And for all you anti-mac people, make sure that everyone knows that mail.app has no such default ability, proving that Windows is the ultimate OS and mac is the POS. The best you can do is not display remote images, which will solve the web bug problem, but not the phishing problem. Also, since the images are shown as question marks, instead of unredered HTML gibberish, the user is more likely to click the icon. Attribute this to the vast apple marketing machine, and one clear instance of general disregard for the customer. I mean how much would the addition on one little box cost them?
My concern here is that we are getting away from judging this man based on his terrorist type behavior, that of subversion of the democratic process, and instead judging him based on the fact that his clients are people that many would tend not to agree with. This is clearly not a useful direction. I don't care is Abramoff was working to fund a guaranteed cure for cancer. The ends does not justify the means, and subversion of legitimate democratic processes are never acceptable.
Let's be clear here. To me the issue is not that he was working with patent mongers, or war mongers, or closed source fundamentalists, or that he worked with the devil incarnate Rove. The issue is that we are allowed our democracy to be subverted by fear, greed, and ignorance, and all we can do it sit back and watch our little tv, and go to our little pro government rallies, and uncritically consume the propaganda that is fed to us by whatever political machine is our favorite. Would we be having this conversation if Abromoff were best friends with RMS?
Yep, I know. A company that has consistently made a profit on across all product line is a terrible company, while a company that consistently has product line that may never make a profit, to they point that they hide the p/l statements of specific product lines, is a wonderful success.
The point of this article, and the lesson from countless years of business case studies, is that mature products are easily reproduced by cut rate competitors, and the only way to stay ahead of those competitors is to continuously refine products into compelling new versions. This is as true for a box of tissue as it is for a computer.
IBM failed to innovate in the 80's, so the cut rate competitor MS won market share. Apple failed to innovate in the 90's, so the cut rate competitor MS won some more market share. In fact, the only thing the article seems to have missing is that MS is always in the position of cut rate competitor, so does not have to innovate so much as wait for others to falter, then come in cheaper commodity products.
This is changing, as is the norm. At some point the cut rate competitor wants to play with big boys, which is where MS has been moving to. This is dangerous as one can make money selling cheap commodity products, but selling higher end products puts you into the rat race. MS has faltered in many of these ventures, and the only success is the game market. Even in the server market they seem to competing with cut rate and legacy *nix installs rather that modern IBM type systems. But MS has enough money and time to make it through. Only time will tell what will emerge.
.mac provides some of this functionality. I have most of what I do on a daily basis on.mac, so it does not matter what machine I use. My mail, documents, etc can be easily synched between machines. This also means that I have three copies of everything, which is not as good as backup, but it pretty good. I can even sync my safari and camino bookmarks
What is missing is my library files, x-windows config and the like. So much is stuffed into the library files, mine is over 2GB, that I don't see how I could keep it remotely. I could put it on my ipod, but not my usb key.
This seems primarily to protect revenue, both from software sales and from content sales. As an side benefit, there is some level of assurance that the drivers are in a known state.
There has been some discussion of money changing hand to be licensed by MS as a kernel driver. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because not everything needs be in the kernel. One can imagine, however, that this would be a cheap way for sponsored applications to gain validity, sort of a membership to the BBB.
Ultimately this may be another case of false security, and another inroad into the PC as property of MS.
I am sure, just like every version of windows it will be a tolerable and reasonable OS. It will have some things that are annoying, and many things that are plain a waste of time, but for people who need a machine to run a few simple apps, or to operate as a dumb terminal for a remote server, it will be just fine.
I think that the reason so many people disrespect the OS is that MS made man claims that it cannot deliver. It missed so many deadlines. It basically made a laughing stock of itself. No one else's fault.
What I would like to see, as IE is pushed as an application front end, and developers are meant to push IE only applications, is an OS with significantly reduced support costs, and significantly reduced updates. For example, my machine has almost no support, and I have no root access. So when things need to be updated, or something else changes, I may get notices for weeks that I can do nothing about, and the notices cannot be turned off.
Again, having used MS OS since MS DOS 2.0, I can honestly say that most MS OS were quite sufficient for the job. Although it took them 10 years to develop an truly usable and reliable OS (1985-1995), and another 5 years to implement a real memory manager, there was progress all the way. MS Windows XP, though imperfect, is an achievement, especially given that MS has to support past mistakes and inferior hardware.
I think what people are chafing at with Vista is that this is the first major release where the improvements are not so apparent. It is certainly not the difference between Windows 95 and XP.
Not only that, but for the few non-iPod kids parents can purchase a subscription service. Parent can also set up allowances on iTunes.
This is really not about lack of funds, but about limited funds and opportunity costs. Listening to the average kid, they want all the music that is popular. However, there is not enough money to buy all the popular music, and making choices is not so easy at an early age. To solve this, the kids buy copied music for $4 instead of legit music for $12. $12 represent too much of an opportunity cost, not only limiting the music choices, but also other consumables, of which music is only one of many.
What credit cards do is push back the opportunity cost a few years for a fee. You can buy all the music you want now, pay only the minimum payment, and not have to make sacrifices immediately. OTOH, by this logic, the report could read kids don't buy music because they have no house equity, and if parent would only share any equity they have in the family house, then kids would not have to steal music.
One big reason that I left MS Office was that once the data was in MS Office it was hidden from me. Also, if I did not upgrade regularly, other persons who had upgraded might have trouble reading my files, as well older versions. In other words, there was a significant loss of functionality if I did not continue to pay for the software.
This was effectively punishing paying customers if they did not continue to pay as often as MS wished. This is a common practice, most products go out of data in a few years, but the MS disregard for paying customers tends to be a bit more extreme. This new proposal is the ultimate indication of that. Your software, that you paid for, has a time bomb that could jeopardize your business, and there is no way to guarantee that it will not affect you.
MS would say, just give us a call and we will fix it. But if I need something ready 10 minutes from now, I need to know that I will not have to call MS because they won't treat me as a paying customer.
I pretty much know what you are going through. I left EE and went to physics because there was too much application of math and not so much understanding of it. To me it was rote plugging into matrixes, rote construction of taylor series, rote construction of algorithms. For some people it was fun, but I just did not have the ability to go through all the homework and understand the background.
There is no silver bullet. The most sensible thing is to practice all the problems in all the books. Learn to use whatever calculator or computer they will let you use to solve the problems. At least learn the algorithm, even it you do not understand the principle. For instance, every DC circuit problem can be solved by drawing the picture, plugging in the right values into the calculator, and having it in reduced row echelon form . Even if you do not understand Gauss-Jordan Elimination, the problem can still be solved. Again, try to understand the algorithms even if the math is a bit fuzzy.
The mention of Feynman is interesting. The man was a brilliant physicist and mathematician. The proof of the equivalence of competing quantum theories. Equally groundbreaking was the restatement of the process of solving QM problems, an oversimplified description would be graphical solutions. The idea is solid though, as stylized graphical representation can be the basis of solving the problem. If you can draw the stylized inclined plane properly, the solution is obvious. If you can draw the proper stylized circuit, the solution is obvious.
So it goes back to practice. Practice drawing. Practice the math. If you don't know algebra, practice that. If you don't know negative numbers or fractions, practice that. Read textbooks and look for clues that will help you understand. But engineering is not a field of reading. It is a field of practicing.
This truly sucks for the US government that a few employees, taking short breaks, can cripple the government. The threat is obviously not from outside terrorists, but from the employees going to ebay during their lunch breaks. If our government is so fragile, we should indeed be afraid.
Lets look at the numbers. Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI. Furthermore they found that these employees spent 2000 hours on these illicit sites, or perhaps 15 minutes a day during the test week.
From these stated fact, they found three interesting things. First, the wasted time represented 50 employees, or less than 0.1% of the workforce. Second they found that the internet use represented about 24 hours of internet use, presumable bandwidth. They then took this 24 hour number and, presumable, combined it with the total budget of the DOI, 10.4 billion, realized that 24 hours was one fifth of a week, and came up with 2 billion dollars in loss.
So here is what we have. 1% of the employees, wasting 0.1% of the potential productive time of the DOI, uses 20% of the budget. This result does not indicate a problem with the employees, but a fundamental issue with the process of budgeting and managing money. Any structure that exposes 20% of the budget to risk due to the actions of 1% of the employees is surely inadequate.
Now, the article did state that 'some' computers were accessing sites that would normally be considered uncool for work, and certainly those few people at those 'some' computer can be handled by management, unless those people are themselves high ranking officials that cannot be easily reprimanded. One wonders why those 'some' computers are even allowed to go to those sites.
In the end it shows the lack of logical skills possessed by the average reporter, and, i fear, by posting it on/., the lack of logic skills of the average geek..
Really, the SAT writing test is in the initial phase, and as far as I know few colleges know exactly what the scores mean, or how they will be used. It is my understanding that the main use of the SAT writing section is to replace the uncontrolled college essay. This means that the college not only has some confidence that the student actually wrote the essay, but the essay is of initial quality. After many years I can put together a well formed essay in 25 minutes, but it would have certainly been beyond my ability in college.
OTOH, in the real world, we seldom have to develop a formulaic arbitrary piece of writing on a topic that we might not only have no interest in, but no background in. That is a good thing because writing about what you know nothing of, and have no interest in, makes you a hack. Certainly no one going off to college is hoping to be a hack.
A while back an english teacher got a hold of one of my writing and proceeded to 'correct it'. The teacher found several errors on the page, some I didn't realize I made, some that did not change the meaning, some that were bad. Understand I feel like I know who to write, and I feel like I know English. I know to say 'on which side the bread is buttered'. I know that saying 'to boldly go' is wrong, but the correct structure changes the meaning. I understand that as a teacher of English one must be pedantic, but expecting a writer to produce a good product in 25 minutes, on a random subject, is just idiocy. Such a requirement is an insult to the adult process of writing, in which one starts off with an interesting idea, and develops it over time.
Many years ago Byte magazine had a silly essay comparing quality the writings of Hemmingway to the quality of a computer program. Even at the young age I read this, I understood that the analogy was daft, as a computer program must be perfect, and reflects a technical process that changes over time, while a published creative work of fiction is a snapshot of a creative process. The later need not conform to some arbitrary standard of perfection to be a perfectly wonderful tale.
In the end this is one of those studies by one of those people that believes a good SAT score has some bearing on your actual ability to produce a real product, creative, technical, or otherwise. This is not sour grapes. I have always had very respectable standardized test scores, scores in fact that probably overestimate my ability. OTOH my ability to produce has nothing to do with the test scores.
Given that the outsourced product was good enough, I wonder how bad it is in the US. IIn the US it seems we increasingly have unmotivated workers, largely due the constant threat of losing ones job. I see super paid project engineers that won't take time to understand the local product or local population of workers, rather focusing on shoehorning generic solutions, and then threatening supervisors it the solution is not made to work. Supervisors who are afraid to make things better, or just not competent enough to know how. And don't even get me started on the QC people, who are largely the motivated line workers who want to get into management, but simply do not have the skills to succeed at a high level.
Manufacturing seems to be a phase that every culture goes through. We probably cannot affordably manufacture most things in the US. What we should be doing is designing and building very interesting things that no one else can, things that will earn a premium price. What we are doing is repacking the same old tripe and selling it to each other.
The sad part of this is not that our manufacturing capacity is declining, that is to be expected, but that our manufacturing technology is not the most advance in the world. Everyone talks about cars because it is such a good example. The American manufacturers have been playing catchup for 25 years. Their most recent innovation, the SUV, was a simple machine that anyone could copy, and everyone did. The innovations in the manufacturing process were slight, and the engineering pathetic. It was built as a cash cow, not as a long term solution, an evolving unique product that would help the American brand, although it was initially not a bad try. In the end all the cash that these vehicles brought in were not invested in long term solutions, but squandered to the point where every American car company, both of them, are on their last legs.
I am for minimizing packaging and costs, but there has to a broader agenda. Simply turning off the car and going for fast food, instead of leaving the car on when going through the drive through window, is not enough.
Likewise, the least of my concerns when it come to computers is the packaging and shipping. A bigger concern is that a computer dirty item to make. Therefore it should be a somewhat durable good, and last for 3-5 years. Many computers meet this requirement, either through allowing upgrades or building a long lasting product to begin with. Many manufacturers make good computers, including Apple, but many manufacturers make through away computers, again including Apple at the very low end. Shipping few more expensive units cuts down on packaging, as well as the other pollutants that result from the manufacturing process.
As far as the long term record. much of Apples progress or not, is based on consumer expectations and the retail price of the product. Apple was able to ship low radiation CRTs. That was because Apple could charge for these monitors, while other ship the more dangerous monitors, not because they did not car, but because it was not cost effective. Likewise, Apple went to LCD screens, which reduced the significantly reduces the power that the computer uses. Again they were able to do this because people will pay for apple products. The cheap PC manufacturers were not able to help save the planet because the consumer would not pay to so do.
In terms of the iPod we are at a potentially scary place. I like the original Mini packaging, even though it was wasteful. I worry the the iPod is going to lead to increased pollution because Apple needs to sell so many, and people may get a new one ever year. OTOH, the general MP3 market and online sales may eventual lead to a world in which we do not have to press pieces of plastic, many of which get thown away or end up littering the street. Recall the original CDs, which came in wasteful packaging so it could compete with LP.
The last piece was packaging. I wonder how many people buy breakfast cereal in the box instead of a plastic bag? Buy individually wrapped snacks instead of a big bag that can be separated into reusable containers? I in no way want to defend Apple because every large corporations has pressures that limit what it can and cannot do, and everything that business does is as likely to be caused by market pressures as otherwise. However, I will say two things. First, as responsible business will conform to market pressures. Second, the market pressures are created by the individual, so if consumers want change, writing blogs is not the way to make it happen. If you want less packaging, buy products will less packaging. For instance, if you want plain boxes, buy Apple refurbished, and save a packet in the process. That is what I have been doing.
Which is exactly why MS is screwing all of it's business partners by abandoning play for sure. If Zune worked with play for sure, there would be no reason for an MS music store, and without an MS music store, the whole MS portal strategy is doomed to failure.
Look at it this way. Even though MS controls the desktop, controls IE, and forces everyone to MSN, MSN is still not a real player in any market. They cannot win the the market on quality, or even controlling the software. So the hope is to take another page out of the Apple book and try make inroads into the music business by controlling the software and hardware, and locking consumers into the format.
I have a feeling that the lack of play for sure support is going to be a detriment, as those same people that buy the player form wal mart are going to want to download songs from wal mart, or whoever. Also, at some point MS is going to want to raise the subscription fee, and at that point owning a Zune will be more expensive than owning another device. Recall that one thing that makes a non-iPod device desirable is the play for sure market is somewhat completive, while the iTunes and alleged MS Music market is not.
As always MS makes the entire thing way too complex, and so will only appeal to those that want the MS name. Otherwise a Zen will be a better choice, unless MS is going to start giving music away, say a free three month subscription with purchase.
I don't think any of these answers were useless, it was just not what you, and perhaps most, wanted to hear. As we all know, because we have all read the HHGTTG, a good question forms the basis to a understandable answer. Most of these question assumed certain things to be true, and then tried to make assertions based on those assumptions, and the lawyer was then expected to say, you are absolutely right, and so brilliant! Instead the lawyer did what lawyers do and gave realistic answers based on the current reality.
The fact is that most of these questions were nonsensical. Answering them would be like answering what kind of food do the trolls that run your car need. While it would be possible to use analogy try to explain that the car has no living components, but does consume a refined product that is refined from gunk that is from the ground, this would not be reality. So while the nice lawyer could have tried to fit the answer to the question, it is not usually what lawyers do, and not what I would expect a lawyer to do.
What is refreshing about these responses is that it provides a ray of reality to a site that all to often hides reality under troll and overrated moderations, and highlights fantasy with insightful mods. Which is not such a big deal, as/. is really just a bit of harmless fun. But if we do take it seriously, then we take some time to learn how to ask good open ended questions, that is questions that do not assume a certain answer, and the develop the discipline to listen to and understand the answer. Otherwise all this effort is truly made trivial, as we will be unable to learn anything at all.
What is really funny is that I buy my Mac OS for $200, and run it on three machines. As far as I know, I can also right now record television on my mac with free software and a simple cable box. MS wants $239 for to provide me with that privilege. How much to access the music already on my machine?
While toolbars are the logical explanation, it could be that this person normally runs with cookies wide open. This means that the web usages is being tracked by the affiliate cookies. Though cookies are set up to be read only by the site that set them, most sites get around this by having double click, 2o7, etc set root tracking cookies. Therefore the average person, lets say the majority of the majority that still run IE wide open, is well tracked. It would be trivial to expand this to coded shopping categories. For the average user it might be a valuable service, and others should learn to accept only root cookies.
This whine could equally be called 'do violent games cause people to commit real world violent acts?'. For the most part/. would say no, yet I suspect we will get a number o greedy people who say 'that's not fair'.
Games are a useful way for us to simulate life. For the young it teaches rules and basic social skills. For the teen it can be a good way to learn advance socialization. And for the older people, the working gamer for instance, it can teach that greed can lead to ones downfall, and nothing comes without a price. One hopes that a person old enough to working has learned this lesson, but we do hear stories all the time of people who have fallen for the line 'I will pay you $1000 and all you have to do is deliver this package'. Certainly something we might forgive a child for, but not an adult.
If I were one of the people that fell for the scam, I would be thankful that I learned the lesson in a simulations and not in life. I would even, perhaps, go as far as thanking the person who took the time to craft the lesson that would clearly save me the inevitable misery of having to go to my family and admit that my greed allowed a clever person to steal all my money.
Back to the top, games help us learn socialization. Part of socialization is knowing and following rules, so some games are big on rules. Part of socialization is knowing that rules are not always enforced, and therefore we must take responsibility for ourselves. We hope that games teach proper socialization, and, for instance, do not teach that crime is without consequences. OTOH, sometimes crime is without consequences. At the end of the day, though, games simply provide a safe place to run scenarios and see what might happen. In this case, a few people got 'rich', and many fold other lost it all. Isn't this what all the anti-gaming people want. A game that responsibly reflects consequences of an action? The only thing that is left is the introduction of jurisprudence, and as we all know that is the best way to ruin a game.
I think for the people who long for the books of the successful Heinlein, say 60's and 70', Robinson will be a good choice. He is very familiar with the works and continues to write in the relaxed, almost trivial, style of this time. This is not a bad thing, I have read the vast majority of both authors book, if not all of them, and have enjoyed them immensely.
However, for those us who long for Heinlein's later works, I am not sure that Robinson can make these happen. These works tended to that of a extremely skillful person who no longer wrote to please anyone, and was willing to incorporate any style he thought appropriate. It was wonderful change from his kids books.
As much as the Neooffice people want you to think that the only solutions for the Mac are MS Office and their fine product, it is simply not true. I began to run OO.org on my mac a few years ago and have never regretted it. My reasoning was much like yours. I had to work on a PC and a Mac, and I had to have no document hiccups. I could access my.mac disk from all machines, and since all machines were running the essentially the same program, it was not a problem.
The common complaint is that OO.org runs in X, and initially that was a problem. It is no longer so because Apple has implemented X very well, even with cut and paste between environments mostly working. The biggest issue is fonts, which can be easily transfered to X, and keyboard controls, which are more like the MS Windows controls than the Mac. If you are, like me, used to using many different machines it is not a problem.
I hate not answering the question ask, and frequently am annoyed when someone answers a perfectly reasonable question with a litany of why the question is wrong, but in this case I believe you are off track.
Programming, as we all know, is establishing a standard process, while allowing for certain deviations, in a directly or indirectly machine readable code. There are several layers of abstraction involve, the most obvious is the abstracting of they physical process, but one must also abstract concepts like repeatability. The student must also respect cause and effect and not, for example, attend Titanic 20 times hoping that both major characters die and in the process create a world in which the movie no longer exists, or perhaps exists with a reasonable director and competent actors. But I digress
But I digress. While this age group has the ability to recognize concrete structures, the ability to abstract those structures probably does not exist. To put this more plainly, a student might be able to understand that both sides of an equation must balance, but may not be able to do single variable algebra. Therefore the concepts of programming must be build concretely.
The game is good, but the kids have to learn process and algorithm. This is not necessarily done on the computer. Have them right how to do certain things, then see what could change and still result in a successful operation. How to we sharpen a pencil. How do we brush our teeth? Given them a map and have them find how to get from their city to another of their choosing. Their teacher probably has exact procedures. Have them write them out and discuss the rational. Any metacognitive activity for this age group will be good.
Another concern is the understanding of variable. For even high school kids the concept of a variable is problematic. Even for college kids the need for idiom t=x, x=y, y=t, is far from obvious. These problems can be surmounted, but they must be addressed.
In terms of the language, anything that minimizes the mental power needed to interface the machine will be good. At age 11 I learned to program on teletype using basic, though it was 3 more years until I understood what was actually going on. It might be fun if the language produced some nifty graphics, and the child could directly visualize the changes in code with the changes in graphic output. For instance, if a loop would produce more squares, and some parameter would change size and spacing. New language elements could be introduced to create more complex graphics. I would avoid complex APIs, and try to stick to stick with things that are native in the language. These requirements tend to point to an interpretive language. Also syntax should be short and forgiving to allow for the limitation of the children.
One last point is I do not think that worrying about a specific standard language is important. It is the concept building that is the likely objective. I mean memorizing and categorizing hundred of Dinosaurs may seem useless, but the concepts learned stay with the child long after every name is forgotten. So if the kids learns about process, and the basic elements of assignment, looppimg, and conditionals, that would be a great job done.
After this long aside, let me suggest a product. Though I am not the biggest fan of the company, The geometer's sketchpad is an interesting piece of software, and seems to have some script capability. I can't seem to find an online manual, which is one reason I do not like the company, but I believe the software does have at least some of the programming elements, and therefore can be used to teach some concepts. The school may already have it.
This is one reason why blaming teachers for American problems is so silly. When newscaster talk about a lighting field, when real estate agents talk about square footage, when the president brags that he never reads, how can a teacher compete? The conceptual errors propagated by those who have the press are insurmountable.
When I read articles like this I must ask what is the person who is buying these product doing. I mean it cost a finite amount of money to produce a product. Once you add overhead, the product may already be at a point where no one is willing to pay for it. Cutting overhead means cutting direct employees and management waste. To be competitive in the stock market one must have good numbers, the product does not really matter. Good numbers means low labor cost, high profits. The amount spent on management can be hidden. Contract costs cannot.
So mostly we benefit from these sweat shops. The low income have an opportunity to buy products. Everyone who has investment feels rich because companies can keep costs low, so the stock market isup and investors will buy more expensive things, like houses. People with houses feels better off than they are because they can leverage paper gains into real cash. The economy appears to be doing better than it is because in addition to the fake house cash, we also get loans from Asia so that we can afford to pay them for manufacturing in their swear shops.
But at the end of the day, it is the average persons desire for cheap stuff that drives the cycle. I wonder if Apple produced the 68K Powerbooks in sweatshops? I wonder if Dell could survive without sweatshops. Would we tolerate, would the american economy survive, the lack of sweat shops?
I certainly would want Apple to have a bit more dignity than say, Nike, but I don't hold my breath. As everyone says, Apples are too expensive, and the cost must come down. But think of this. I saw a documentary last year in which a european cell phone manufacturer audited their asian manufacturing facility. Overall it was not terrible. Many safety issues, but not unlike what one would see in the US. Most girls, cramped housing, but again not unlike the way young people live in the US. These workers were there earning a living and saving money, which, if you believe that a hard days work imbues dignity, could be a good thing. One interesting thing was that since the employees were living in company dorm, the company was officially much more responsible for their workers, like being liable if a girl got pregnant.
Which is simply to say that the simplifications made by most are simply useless. I believe we are in much more trouble than most will admit, and the solutions will require much broader adjustments in behavior, which will either be done voluntarily or by necessity. While much of this simplification is done to make it accessible to the common person, and the bias may often be unintentional, the fact that so often the blame lies elsewhere than the writer seem disingenuous.
This is not contemporary information, but when I was a kid I just went through the series of biographies at the public and school library. We had Booker T Washington, Edison, all usualy suspects. Not much in the physics realm. I don't know why. Perhaps most of the physics people of the time were not American born. I would like to see what a middle school bio of Feyman would look like, as most of the interesting stuff is the drinking and cavorting, and, of course, the situation with his first wife.
It is often the case that reading of the sciences is the critical thing, and a book chosen by a youngster is more likely to be read by the youngster.
i just want the light to be on the caps lock key and not down in the basement in the unused lavatory behind a big sign that say beware of rabbit. The worst thing about using company issued PC is that no matter who expensive the machine, the keyboard always sucks, with the cap lock indicator way off to the left in a forest or twenty other LEDs, like they could not afford a PCB layout program that could route the leads around the key.
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And for all you anti-mac people, make sure that everyone knows that mail.app has no such default ability, proving that Windows is the ultimate OS and mac is the POS. The best you can do is not display remote images, which will solve the web bug problem, but not the phishing problem. Also, since the images are shown as question marks, instead of unredered HTML gibberish, the user is more likely to click the icon. Attribute this to the vast apple marketing machine, and one clear instance of general disregard for the customer. I mean how much would the addition on one little box cost them?
Let's be clear here. To me the issue is not that he was working with patent mongers, or war mongers, or closed source fundamentalists, or that he worked with the devil incarnate Rove. The issue is that we are allowed our democracy to be subverted by fear, greed, and ignorance, and all we can do it sit back and watch our little tv, and go to our little pro government rallies, and uncritically consume the propaganda that is fed to us by whatever political machine is our favorite. Would we be having this conversation if Abromoff were best friends with RMS?
The point of this article, and the lesson from countless years of business case studies, is that mature products are easily reproduced by cut rate competitors, and the only way to stay ahead of those competitors is to continuously refine products into compelling new versions. This is as true for a box of tissue as it is for a computer.
IBM failed to innovate in the 80's, so the cut rate competitor MS won market share. Apple failed to innovate in the 90's, so the cut rate competitor MS won some more market share. In fact, the only thing the article seems to have missing is that MS is always in the position of cut rate competitor, so does not have to innovate so much as wait for others to falter, then come in cheaper commodity products.
This is changing, as is the norm. At some point the cut rate competitor wants to play with big boys, which is where MS has been moving to. This is dangerous as one can make money selling cheap commodity products, but selling higher end products puts you into the rat race. MS has faltered in many of these ventures, and the only success is the game market. Even in the server market they seem to competing with cut rate and legacy *nix installs rather that modern IBM type systems. But MS has enough money and time to make it through. Only time will tell what will emerge.
What is missing is my library files, x-windows config and the like. So much is stuffed into the library files, mine is over 2GB, that I don't see how I could keep it remotely. I could put it on my ipod, but not my usb key.
There has been some discussion of money changing hand to be licensed by MS as a kernel driver. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because not everything needs be in the kernel. One can imagine, however, that this would be a cheap way for sponsored applications to gain validity, sort of a membership to the BBB.
Ultimately this may be another case of false security, and another inroad into the PC as property of MS.
I think that the reason so many people disrespect the OS is that MS made man claims that it cannot deliver. It missed so many deadlines. It basically made a laughing stock of itself. No one else's fault.
What I would like to see, as IE is pushed as an application front end, and developers are meant to push IE only applications, is an OS with significantly reduced support costs, and significantly reduced updates. For example, my machine has almost no support, and I have no root access. So when things need to be updated, or something else changes, I may get notices for weeks that I can do nothing about, and the notices cannot be turned off.
Again, having used MS OS since MS DOS 2.0, I can honestly say that most MS OS were quite sufficient for the job. Although it took them 10 years to develop an truly usable and reliable OS (1985-1995), and another 5 years to implement a real memory manager, there was progress all the way. MS Windows XP, though imperfect, is an achievement, especially given that MS has to support past mistakes and inferior hardware.
I think what people are chafing at with Vista is that this is the first major release where the improvements are not so apparent. It is certainly not the difference between Windows 95 and XP.
This is really not about lack of funds, but about limited funds and opportunity costs. Listening to the average kid, they want all the music that is popular. However, there is not enough money to buy all the popular music, and making choices is not so easy at an early age. To solve this, the kids buy copied music for $4 instead of legit music for $12. $12 represent too much of an opportunity cost, not only limiting the music choices, but also other consumables, of which music is only one of many.
What credit cards do is push back the opportunity cost a few years for a fee. You can buy all the music you want now, pay only the minimum payment, and not have to make sacrifices immediately. OTOH, by this logic, the report could read kids don't buy music because they have no house equity, and if parent would only share any equity they have in the family house, then kids would not have to steal music.
This was effectively punishing paying customers if they did not continue to pay as often as MS wished. This is a common practice, most products go out of data in a few years, but the MS disregard for paying customers tends to be a bit more extreme. This new proposal is the ultimate indication of that. Your software, that you paid for, has a time bomb that could jeopardize your business, and there is no way to guarantee that it will not affect you.
MS would say, just give us a call and we will fix it. But if I need something ready 10 minutes from now, I need to know that I will not have to call MS because they won't treat me as a paying customer.
There is no silver bullet. The most sensible thing is to practice all the problems in all the books. Learn to use whatever calculator or computer they will let you use to solve the problems. At least learn the algorithm, even it you do not understand the principle. For instance, every DC circuit problem can be solved by drawing the picture, plugging in the right values into the calculator, and having it in reduced row echelon form . Even if you do not understand Gauss-Jordan Elimination, the problem can still be solved. Again, try to understand the algorithms even if the math is a bit fuzzy.
The mention of Feynman is interesting. The man was a brilliant physicist and mathematician. The proof of the equivalence of competing quantum theories. Equally groundbreaking was the restatement of the process of solving QM problems, an oversimplified description would be graphical solutions. The idea is solid though, as stylized graphical representation can be the basis of solving the problem. If you can draw the stylized inclined plane properly, the solution is obvious. If you can draw the proper stylized circuit, the solution is obvious.
So it goes back to practice. Practice drawing. Practice the math. If you don't know algebra, practice that. If you don't know negative numbers or fractions, practice that. Read textbooks and look for clues that will help you understand. But engineering is not a field of reading. It is a field of practicing.
Lets look at the numbers. Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI. Furthermore they found that these employees spent 2000 hours on these illicit sites, or perhaps 15 minutes a day during the test week.
From these stated fact, they found three interesting things. First, the wasted time represented 50 employees, or less than 0.1% of the workforce. Second they found that the internet use represented about 24 hours of internet use, presumable bandwidth. They then took this 24 hour number and, presumable, combined it with the total budget of the DOI, 10.4 billion, realized that 24 hours was one fifth of a week, and came up with 2 billion dollars in loss.
So here is what we have. 1% of the employees, wasting 0.1% of the potential productive time of the DOI, uses 20% of the budget. This result does not indicate a problem with the employees, but a fundamental issue with the process of budgeting and managing money. Any structure that exposes 20% of the budget to risk due to the actions of 1% of the employees is surely inadequate.
Now, the article did state that 'some' computers were accessing sites that would normally be considered uncool for work, and certainly those few people at those 'some' computer can be handled by management, unless those people are themselves high ranking officials that cannot be easily reprimanded. One wonders why those 'some' computers are even allowed to go to those sites.
In the end it shows the lack of logical skills possessed by the average reporter, and, i fear, by posting it on /., the lack of logic skills of the average geek..
OTOH, in the real world, we seldom have to develop a formulaic arbitrary piece of writing on a topic that we might not only have no interest in, but no background in. That is a good thing because writing about what you know nothing of, and have no interest in, makes you a hack. Certainly no one going off to college is hoping to be a hack.
A while back an english teacher got a hold of one of my writing and proceeded to 'correct it'. The teacher found several errors on the page, some I didn't realize I made, some that did not change the meaning, some that were bad. Understand I feel like I know who to write, and I feel like I know English. I know to say 'on which side the bread is buttered'. I know that saying 'to boldly go' is wrong, but the correct structure changes the meaning. I understand that as a teacher of English one must be pedantic, but expecting a writer to produce a good product in 25 minutes, on a random subject, is just idiocy. Such a requirement is an insult to the adult process of writing, in which one starts off with an interesting idea, and develops it over time.
Many years ago Byte magazine had a silly essay comparing quality the writings of Hemmingway to the quality of a computer program. Even at the young age I read this, I understood that the analogy was daft, as a computer program must be perfect, and reflects a technical process that changes over time, while a published creative work of fiction is a snapshot of a creative process. The later need not conform to some arbitrary standard of perfection to be a perfectly wonderful tale.
In the end this is one of those studies by one of those people that believes a good SAT score has some bearing on your actual ability to produce a real product, creative, technical, or otherwise. This is not sour grapes. I have always had very respectable standardized test scores, scores in fact that probably overestimate my ability. OTOH my ability to produce has nothing to do with the test scores.
Manufacturing seems to be a phase that every culture goes through. We probably cannot affordably manufacture most things in the US. What we should be doing is designing and building very interesting things that no one else can, things that will earn a premium price. What we are doing is repacking the same old tripe and selling it to each other.
The sad part of this is not that our manufacturing capacity is declining, that is to be expected, but that our manufacturing technology is not the most advance in the world. Everyone talks about cars because it is such a good example. The American manufacturers have been playing catchup for 25 years. Their most recent innovation, the SUV, was a simple machine that anyone could copy, and everyone did. The innovations in the manufacturing process were slight, and the engineering pathetic. It was built as a cash cow, not as a long term solution, an evolving unique product that would help the American brand, although it was initially not a bad try. In the end all the cash that these vehicles brought in were not invested in long term solutions, but squandered to the point where every American car company, both of them, are on their last legs.
Likewise, the least of my concerns when it come to computers is the packaging and shipping. A bigger concern is that a computer dirty item to make. Therefore it should be a somewhat durable good, and last for 3-5 years. Many computers meet this requirement, either through allowing upgrades or building a long lasting product to begin with. Many manufacturers make good computers, including Apple, but many manufacturers make through away computers, again including Apple at the very low end. Shipping few more expensive units cuts down on packaging, as well as the other pollutants that result from the manufacturing process.
As far as the long term record. much of Apples progress or not, is based on consumer expectations and the retail price of the product. Apple was able to ship low radiation CRTs. That was because Apple could charge for these monitors, while other ship the more dangerous monitors, not because they did not car, but because it was not cost effective. Likewise, Apple went to LCD screens, which reduced the significantly reduces the power that the computer uses. Again they were able to do this because people will pay for apple products. The cheap PC manufacturers were not able to help save the planet because the consumer would not pay to so do.
In terms of the iPod we are at a potentially scary place. I like the original Mini packaging, even though it was wasteful. I worry the the iPod is going to lead to increased pollution because Apple needs to sell so many, and people may get a new one ever year. OTOH, the general MP3 market and online sales may eventual lead to a world in which we do not have to press pieces of plastic, many of which get thown away or end up littering the street. Recall the original CDs, which came in wasteful packaging so it could compete with LP.
The last piece was packaging. I wonder how many people buy breakfast cereal in the box instead of a plastic bag? Buy individually wrapped snacks instead of a big bag that can be separated into reusable containers? I in no way want to defend Apple because every large corporations has pressures that limit what it can and cannot do, and everything that business does is as likely to be caused by market pressures as otherwise. However, I will say two things. First, as responsible business will conform to market pressures. Second, the market pressures are created by the individual, so if consumers want change, writing blogs is not the way to make it happen. If you want less packaging, buy products will less packaging. For instance, if you want plain boxes, buy Apple refurbished, and save a packet in the process. That is what I have been doing.
Look at it this way. Even though MS controls the desktop, controls IE, and forces everyone to MSN, MSN is still not a real player in any market. They cannot win the the market on quality, or even controlling the software. So the hope is to take another page out of the Apple book and try make inroads into the music business by controlling the software and hardware, and locking consumers into the format.
I have a feeling that the lack of play for sure support is going to be a detriment, as those same people that buy the player form wal mart are going to want to download songs from wal mart, or whoever. Also, at some point MS is going to want to raise the subscription fee, and at that point owning a Zune will be more expensive than owning another device. Recall that one thing that makes a non-iPod device desirable is the play for sure market is somewhat completive, while the iTunes and alleged MS Music market is not.
As always MS makes the entire thing way too complex, and so will only appeal to those that want the MS name. Otherwise a Zen will be a better choice, unless MS is going to start giving music away, say a free three month subscription with purchase.
The fact is that most of these questions were nonsensical. Answering them would be like answering what kind of food do the trolls that run your car need. While it would be possible to use analogy try to explain that the car has no living components, but does consume a refined product that is refined from gunk that is from the ground, this would not be reality. So while the nice lawyer could have tried to fit the answer to the question, it is not usually what lawyers do, and not what I would expect a lawyer to do.
What is refreshing about these responses is that it provides a ray of reality to a site that all to often hides reality under troll and overrated moderations, and highlights fantasy with insightful mods. Which is not such a big deal, as /. is really just a bit of harmless fun. But if we do take it seriously, then we take some time to learn how to ask good open ended questions, that is questions that do not assume a certain answer, and the develop the discipline to listen to and understand the answer. Otherwise all this effort is truly made trivial, as we will be unable to learn anything at all.
What is really funny is that I buy my Mac OS for $200, and run it on three machines. As far as I know, I can also right now record television on my mac with free software and a simple cable box. MS wants $239 for to provide me with that privilege. How much to access the music already on my machine?
While toolbars are the logical explanation, it could be that this person normally runs with cookies wide open. This means that the web usages is being tracked by the affiliate cookies. Though cookies are set up to be read only by the site that set them, most sites get around this by having double click, 2o7, etc set root tracking cookies. Therefore the average person, lets say the majority of the majority that still run IE wide open, is well tracked. It would be trivial to expand this to coded shopping categories. For the average user it might be a valuable service, and others should learn to accept only root cookies.
Games are a useful way for us to simulate life. For the young it teaches rules and basic social skills. For the teen it can be a good way to learn advance socialization. And for the older people, the working gamer for instance, it can teach that greed can lead to ones downfall, and nothing comes without a price. One hopes that a person old enough to working has learned this lesson, but we do hear stories all the time of people who have fallen for the line 'I will pay you $1000 and all you have to do is deliver this package'. Certainly something we might forgive a child for, but not an adult.
If I were one of the people that fell for the scam, I would be thankful that I learned the lesson in a simulations and not in life. I would even, perhaps, go as far as thanking the person who took the time to craft the lesson that would clearly save me the inevitable misery of having to go to my family and admit that my greed allowed a clever person to steal all my money.
Back to the top, games help us learn socialization. Part of socialization is knowing and following rules, so some games are big on rules. Part of socialization is knowing that rules are not always enforced, and therefore we must take responsibility for ourselves. We hope that games teach proper socialization, and, for instance, do not teach that crime is without consequences. OTOH, sometimes crime is without consequences. At the end of the day, though, games simply provide a safe place to run scenarios and see what might happen. In this case, a few people got 'rich', and many fold other lost it all. Isn't this what all the anti-gaming people want. A game that responsibly reflects consequences of an action? The only thing that is left is the introduction of jurisprudence, and as we all know that is the best way to ruin a game.
However, for those us who long for Heinlein's later works, I am not sure that Robinson can make these happen. These works tended to that of a extremely skillful person who no longer wrote to please anyone, and was willing to incorporate any style he thought appropriate. It was wonderful change from his kids books.
The common complaint is that OO.org runs in X, and initially that was a problem. It is no longer so because Apple has implemented X very well, even with cut and paste between environments mostly working. The biggest issue is fonts, which can be easily transfered to X, and keyboard controls, which are more like the MS Windows controls than the Mac. If you are, like me, used to using many different machines it is not a problem.
Programming, as we all know, is establishing a standard process, while allowing for certain deviations, in a directly or indirectly machine readable code. There are several layers of abstraction involve, the most obvious is the abstracting of they physical process, but one must also abstract concepts like repeatability. The student must also respect cause and effect and not, for example, attend Titanic 20 times hoping that both major characters die and in the process create a world in which the movie no longer exists, or perhaps exists with a reasonable director and competent actors. But I digress
But I digress. While this age group has the ability to recognize concrete structures, the ability to abstract those structures probably does not exist. To put this more plainly, a student might be able to understand that both sides of an equation must balance, but may not be able to do single variable algebra. Therefore the concepts of programming must be build concretely.
The game is good, but the kids have to learn process and algorithm. This is not necessarily done on the computer. Have them right how to do certain things, then see what could change and still result in a successful operation. How to we sharpen a pencil. How do we brush our teeth? Given them a map and have them find how to get from their city to another of their choosing. Their teacher probably has exact procedures. Have them write them out and discuss the rational. Any metacognitive activity for this age group will be good.
Another concern is the understanding of variable. For even high school kids the concept of a variable is problematic. Even for college kids the need for idiom t=x, x=y, y=t, is far from obvious. These problems can be surmounted, but they must be addressed.
In terms of the language, anything that minimizes the mental power needed to interface the machine will be good. At age 11 I learned to program on teletype using basic, though it was 3 more years until I understood what was actually going on. It might be fun if the language produced some nifty graphics, and the child could directly visualize the changes in code with the changes in graphic output. For instance, if a loop would produce more squares, and some parameter would change size and spacing. New language elements could be introduced to create more complex graphics. I would avoid complex APIs, and try to stick to stick with things that are native in the language. These requirements tend to point to an interpretive language. Also syntax should be short and forgiving to allow for the limitation of the children.
One last point is I do not think that worrying about a specific standard language is important. It is the concept building that is the likely objective. I mean memorizing and categorizing hundred of Dinosaurs may seem useless, but the concepts learned stay with the child long after every name is forgotten. So if the kids learns about process, and the basic elements of assignment, looppimg, and conditionals, that would be a great job done.
After this long aside, let me suggest a product. Though I am not the biggest fan of the company, The geometer's sketchpad is an interesting piece of software, and seems to have some script capability. I can't seem to find an online manual, which is one reason I do not like the company, but I believe the software does have at least some of the programming elements, and therefore can be used to teach some concepts. The school may already have it.
This is one reason why blaming teachers for American problems is so silly. When newscaster talk about a lighting field, when real estate agents talk about square footage, when the president brags that he never reads, how can a teacher compete? The conceptual errors propagated by those who have the press are insurmountable.
So mostly we benefit from these sweat shops. The low income have an opportunity to buy products. Everyone who has investment feels rich because companies can keep costs low, so the stock market isup and investors will buy more expensive things, like houses. People with houses feels better off than they are because they can leverage paper gains into real cash. The economy appears to be doing better than it is because in addition to the fake house cash, we also get loans from Asia so that we can afford to pay them for manufacturing in their swear shops.
But at the end of the day, it is the average persons desire for cheap stuff that drives the cycle. I wonder if Apple produced the 68K Powerbooks in sweatshops? I wonder if Dell could survive without sweatshops. Would we tolerate, would the american economy survive, the lack of sweat shops?
I certainly would want Apple to have a bit more dignity than say, Nike, but I don't hold my breath. As everyone says, Apples are too expensive, and the cost must come down. But think of this. I saw a documentary last year in which a european cell phone manufacturer audited their asian manufacturing facility. Overall it was not terrible. Many safety issues, but not unlike what one would see in the US. Most girls, cramped housing, but again not unlike the way young people live in the US. These workers were there earning a living and saving money, which, if you believe that a hard days work imbues dignity, could be a good thing. One interesting thing was that since the employees were living in company dorm, the company was officially much more responsible for their workers, like being liable if a girl got pregnant.
Which is simply to say that the simplifications made by most are simply useless. I believe we are in much more trouble than most will admit, and the solutions will require much broader adjustments in behavior, which will either be done voluntarily or by necessity. While much of this simplification is done to make it accessible to the common person, and the bias may often be unintentional, the fact that so often the blame lies elsewhere than the writer seem disingenuous.
It is often the case that reading of the sciences is the critical thing, and a book chosen by a youngster is more likely to be read by the youngster.
i just want the light to be on the caps lock key and not down in the basement in the unused lavatory behind a big sign that say beware of rabbit. The worst thing about using company issued PC is that no matter who expensive the machine, the keyboard always sucks, with the cap lock indicator way off to the left in a forest or twenty other LEDs, like they could not afford a PCB layout program that could route the leads around the key.