will likely mean is that they may be able to avoid some of the new laws that have popped up in the past few years. The republican congress knew that such laws would force even more businesses off shore, and now it is happening.
What I have noticed over the years, however, is that some of the most aggressive pirates of software are some of the most conservative people I know. They need the software to make money, and therefore it is a good investment, but they want pay for it. I had one guy demand that I 'loan' him my copy of MS Office, and leave in great offense when I refused. This guy also kept a loaded gun in his truck, and moved it from the glove compartment to the seat when he got to close to the city.
One problem with the mac, especially in the 90's, was that everything cost money. One could not just go out, spend $1000 on a box, and then steal all the software. One had to pay for not only the software, but also premium prices on upgrades. This of course meant that liberals, who often are not obsessed with money, were often also those willing to invest in the hardware.
I am a fiscal conservative, so appreciate the fact that Mac will now run OSS software, and my fiscal conservatism also allows me to appreciate that fact that the Mac provide value. I pay them money and immediately get treated like a honest customer, without having to jump hoops like WGA.
I think the power thing has to do more with who has the money. Look at the U.S. deficit over time. It is higher with a conservative government, and the deficit merely reflects the amount that the average person owes. With a high deficit, one in effect limits the power of the government to perform the function of providing services to the people, and insures that taxes are not spent on social services, but in fact pushed back into the pockets of the rich. If we could get rid of the deficit, and collect taxes from those traitors that refuse to pay their taxes, we could implement all the tax reduction plans put forth by the president, and even pay for the war without whoring ourselves out to unfriendly foreign governments.
What we have seen is producing PCs is only hugely profitable for MS, Intel, and AMD. Otherwise the competition is so great that very most machines appear to profitable only with subsidies from MS and Intel. It is silly to want Apple in the corporate market. What I want is the computer to work together, specifically MS to no longer encourage developers to write interfaces that are hostile to other OS. This way the worker bees can be given the generic equipment they need, and I can use the specilized equipment I need to efficiently work.
But it still is useful. Like terminals hooked up to big mainframes, it may make sense to run multiple virtual machines off a single server, or even have the same OS run for the same user in different spaces on a single machine. We have been heading to this point for a while, and now that we have the power, it makes little sense not to use it.
The next thing I am waiting for are very cheap machines, say $150, with no moving parts, only network drivers, that will link to a remote server.
I have worked in the private sector, government, and academia. In all cases, the make or break criteria is customer service. The american auto companies illustrates this very well. They were profitable, they were dominant, but when we tried to buy a car in the 70's, they were arrogant and unresponsive. Anytime I have dealt with an American car company, the experience has been the same. One can complain about high costs of healthcare, but when compensation for individuals is 8 and 9 figures, how can you claim that the company is not making enough profit? Can these people not be paid 7 figures instead?
Accountability is about the same everywhere. I worked in one office where the guys went and did drugs on thier lunch breaks. Teachers can't do that. I worked in private offices where office staff were using the company card for personal auto fuel. That is much more difficult to get away with in schools. Everyone steals from the office supply cabinet, but not in schools. Every situation has a unique set of rules, and it merely the lack of empathy that makes a person a jealous that others do not have follow the exact same rules.
While unions are imperfect, they do some good. For instance, a firm could create a situation in which a worker is simple used until they are so sick they cannot work. Then lay the worker off in such a way that the government has to foot the bill for social security and medicare. Or force a worker to work 12 hour days with 8 hours of pay. Or create some much paperwork that no teaching gets down. While some points are valid, in the real world employers will try to maximize short term gain and minimize short term pay, while workers are trying to maximize long term gain while minimizing work. Clearly these goals are incompatible, and unions can help find a compromise.
On the last point, any certification requires the attendance of boring courses. For instance, no matter how good of a programmer you are, it is difficult to get a job without a certification. The certification is largely meaningless, I have seen people get these sheets of paper just by taking the test a number of times. The certifications are put up merely as a barrier to maximize the already excessive pay of coders and serve no real purpose to one that really knows the trade of computer work. If it weren't for certification course in computers, we would have real people coding, and not just those that want the money so bad that they take the exam.
As far as the doctorate in a subject, how many times on /. have we heard people complain about their professors. Do you really think a PhD mathematician has the skill to teach a middle school math course? One goo thing about the NCLB, is that teachers are now test for subject area content and how to deal with the kids. There are some minor skills necessary. It kind of reminds me of a person I once knew that hated to pay the plumber, but had no idea of take apart pipe. It is easy to think that things one are completely ignorant of are simple. After all, how hard could it be to cut silicon. One just needs a saw a a polisher. Anyone could do it. yeah.
For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection
Such reliance on automated intelligence, and the false sense of security, is shown in the above quote. There are any number of ways to use the system against the government. Leave the car in a location for a different random locations over a number of weeks. Find the blind spot in the system and switch cars. Perhaps you make it appear that the car came from an embassy. It would not be so hard to do. Homeland security would be running around chasing false leads while the real terrorist are free to plan another event.
Sometimes I hear good thing from the Bush administration, things like the importance of humint, but then I hear something like this and my faith falls back to zero.
Now, if the parent is taking the radical view of actually teaching kids, and not baby-sitting, then the situation becomes more complex. It is possible to combine the teaching and practice of basic skills into the school day, if the kids are motivated, if the kids are bright enough, and if the kids are at or around grade level. Such kids can probably achieve the required 8th grade education by the end of high school with little more than classroom work.
But such students are not common, and such low expectations are hardly worth the huge amounts of money we spend educating our kids. For the average kid that can learn for 10-15 per session, another 10-15 minutes of reinforcing practice can make all the difference in the world. And it is not a matter of whether the teacher taught the material, it is simply a matter of the student making the effort of internalizing the material. Internalization is a very personal, sometimes painful, process, but little learning goes on for students who choose to not so do. For the lower grades, this might involve 10 minutes of reading and 5 minutes of practicing letters. Not much work, but the payoff can be great.
OTOH, I know the consequences of excessive homework. For most students, homework should increase from 20 minutes per night to a few hours of homework per night over the course of the k-12 progressions. Even outside the pedagogical benefits, such work is necessary for college and life. A last year student should have a comparable workload as the freshmen college student, and more important have the skills to manage their own time. The most lacking skill of any student is the ability to do work without being watched and prodded. While the high school student spends 7 hours in class and a few hours on homework, the college student spends a few hours in class and 7-10 hours on homework. For life, I have seen many examples of young adults forced out of a job because they did not have the skills to schedule their time. On a more recent note, I have left a number of sales people without commission because they felt that the job was too much work.
There is also the issue of trying to run a new OS. Certainly, no one that is faint of heart should install Vista today, or even in the next year. The PC makes should not even be shipping Vista mandatory for the next six months. It is new, and customers should not be forced to buy it.
This reminds me of trying to install any OS, especially in old hardware. I could never get a my build of Linux to install on my old Compaq, because I could never get the machine to recognize enough RAM. I had to do clean install of OS X on a pre-2000 machine because the installer crashed the machine. both of these were totally acceptable because I was installing a new OS on an old machine. The only news here is MS is not being honest with the product capabilities.
Apple and others are providing a means to compensate for loss of sales due to the decrease in popularity of the CD due to the relative high cost and inconvenient form factor. Instead of welcoming such help, they are again to shoot the messenger because they fell the they feel it will make them marginally more money, at least short term. Not that they don't have the right to make that choice, but if the owner of the music wants to release it without DRM, there are any number of services that would be willing to comply, and I am sure that any label could put such a service together for a nominal fee.
The cool thing about this situation is that the OS does not pop up a banner ad every time a piece of code from IBM is used. You do not have to click through a number of pages acknowledging the work that each company contributed. Simply because so much of the contributions are annonymous indicates that this is truly a volunteer effort.
So now they can't compete. When I need to simply replace a failed part, Microcenter provides a better experience and selection. The salespeople are always willing to help, and the cashiers always give them credit. If I can wait a day, I order the product and get it the next day. In either case, I end up ordering what I want anyway because no one in town has it.
The last time I was at Compusa, I went there specifically because I had a coupon for an LCD Monitor. It took me about 15 minutes to get the monitor, and about 15 minutes to check out with the advertised price. That was the last time I dealt with them. In fact, the complicated coupon/rebate problem is why I just mail order so many things. I can deal with reputable people where the advertised price is the price.
Not a good comparison. 20 years ago, this was the calculator, which is pretty similar to what we use today. Even 25 years ago, the calculator was a significantly powerful computing machine capable of mass storage, and still fit in a pocket. To get to really massive machines, one has to go back to the pre transistor days, when the mechanical machines were 40 pounds.
I am not sure if I want to pay $500 for an OS and then not be sure it is genuine.
In fact most of the other PDAs were not much better. At the time I was consulting, used many of the them, and most were further below the mark than the Newton, which could plug into the LAN, print, and was in many ways a full featured computer. What the others had, and what the newton critically did not, was what we know call integration with the desktop. Apple had little software at the time, and the Newton was a device that did not integrate with much.
In fact what finally made me give up the Newton was the Palm V. It was small, it had good integration, and although inferior to the newton in many respects, it made a good replacement for the Filofax.