It is my understanding thst any security measure has to take into account the time and resources, and tolderance, of the attacker. If this is true, then Sony must realize that there is no one with more time, resources, and,as they well know, tolerance for crappy music, than the high school student.
As the parent mentioned, and I am not saying the parent in a high school student, there is no problem with copying music from a CD to the computer using analog. Likewise there will be no descernable loss to Missy Elliot or Green Day or Will Smith or Alan Jackson. And once on person gets it on CD, the whole school has it.
It is probably unfortunate that the past models will not produce enough money. And with singles out, and many kids not having computers at home, the way to get them to buy a CD instead of copying seems difficult. What is true is that $15 is alot of money to some kids, and spending a coupel hourse making a copy is time well spent.
Which is not to say copying is right. But when one realizes that the labels spend millions making certain music seem like a necesity, and actively linking certain music to certain peer groups, it seems heartless to then say that everyone who does not have the money to buy the music is destined to be the outcast of the school. I mean, at least the cig companies has enough compassion to give the product away to cool kids who could not afford the product.
Nothing you say is untrue, but has nothing to do with the matter at hand. The one thing though, is that the internet is not old enough to be considered anything. however, like the phone, it depends on federal dollars and will likely be treated as a neccesisty soon enough.
What this legislation has to do with is federalism. A government entity, with little direct contact with the people, trying to create laws regulating what the local people can and cannot do. Now, as our federalist government has shown over these many years, sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it is a bad thing. Sometimes we just don't know. For example when i was growing up the federal educators laughed at France's method of centralized education and testing. Now we are doing the same thing.
This bill is an attempt by SBC to use the non-local governments to limit the free market choice of locals constituents. They do this already by manipulating the federal regulations. For instance, five years ago I had a choice in who provided my DSL. SBC made it difficult, but I could get relatively high speed internet for a good price. Today I can still get DSL, but the only good price is through SBC, and it provides no advantage to the service i had five years ago. SBC, by manipulating the government, has usurped the process of the free market
The local constituent has the ultimate control of the local government by controlling the purse strings. Except for matters of safety and defense and the like, there is little reason for a non-local entity to dictate what the local entities can do. If a local entity wants free community wifi, for reasons of safety, defense, or merely connivence, they will vote the funds. If not, fund will be unavailable.
Does this violate any social contract. Does the pursuit of happiness mean the guarantee of happiness. No, all it means is an even chance. Any efficient firm should be able to produce cheaper goods and services that the government. All the firms needs to do in convince the public that their products provides a superior value. This happens all the time with trash pick up, water, and the like. Of course, no one may wish to do the work, but that is the failure of the market, not the government. In this case SBC is trying to maximize shareholder value by limited consumer choice. There is nothing wrong with that, except that is closer to socialism than capitalism.
The final point I make is this. Government investment will stimulate markets, even unrelated ones, and this stimulation is the fear of major corporations because it might provide a way for newcomers to take marketshare. Take for example the mail. This allowed mail order catalogs. This allowed the airlines to make thier early profits. The infracture allowed UPS and later Fedex to viable entities. The internet was the last nail in the failing model that long distance carriers used to overcharge customers, and allowed other players to compete. The gift of the land for rail and the national highway system helps firm grow, and probably destroyed some that relied on the lack of access.
As can be told by other responses in this thread, many feel the need to justify thier life choices by denigrating other choices. Even the parent fell into this trap, by stating that geeks that go to fancy places only pretend to enjoy themselves.
There should be enough room in this world to handle many different forms of relationships. One should absolutely be true to who one is, and set up affectations just to get something the world says one needs.
OTOH, a relationship is not just about sex. It is also about growth and becoming a more expressed person. This might involve a geek going to fancy place. It might involve a jock learning to read. It might involve a socialite doing some house work. The point is that being who you are is not meant to be an excuse not to grow. And being who you are does not mean one has to be with someone exactly the same. Enjoying some of the same things, certainly, but another person will be different, and if one wants the relationship, one often has to learn to love the differences.
This self serving rationalization is rampant, and though it has elements of truth, it ignores the commonly accepted notions of right and wrong. Leaving a valuable article out in the open and then having it stolen does not make the person who stole it any less a criminal. If a test is left on a desk, and some student takes it, the professor might be negligent, but the student is still violating ethics. And if the whole set of student files were left in an open office in an open file cabinet, the school might be negligent in protecting student data, but the person who looks at the data, or takes a copy, has still done wrong.
And there are legal issues. Misrepresentation is illegal. When one puts a number on that URL, one is in fact representing oneself as that student. Now, again, the software should establish a protocol to insure security, and also that enough evidence so that action can be taken against the criminal, but that makes it no less wrong to misrepresent.
But the crux of the mater is this. School is supposed to be about education., not about getting a sheet of paper. The problem with high School is that even among students who are mature enough to understand what education is, most are there to get a sheet of paper using whatever trickery is necessary. Therefore teachers have to waste time countering the tricks in the hopes that the student might learn something useful and not just go out into the world expecting to use more tricks to survive, i.e. phishing, spamming, or good old extortion.
But as one gets into higher education, the tolerance for such tricks wanes. The requirement for universal education relaxes. if a student does not want to learn, the student just get failed and eventually goes away. Some students may be amoral and smart enough to continue the tricks, and thereby get through college and waste more of everyone else's time.
And some of these might make it to graduate school, where the stakes are high and no one really wants these players around. Though most may still only be there for a sheet of paper, at leas three is understanding that the paper is given in exchange for hones work. And so the administration has evidence that some students are there only to play, only to get a sheet of paper, and will use whatever tricks to graduate, and may continue to use tricks in their work life to, for instance, inflate stock values, run competitors out of business, or the like. Are these the type of people that a good school, who is not desperate for students, want as their alumni. Of course not. These students are clearly going to be a waste of everyones time. They can go to some other school that have lower academic standards.
I think the meta whatever thingies were badly handled. However, as others have mentioned, in the first three eps we are dealing with technology and science. In the next three eps, rationality has left the universe, and we have the mystic power of the force. This cycling between rationality and mysticism can happen very quickly, as we have seen in our own real world.
The real issue is this. There is clearly an innate and learned component of the force. Although anyone can learn to use the force, as was mentioned in ep 4, certain people have a talent. This is why Luke and Lea are so important. They are the in the blood line of a powerful Jedi. I don't remeber if what the talk was of Anikins father or mother. This also is widely seen in our real world. The real problem is that if we have identified the root cause of the talent, then it would seem that the talent would be bottled.
So, the thingies were just a throw away plot device to explain some point. This is a problem with Star Wars. It would have been somewhat interesting to explore the scince. Is it passed down or mutations? Is it not bottled to protect the Jedi monopoly, or is there some technical reason. Since both luke and lea manefested, and since only the father manefested, from a genetic point fo view, one would think it was a pretty common trait. This is also supported by the fact that it is cross species, but aparrently not with the hairy species.
The problem, amazingly enough, is standards. To get get a basic device, like a printer, or mass media, or a monitor to work in the PC world, one needs a driver or a DLL or the like. This is the fatal flaw of the PC world, and the Linux world that is build on it. This is really what causes the complexity. To read and write to a mass storage device should be a standard process that everyone should agree on. To characters to a printer should be a standard that people should agree on. To send a signal to a monitor, that should be standard.
Now to do complex stuff, and to get full functionality from a device, that might require a driver. But the basics, after 20 years of working on it, should be automatic. Especially with USB. There is no reason to have to install anything or program anything.
15 years ago to get a mass storage drive working on MS Windows one had to drop to the command line, enter cryptic characters, and then install a driver. To get baisc functionilty from the exact same device on a Mac, it was plug and play. To get a camera working on modern PC, using USB, requires a driver. On a PPT compliant system, nothing. To get a monitor working, one should only have to plug it in.
The problem is that everyone, and printer manufacturers are expecially at fault, want to lock people in and make it difficult to use a competitors product. MS Windows maximizes this culture by promoting the concept of standard breaking, and compensating for it by creating this incredible complicated autodetect feature. I tried to install an USB wireless reciever the other day. The computer recognized it. I had the latest drivers. But the interaction between the install, autodetect, and the desire for the autodetect to want to check the world for a driver I already had made it impossible to install. And I was making peripherals work back when one soldered one's own cable and coded one's own driver.
Which is to say that Linux would do well to not follow MS to the lowest common denominator. Supporting every stupid standard is not neccesary. There is no benifit to OSS to support a non-complient product just becuase it is cheap. MS has a ton of money and can win any reasonable battle over price. What they can't win is a battle over quality, and if Linux starts supporting quality components, then perhaps they will lose the users who have trash computers, but perhpas they will gain the corporate customers that tend spend a pretty penny on IT anyway, but still have to pay for all the useless extras in MS Windows.
And perhaps something like a TV card or game might be mission critical, but I rather think that a supervisor might be happier knowing that a worker is actually working, and not playing.
First, I do understand your fustration. But the shop is not there to meet our needs, it is ther to turn a profit.
So to question of if a coffe shop exists to let people meet or talk, or read a book, or work, or whatever is not the point. I think a coffee shop is flexible enough to be all of these things, and there are enough coffee shops around to meet everones needs. If one wants a meat market, go and find one. If one wants a hole, find a hole. What is silly is thinking that the cutie hiding in an iBook has any interest in a dork that has to go a coffee shop to chat up the birds, but chooses the one on the highest limb, and then does not have the tenacity to climb the tree to meet it.
But when coffee shops did not have Wifi, because not only did it not exist, but few people had laptops, and the few that did werre not enobled enough to bring them out, coffee shops still had problems. People would go there to meet other people, and still not buy anything. The real issue is that a firm must do things that generate a profit. If WiFi brings in the customers, that is what it needs to do. If bringing in poor 20-something single people will do it, then that is what they will do.
What is really shown in this article is that one should choose a model that is right for your location and customers, and not just copy what one reads in Forbes.
One of the big things that made windows succesful was the mytht that is it stable and anyone can set up a machine. The implication of this was that workers would be easy to find and would not have to paid large sums of tribute. This made computers affordable to many firms.
This was always a myth, but it was true that an untrained but intellegent monkey could get a computer running, and later on, a small network. The problem is that MS puts out all these TCO reports stating that Windows is still the cheapest solution. Certainly one can cheaply configure a malformed yet functional windows machines, but to do it right probably costs as much as any other platform.
So the problem is that a firm buys a window machine thinking that it is plug and play with current staff, or at most they might have to pull some random person out of the newpaper, when in fact to make any system function one needs a well trained administrator.
If we go with near past stupid trends, the better analogy would be hey, my Hummer keeps running out of gas, perhaps I should get a diesel mercedes. Of course, the family would quite having to stuff ourselves full of hamburgers and french fries so that we could fit in a normal size car, but that is a small price to pay.
I do not believe this is true. The filenames are there, and even the directory is there. The only thing is that the directory is hidden. On Mac OS one can get to the directories through the terminal. It should then be a simple matter of cp.
This is now the same as adding music from an unknown sorce. Itunes has no way to do a lookup for song or album name, so you must reorganize yourself.
it really is silly. Not only are many of the comments 'you are idiot for wanting to use technology', and this from a group that probably does or has or will make money from peoples use of technology, but these useless comments made the higher ratings.
What is doubly silly is that pencil and paper is technolgy. The leap from previous technologies to the paper and pen probably made as much difference as the leap from paper to computers. It is really no different.
So this guy wants to do something different. The technology is not quite there. But it is possible, and it is practical. Unless we want to go back to the technology of stone tablets.
One presumes you want to write and then edit and transfer to your desktop. As geeky as this crowd is supposed to be, they sure are ludites. Don't get me wrong, I have my collection of fountain and glass pens and moleskins and fancy paper, but many of us do work better on certian things on a computer. If you are happy with plain text, the options are limitless.
So, let me tell you the things i tried. I see on ebay that you can get an eMate for abou $100. This would let you write. Connectivity should not be a problem as there is a PCMCIA slot that can be used for a ethernet card. As long as you can work out the file transfer protocols, or someelse has, this should work great. (And it looks like several people have)
The same is true for a newton, but those are getting harder to find, and the keyboard is is extra, and extra hard to find.
For modern hardware, any Palm device will do. I used to have a Palm V with a pretty nice keyboard. it was a good solution. The only problem is that the processor is slow, and one can sometimes get pretty far ahead of the device. I have seen refubed palms for $50, and the keyboard should be about the same.
If you want to try ancient hardware, and can use the tiny keyboards, you might be able to get a good deal on the zaurus. Used one of these for a while as well. I don't know how easy it will connect.
One of the biggest security threat is the profilieration of HTML email. All the free mail services want it so they can track email and advertising. However, if we treat email like the untrusted media it is, and ture off HTML, 99% of the threat is destroyed. Half the time the messesge is so hidden in tags that the message is not even legible. No legitimate firm would do that.
First, not everyone knows the underlying structure of the internet, what the protocols are, and what the risks are. A good analogy is a car. Most do not know how complex a car is, and how easy it would be to die at high speeds. Most are not able to understand the physics of tire against road, and how fragile and small that contact patch is. Those who do buy cars that are stable and tires that are over engineered for the application. Those that do understand would like to say that those who have accidents or die in SUVs do so due thier own stupidty, but that would be simplistic.
Also, it took some time for the so called experts to get a line on the issue. I remember in the early days of online banking writing an email to a bank. The banks was sending out emails to customers with links to the banksite, using a third party address, and other bad security protocols. I informed them of this, and was told there was no risk. That issue has been largely soved, but today we have passwords in secure frames of unsecured pages. It builds a bad habit of entering important passwords on unsecure pages.
Security is complex, and the issue is that the people who should know what they are doing don't, and they put everyone else at risk.
I would tend to agree. Many kids don't quite realize what prejudice was, and can't realy identify current disrespect because it is so toned down. Many have been lead to believe that prejudice does not currently exist in any meaningful way, and the past episodes have been overblown.
Examples are becoming sanitized. Certainly the Tom & Jerry with Tom in blackface should be shown as an example of not so far off cultural norms. I think that the whole heckle and jeckly thing was somewhat disturbing. Certainly there are many shows that are proof of the cultural norms that many now wish to deny. Like in Family Guy European Road Trip, when the German tourguide censored the entirety of WWII out of his talk, claiming Germany was 'invited'.
Because we are now widely networked in a monoculture, so the succesful virus tends to be one that infects many hosts, often secretly. Therefore, any virus that makes itself known, or kills the host too quickly, will tend not to be as succesful.
This is different from the early viruses which depended on sneaker net. These tended to kill the host quickly, but leave an active remnant, say in the form of an infected disk, that could propogate the virus. These viruses were primitive and rather pointless, as opposed to the objective based modern viruses.
Of course some realy early viruses did depend on direct connected network, but there were not as many machines to infect.
Another issue is threat level. Many modern viruses are succesful without being an exxtreme threat. They are therefore allowed to live, without the risk of extreme retaliation.
I was wondering what texas classic they were going to start with. Best little whorehouse would have been to obvious and commercial. The Last Picture Show is a good choice. It is a racy film with enough T&A to keep the youngsters happy, and story to keep everyone else attentive.
And it gives another view of the fifties. One is which young people do what they have always have done, and were as insensitive as they always will be.
I am not big on the in your face special effects. Just becuase one can do something, doesn't mean one should. It can be just as useful to allude to an event, as show it. I remember an old hitchcock film in which he started with a big ship accident. it was not interesting. It would have been better to just get to the human drama.
So, in term of fx, and putting a lot of interesting clutter on the screen, it was good. But we left that many years ago. We are now at video game physics. He knows how to do that, which he did in ep 1, and at the same time had a chance to do the land race he couldn't do in Star Wars. Which was fine. He should have gotten it all out of his system by ep 3, and just done the drama of Anikin.
If he had it would have been as good as ep 4, which was just about a farm kid with an unknown but important past, and a future more interesting than he could ever imagine, finding himself. We have this kid working on the farm. We have this kid gazing over the desert wishing he could get out. We have thing kid defying his folks and doing something really brave and stupid. And we have interesting people he meets.
It is an old story, but it works, and it should have worked with Anikin as well as luke. But we know all the characters so there could be no surprise there. And there was too much concern with the fx to create a drama.
The fights were good, though. They did keep changing the rules on what the force could do, though.
Or the screen could just be flat on top. And the it could ne a touch screen. You could write on the screen and the writing could be converted into text!
Almost anyone with technical ability can patch windows. You can hire windows admins on the cheap.
Which can be an issue as anyone might patch MS Windows.
Which means that anyone can break MS Windows.
Which is why so much money is spent not trying to update MS Windows, but making sure it only gets updated by authorized people, at authorized times, and with authorized code.
I recently heard on thing that I never thought of before. Most Wal Marts are not close to anything, and require a bit of time and fuel. Also, Walmart customers do not have a lot of money, so the increased gas prices can mean significantly less money for other stuff. Therefore in the world of huge gas prices, Walmart might find itself in a pickle, and other stores, such as Target, that staying in the city and close to residential, might be a better deal, even if the prices are higher. Certainly my time is seldom worth so little that Walmart makes sense. Add in the public costs of roads, and the tax breaks to get a Walmart, one wonders if it does not cost tax payers more than is 'saved.'
CR has been increasingly neutered by corporation who abuse the courts to protect their defective products. CR does provide reasonably independent reviews on how a product might reasonably function with an average consumer under reasonable conditions. Although I have disagreed with some conclusions, I have seldom found thier methods truly suspect.
Most reductions in quality are probably due to fact that the courts are becoming less a protector of individual freedom, and more a tool to insure corporate profit. Since CR is not out to make a profit selling shitty profits, they cannot afford to fight long battles in court. OTOH, corporations are masters are abusing the courts and wasting the time of judges. The corporation know how to extend lawsuits, thereby purposefully increasing fines to huge amounts, and then complain about excessive damages, resulting in awards far less than court costs, and minimal compensation to the injured consumer.
There is really no way for the public to get an accurate picture of a product in a world where the corporation is free to use the courts as thier personal PR department.
And, to address you real concern, CR has always published certain complaints from consumers. Like anything on the net, one has to take it with a grain of salt. Of course, corporations want the average person to beleive everything he or she reads so they can sell thier penis elargement pills.
Apple has seldom played the numbers game. The machines are designed to be reasonable computer machines, and are sold on the basis on real productivity, not gee-whiz numbers.
So the key is to make sure everything works. That often will require not using all the features. We see this in overclocking. The CPU could go faster, but at a risk.
So I don't get illegible text on my computer. Kids love to reset the PC video so they can be used by anyone else. Is the ability to endlessly change the background and resolution of a screen useful to any bussiness application?
As far the low perfomance Mini. It is a cheaper machine. It is not going to have the specs of a top of the line Apple. Apple can design to to meet a price point or performance point. They interesting thing is they have learned to do both well. As has been mentioned, one can't get a similiarly configured and sized PC for the same price. I have been the sites. I have prices them. Reduction in size has always meant reduction in performance. We live with that.
Which is a point I also try to make. IE is a simple application front end. It allows developers to create GUI based applications without getting into all the GUI specifics. The controls are limited, but when one needs a simple cross platfrom(meaning that if you write it on Windows XP, it will probably work on Windows ME), writing for IE is a good compromise. This is especially try for prototyping.
The problem comes when one is trying to develop a serious web application that one expects customers to use, or one has a very large and divergent employee base, that one wants constant communcition with, but won't always have a windows computer around. Then one needs to reconsidr the shortcut of IE and try to do some real web application design.
In any case, it is best to have a web browser and IE on all computers.
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As the parent mentioned, and I am not saying the parent in a high school student, there is no problem with copying music from a CD to the computer using analog. Likewise there will be no descernable loss to Missy Elliot or Green Day or Will Smith or Alan Jackson. And once on person gets it on CD, the whole school has it.
It is probably unfortunate that the past models will not produce enough money. And with singles out, and many kids not having computers at home, the way to get them to buy a CD instead of copying seems difficult. What is true is that $15 is alot of money to some kids, and spending a coupel hourse making a copy is time well spent.
Which is not to say copying is right. But when one realizes that the labels spend millions making certain music seem like a necesity, and actively linking certain music to certain peer groups, it seems heartless to then say that everyone who does not have the money to buy the music is destined to be the outcast of the school. I mean, at least the cig companies has enough compassion to give the product away to cool kids who could not afford the product.
What this legislation has to do with is federalism. A government entity, with little direct contact with the people, trying to create laws regulating what the local people can and cannot do. Now, as our federalist government has shown over these many years, sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it is a bad thing. Sometimes we just don't know. For example when i was growing up the federal educators laughed at France's method of centralized education and testing. Now we are doing the same thing.
This bill is an attempt by SBC to use the non-local governments to limit the free market choice of locals constituents. They do this already by manipulating the federal regulations. For instance, five years ago I had a choice in who provided my DSL. SBC made it difficult, but I could get relatively high speed internet for a good price. Today I can still get DSL, but the only good price is through SBC, and it provides no advantage to the service i had five years ago. SBC, by manipulating the government, has usurped the process of the free market
The local constituent has the ultimate control of the local government by controlling the purse strings. Except for matters of safety and defense and the like, there is little reason for a non-local entity to dictate what the local entities can do. If a local entity wants free community wifi, for reasons of safety, defense, or merely connivence, they will vote the funds. If not, fund will be unavailable.
Does this violate any social contract. Does the pursuit of happiness mean the guarantee of happiness. No, all it means is an even chance. Any efficient firm should be able to produce cheaper goods and services that the government. All the firms needs to do in convince the public that their products provides a superior value. This happens all the time with trash pick up, water, and the like. Of course, no one may wish to do the work, but that is the failure of the market, not the government. In this case SBC is trying to maximize shareholder value by limited consumer choice. There is nothing wrong with that, except that is closer to socialism than capitalism.
The final point I make is this. Government investment will stimulate markets, even unrelated ones, and this stimulation is the fear of major corporations because it might provide a way for newcomers to take marketshare. Take for example the mail. This allowed mail order catalogs. This allowed the airlines to make thier early profits. The infracture allowed UPS and later Fedex to viable entities. The internet was the last nail in the failing model that long distance carriers used to overcharge customers, and allowed other players to compete. The gift of the land for rail and the national highway system helps firm grow, and probably destroyed some that relied on the lack of access.
There should be enough room in this world to handle many different forms of relationships. One should absolutely be true to who one is, and set up affectations just to get something the world says one needs.
OTOH, a relationship is not just about sex. It is also about growth and becoming a more expressed person. This might involve a geek going to fancy place. It might involve a jock learning to read. It might involve a socialite doing some house work. The point is that being who you are is not meant to be an excuse not to grow. And being who you are does not mean one has to be with someone exactly the same. Enjoying some of the same things, certainly, but another person will be different, and if one wants the relationship, one often has to learn to love the differences.
And there are legal issues. Misrepresentation is illegal. When one puts a number on that URL, one is in fact representing oneself as that student. Now, again, the software should establish a protocol to insure security, and also that enough evidence so that action can be taken against the criminal, but that makes it no less wrong to misrepresent.
But the crux of the mater is this. School is supposed to be about education., not about getting a sheet of paper. The problem with high School is that even among students who are mature enough to understand what education is, most are there to get a sheet of paper using whatever trickery is necessary. Therefore teachers have to waste time countering the tricks in the hopes that the student might learn something useful and not just go out into the world expecting to use more tricks to survive, i.e. phishing, spamming, or good old extortion.
But as one gets into higher education, the tolerance for such tricks wanes. The requirement for universal education relaxes. if a student does not want to learn, the student just get failed and eventually goes away. Some students may be amoral and smart enough to continue the tricks, and thereby get through college and waste more of everyone else's time.
And some of these might make it to graduate school, where the stakes are high and no one really wants these players around. Though most may still only be there for a sheet of paper, at leas three is understanding that the paper is given in exchange for hones work. And so the administration has evidence that some students are there only to play, only to get a sheet of paper, and will use whatever tricks to graduate, and may continue to use tricks in their work life to, for instance, inflate stock values, run competitors out of business, or the like. Are these the type of people that a good school, who is not desperate for students, want as their alumni. Of course not. These students are clearly going to be a waste of everyones time. They can go to some other school that have lower academic standards.
The real issue is this. There is clearly an innate and learned component of the force. Although anyone can learn to use the force, as was mentioned in ep 4, certain people have a talent. This is why Luke and Lea are so important. They are the in the blood line of a powerful Jedi. I don't remeber if what the talk was of Anikins father or mother. This also is widely seen in our real world. The real problem is that if we have identified the root cause of the talent, then it would seem that the talent would be bottled.
So, the thingies were just a throw away plot device to explain some point. This is a problem with Star Wars. It would have been somewhat interesting to explore the scince. Is it passed down or mutations? Is it not bottled to protect the Jedi monopoly, or is there some technical reason. Since both luke and lea manefested, and since only the father manefested, from a genetic point fo view, one would think it was a pretty common trait. This is also supported by the fact that it is cross species, but aparrently not with the hairy species.
Now to do complex stuff, and to get full functionality from a device, that might require a driver. But the basics, after 20 years of working on it, should be automatic. Especially with USB. There is no reason to have to install anything or program anything.
15 years ago to get a mass storage drive working on MS Windows one had to drop to the command line, enter cryptic characters, and then install a driver. To get baisc functionilty from the exact same device on a Mac, it was plug and play. To get a camera working on modern PC, using USB, requires a driver. On a PPT compliant system, nothing. To get a monitor working, one should only have to plug it in.
The problem is that everyone, and printer manufacturers are expecially at fault, want to lock people in and make it difficult to use a competitors product. MS Windows maximizes this culture by promoting the concept of standard breaking, and compensating for it by creating this incredible complicated autodetect feature. I tried to install an USB wireless reciever the other day. The computer recognized it. I had the latest drivers. But the interaction between the install, autodetect, and the desire for the autodetect to want to check the world for a driver I already had made it impossible to install. And I was making peripherals work back when one soldered one's own cable and coded one's own driver.
Which is to say that Linux would do well to not follow MS to the lowest common denominator. Supporting every stupid standard is not neccesary. There is no benifit to OSS to support a non-complient product just becuase it is cheap. MS has a ton of money and can win any reasonable battle over price. What they can't win is a battle over quality, and if Linux starts supporting quality components, then perhaps they will lose the users who have trash computers, but perhpas they will gain the corporate customers that tend spend a pretty penny on IT anyway, but still have to pay for all the useless extras in MS Windows.
And perhaps something like a TV card or game might be mission critical, but I rather think that a supervisor might be happier knowing that a worker is actually working, and not playing.
So to question of if a coffe shop exists to let people meet or talk, or read a book, or work, or whatever is not the point. I think a coffee shop is flexible enough to be all of these things, and there are enough coffee shops around to meet everones needs. If one wants a meat market, go and find one. If one wants a hole, find a hole. What is silly is thinking that the cutie hiding in an iBook has any interest in a dork that has to go a coffee shop to chat up the birds, but chooses the one on the highest limb, and then does not have the tenacity to climb the tree to meet it.
But when coffee shops did not have Wifi, because not only did it not exist, but few people had laptops, and the few that did werre not enobled enough to bring them out, coffee shops still had problems. People would go there to meet other people, and still not buy anything. The real issue is that a firm must do things that generate a profit. If WiFi brings in the customers, that is what it needs to do. If bringing in poor 20-something single people will do it, then that is what they will do.
What is really shown in this article is that one should choose a model that is right for your location and customers, and not just copy what one reads in Forbes.
This was always a myth, but it was true that an untrained but intellegent monkey could get a computer running, and later on, a small network. The problem is that MS puts out all these TCO reports stating that Windows is still the cheapest solution. Certainly one can cheaply configure a malformed yet functional windows machines, but to do it right probably costs as much as any other platform.
So the problem is that a firm buys a window machine thinking that it is plug and play with current staff, or at most they might have to pull some random person out of the newpaper, when in fact to make any system function one needs a well trained administrator.
If we go with near past stupid trends, the better analogy would be hey, my Hummer keeps running out of gas, perhaps I should get a diesel mercedes. Of course, the family would quite having to stuff ourselves full of hamburgers and french fries so that we could fit in a normal size car, but that is a small price to pay.
This is now the same as adding music from an unknown sorce. Itunes has no way to do a lookup for song or album name, so you must reorganize yourself.
What is doubly silly is that pencil and paper is technolgy. The leap from previous technologies to the paper and pen probably made as much difference as the leap from paper to computers. It is really no different.
So this guy wants to do something different. The technology is not quite there. But it is possible, and it is practical. Unless we want to go back to the technology of stone tablets.
So, let me tell you the things i tried. I see on ebay that you can get an eMate for abou $100. This would let you write. Connectivity should not be a problem as there is a PCMCIA slot that can be used for a ethernet card. As long as you can work out the file transfer protocols, or someelse has, this should work great. (And it looks like several people have)
The same is true for a newton, but those are getting harder to find, and the keyboard is is extra, and extra hard to find.
For modern hardware, any Palm device will do. I used to have a Palm V with a pretty nice keyboard. it was a good solution. The only problem is that the processor is slow, and one can sometimes get pretty far ahead of the device. I have seen refubed palms for $50, and the keyboard should be about the same.
If you want to try ancient hardware, and can use the tiny keyboards, you might be able to get a good deal on the zaurus. Used one of these for a while as well. I don't know how easy it will connect.
One of the biggest security threat is the profilieration of HTML email. All the free mail services want it so they can track email and advertising. However, if we treat email like the untrusted media it is, and ture off HTML, 99% of the threat is destroyed. Half the time the messesge is so hidden in tags that the message is not even legible. No legitimate firm would do that.
Also, it took some time for the so called experts to get a line on the issue. I remember in the early days of online banking writing an email to a bank. The banks was sending out emails to customers with links to the banksite, using a third party address, and other bad security protocols. I informed them of this, and was told there was no risk. That issue has been largely soved, but today we have passwords in secure frames of unsecured pages. It builds a bad habit of entering important passwords on unsecure pages.
Security is complex, and the issue is that the people who should know what they are doing don't, and they put everyone else at risk.
Examples are becoming sanitized. Certainly the Tom & Jerry with Tom in blackface should be shown as an example of not so far off cultural norms. I think that the whole heckle and jeckly thing was somewhat disturbing. Certainly there are many shows that are proof of the cultural norms that many now wish to deny. Like in Family Guy European Road Trip, when the German tourguide censored the entirety of WWII out of his talk, claiming Germany was 'invited'.
This is different from the early viruses which depended on sneaker net. These tended to kill the host quickly, but leave an active remnant, say in the form of an infected disk, that could propogate the virus. These viruses were primitive and rather pointless, as opposed to the objective based modern viruses.
Of course some realy early viruses did depend on direct connected network, but there were not as many machines to infect.
Another issue is threat level. Many modern viruses are succesful without being an exxtreme threat. They are therefore allowed to live, without the risk of extreme retaliation.
And it gives another view of the fifties. One is which young people do what they have always have done, and were as insensitive as they always will be.
So, in term of fx, and putting a lot of interesting clutter on the screen, it was good. But we left that many years ago. We are now at video game physics. He knows how to do that, which he did in ep 1, and at the same time had a chance to do the land race he couldn't do in Star Wars. Which was fine. He should have gotten it all out of his system by ep 3, and just done the drama of Anikin.
If he had it would have been as good as ep 4, which was just about a farm kid with an unknown but important past, and a future more interesting than he could ever imagine, finding himself. We have this kid working on the farm. We have this kid gazing over the desert wishing he could get out. We have thing kid defying his folks and doing something really brave and stupid. And we have interesting people he meets.
It is an old story, but it works, and it should have worked with Anikin as well as luke. But we know all the characters so there could be no surprise there. And there was too much concern with the fx to create a drama.
The fights were good, though. They did keep changing the rules on what the force could do, though.
Or the screen could just be flat on top. And the it could ne a touch screen. You could write on the screen and the writing could be converted into text!
Which can be an issue as anyone might patch MS Windows.
Which means that anyone can break MS Windows.
Which is why so much money is spent not trying to update MS Windows, but making sure it only gets updated by authorized people, at authorized times, and with authorized code.
I recently heard on thing that I never thought of before. Most Wal Marts are not close to anything, and require a bit of time and fuel. Also, Walmart customers do not have a lot of money, so the increased gas prices can mean significantly less money for other stuff. Therefore in the world of huge gas prices, Walmart might find itself in a pickle, and other stores, such as Target, that staying in the city and close to residential, might be a better deal, even if the prices are higher. Certainly my time is seldom worth so little that Walmart makes sense. Add in the public costs of roads, and the tax breaks to get a Walmart, one wonders if it does not cost tax payers more than is 'saved.'
Most reductions in quality are probably due to fact that the courts are becoming less a protector of individual freedom, and more a tool to insure corporate profit. Since CR is not out to make a profit selling shitty profits, they cannot afford to fight long battles in court. OTOH, corporations are masters are abusing the courts and wasting the time of judges. The corporation know how to extend lawsuits, thereby purposefully increasing fines to huge amounts, and then complain about excessive damages, resulting in awards far less than court costs, and minimal compensation to the injured consumer.
There is really no way for the public to get an accurate picture of a product in a world where the corporation is free to use the courts as thier personal PR department.
And, to address you real concern, CR has always published certain complaints from consumers. Like anything on the net, one has to take it with a grain of salt. Of course, corporations want the average person to beleive everything he or she reads so they can sell thier penis elargement pills.
So the key is to make sure everything works. That often will require not using all the features. We see this in overclocking. The CPU could go faster, but at a risk.
So I don't get illegible text on my computer. Kids love to reset the PC video so they can be used by anyone else. Is the ability to endlessly change the background and resolution of a screen useful to any bussiness application?
As far the low perfomance Mini. It is a cheaper machine. It is not going to have the specs of a top of the line Apple. Apple can design to to meet a price point or performance point. They interesting thing is they have learned to do both well. As has been mentioned, one can't get a similiarly configured and sized PC for the same price. I have been the sites. I have prices them. Reduction in size has always meant reduction in performance. We live with that.
The problem comes when one is trying to develop a serious web application that one expects customers to use, or one has a very large and divergent employee base, that one wants constant communcition with, but won't always have a windows computer around. Then one needs to reconsidr the shortcut of IE and try to do some real web application design.
In any case, it is best to have a web browser and IE on all computers.