Textbooks are way overrated. Most kids don't respond well to the lecture/text format. For language art classes genuine literature and interactive activities (read computer simulations) are much better. The same is true for social studies, science and math. Increasingly school districts are creating their own curriculum.
Secondary students would probably do much better running simulations and puzzles on a computer than reading text books and filling worksheets. Genuine literature can be commissioned or bought outright and read on the computer with automatic reflective questions to help the student monitor comprehension and build reading skills. The student could build timelines and trees in social studies to help relate information to previous knowledge. Math classes already use graphing calculators to help the students connect function to non-abstract objects.
Much research exists that shows such activities would help at risk student improve and above average students develop personal higher order thinking skills.
I did not have a real computer curriculum until high school. Fortunately I did have computers to play with in middle school. And play I did. Basic and games on the teletype. Other stuff on some proprietary micro machines.
The reality was I did not understand anything. I did not understand what a computer really was. I did not understand what i was really doing when i was using one. But I did understand that these things were very cool and I needed to learn and understand. i needed to get comfortable with them. I needed to become a user. I needed to own one ASAP
And that is why the laptop program is potentially so good for so many students. If they parent has a computer at home, then fine. But for many students this is the only way they will get the technology. This is what is going to get some of the non standard learners involved with school. Sure, the person who is focused on curriculum and 'quality activities' may not see any learning going on. There may be no measurable results. But often learning is going on.
The thing is that competition is good, and MS just does not have enough to be forced to create a truly great product. They could if they had to. They just don't have to.
Let me tell you a story. I once worked for a company that was able to charge a lot of money for an adequate product. There was no competition, so we could pretty much name our price. We had to keep quality at a tolerable level, but not the level the customer really wanted. We tended to use processes and equipment that was quite old.
These factors caused many economic problems. The company had money, but was not developing or consuming new technology at a rate comparable to the amount of cash on hand. This probably resulted in few overall jobs, but richer principles in the company. Also, the companies customers had to spend time working on our quality issues rather than creating better products for the end user. Also, the companies customers had to pay our 'inflated' prices rather that using that money to upgrade their facilities.
Eventually competition came in the form of Asian manufacturers with modern equipment and processes. The company spent money trying to quickly upgrade equipment and procedures. The competition produced products of equivalent quality at about half the price. Things were no longer great for the company, but times were much better for the companies vendors and customers. Quality increased and jobs were created in the US as the company was forced to modernize the facility.
Which is to say that the free market and capitalism depends on active competitions. While there may be nothing wrong with MS maintaining a monopoly on x86 systems, it does not help the American economy. Manufacturing jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, programming jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, and MS sits there with billions of dollars in the bank and an OS that desperately needs improvement in quality. They could do it.
But there is no competition. There is no other OS that threatens their market share. The vendors are in trouble because MS had no need to upgrade their facilities. The customers are in trouble because MS does not have to charge true market value. There has been no significant feature changes in Windows or Office for at least 5 years. Yet there has also been no retail price change. Admittedly Office now contains VPC, but still we are paying $200 for VPC and $250 for a five year old office suite.
I would suggest that if competition did exist the customer would pay a lower true market price. I suggest that MS would have to hire programmer and buy equipment. I suggest that the previously unemployed programmer would have money to buy durable goods. The manufactures of the durable goods would then hire workers to create the goods. And so on.
This is certainly a simplistic economic view, but the point is that we allow companies to create monopolies and these monopolies cause nothing but problems in the free market . Money collects in unproductive spaces. Technology and process stagnate. And China and India create better cheaper products while American CEO claim ignorance and disbelief at the unfairness of it all and demand that congress enact dangerous protectionist measure to help keep American jobs. They could have just spent some of thier cash reserves on implemeting the new technology, but that never occurs to the CEO.
If Ginny were still alive, I'm sure that we wouldn't be seeing this
With all due respect to Robert and Virginia, Requiem and Tramp Royale were very dissapointing. I do not believe that there was much editing or sense of his 'artistry' in either. But one of the great things about Heinlein was his directness and honesty. Writing was his professions, his way to support his family. It was only natural that the estate would milk writing for all they were worth. He was very good at the profession, but did not have the illusion that the books were more than just books, unlike some of the pompous writers we have to deal with today.
This directness made it very easy to forgive the mentioned books. After all, he gave us some many good things. My family probably has every book, many in first editions back to the fifties, some decaying paperback. The family discussions that the books provoked were priceless.
And if For us the Living only brings back memories of growing up with such writing and dialogues, then it be will be worth every penny, no matter how bad it is. I doubt it could do any more damage.
I agree with you. The artist should know what work is to be published and what work should be hidden. In some cases such decisions are to promote artistry. In some cases it is ego. in some cases the decision is not made.
In Heinlein's case, like the other great masters of his time, writing was done to make money. He was good at creating things people wanted to read, and knew it. When one publisher did not want to distribute his work, he went across the street to another publisher who was happy for the opportunity.
The fact that they publish stuff at the end of their career, or even after their death to make money is no surprise. Tramp Royale, frankly, was an unreadable piece of crap. Outnumbering the Dead was way below par. Timequake was bad but not unreadable. And as far as The Salmon of Doubt is concerned, I think it was a very well done retrospective.
In this particular case, I think we can have high hopes concerning For us the Living. If we believe the hype, the masters did not spend a lot of time in revision. Heinlein's main concern seemed to hitting the required work count. Fahrenheit 451 was written in less than a week on rented library typewriter. In addition, Heinlien's other comedies, like Job, in which a the protagonist felt wronged by a murderer not because a man was shot, but because a man was shot at his table, were excellent. I believe a comedy of customs will be a great asset to the legacy.
This problem of repetitive stock photos go beyond brochures. There was recently a study examining the validity of Jr. High Science textbooks. Overall they found these book full of errors and often targeted to the politics of the districts rather than the needs of the students. One of the funniest finding of the study was that one book used the same photo of the same guy in the same yellow hat several times to illustrate several different science based careers. Very disturbing on many levels.
With the high cost of installing patches and downtime caused by MS inspired viruses, can anyone seriously consider the TCO of windows to be in any way reasonable. I mean is a *nix system, like a x86 linux or mac or even a sun blade be so expensive or hard to use that the having a systems down for days at a time be a necessary cost of doing business
ya know, perhaps many readers of/. do not compulsively load and read/. every 15 minutes. Perhaps they have lives to live or jobs to do or friends to play with. Perhaps by the time they have 10 minutes to peruse the site, the story is off the front page and they don't take the time to look back. Or perhaps the story already has many comments and they do not feel like adding more. In such cases the repeats may be a service.
Now I realize that some of us do nothing but read every story and every comment on/. in an attempt to fill our empty lives. And I realize that for those of us who depend on/. in this way, a repeat is as much of a distressful situation as if every channel on TV were to run Thirtysomething repeats all day. In such cases we are helpless. We are desperate to find other things to do. Maybe watch the electric meter run, or bang our head against the wall.
If a story is a repeat, don't read it./. is not meant to be the sole form of entertainment. Find something else entertaining to do. Though i myself am not familiar with these activities, and certainly cannot recommend them form experience or condone them in any way, from the movies I see that people kill time with drugs, sex, and moving rhythmically to syncopated tonal beats.
As has been said, in 1985 was the start of popular WYSIWYG, with the macintosh. We had a ton of them in engineering computer lab, and i used them quite often for papers.
Before that I had an Epson FX-80 and an Apple. It had some fonts, proportional fonts, and many other features, such as skipping a specific amount of vertical white space and margins. I used these features by embedding escape codes in my text. My habit was to use tabs because I coded a lot. In the back of my mind I seem to remember it doing automatic page numbers and footers.
That pretty much met all my term paper needs until the Epson died. Fortunately by that point MS had come out with an OS and word processor that was as good as the Apple/Epson combination, so i was able to do work even when I wasn't able to sign up for a Mac.
It is hardly new. MS Office can password protect documents. I have also noticed of late that several application will hapilly ignore the password and try it's very best to open the document, often with wild success.
p.
In particular, if the document is only protected, Openoffice.org will open it without protection.
I think the point is that there will be no 'hard copy.'
I believe the problem with the current content market, from the point of view of the manufacturers, is that the consumer can store content effectively forever, as opposed to the content predictable degrading over time. Such degradation has occurred from the days of the wax cylinder, to vinyl, to generational effects of copying to tape. The manufacturers could depend on reselling the content to the same consumer.
Which is one reason, i believe, why they allowed CDs but not DAT. CDs offered them a boon to profit of mostly worthless content. Everyone, including me, eagerly replaced our bought and paid for content with equal content pressed onto CDs. We did not ask for discounts or any credits for previous purchases. On the other hand DATs represented a loss of control and return to the days when we would buy a single LP and copy it 10 times onto tape for everyone we knew.
With the early CDs, the manufacturers were in nirvana. They could charge more for CDs to compensate for the longer life-span of the media. There was an immense initial profit, and copying on analog tape severely degraded the content. Of course powerful computers and cheap CD burners have destroyed that business model, so what is a helpless music manufacturer on the edge of bankruptcy to do?
Get rid of all storage media. Cut out the existing retail chain, which are needed to sell product, but also kill product my reselling used media. Deliver content only over broadband. A copy of the music can be stored on a single computer. If the hard disk is moved to another computer, or if the computer is upgraded, for instance by adding a hard disk, adding memory, or changing video cards, the music files destroy themselves. The music may be downloaded to a single player, but if that player is attached to another machine, or if the song has been deleted when reattached to the original machine, the song destroys itself. The song may not be digitally copied to any other media.
Viola! Nirvana regained. Digital copies of music can be sold for $20 a album or $2.50 a track through the net. AOLTimeWarner becomes rich through the sale of content and sale of bandwidth. Movie theaters receive content only though dedicated lines and only onto DRM secured projectors that automatically destroy the content every week. At home, much like the original cable days, computer and TV are set up in matched pairs so that the consumer much purchase of copy of each movie for each TV. Happy Happy Joy Joy!
Re:Scalability?
on
MIT Roofnet
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· Score: 3, Interesting
i think it might be economical for series of planned communities or farms in the middle of nowhere. Some thing like this could be set up easily as the houses are being built. No cables between the houses or into the neighborhood. Have redundant connection between several of the nearest houses.
An antennae on each house, a central receiving station in each neighborhood, and peering agreements between the neighborhoods. Maintenance and internet access could be handled through civic association fees. If the association can control paint color to keep property values up, good internet connections can be equally justified.
This could even work for rural folks who always are griping about lack of broadband. I know that when my father had a farm electricity was handled in such a cooperative manner. Line of sight would be an issue, but not an insurmountable one.
I often wonder why more universities do not do this. Most places specify the machine they want, typically a portable, and typically expect students to spend 1K for each machine. For this money one could buy an mac laptop. If a student wishes to buy a wintel machine that is fine, but they have to reinstall the OS each semester to insure the machine is clean.
Most major applications run, office, Mathematica, etc. X windows is running rather well, which gives you access to most OSS apps. I think it would be a great boon for science, math, engineering, and computer science people to use a computer in which they could learn from the code.
There are only two reasons I can think of. First, most school pay almost nothing for MS software. These discounts are almost certainly in exchange for running windows. Second, it appears that many schools are writing web applications that use IE as the front end. I do not know if it is the lack of competence of the programming staff or an agreement with MS to only support windows, but the reality is that many school applications will not run on OSS browsers.
Ob On Topic:
In addition to forcing all students to reinstall the OS, could you change student machines to PPOE and when they log on have periodic checks to insure the students computer are up to date and not effective.
They hate the GPL, they believe that Linux is a derivative of Unix and as such they own it. That is why they are asking licensing fees. The fact that they are bothering to create a licensing structure that allows people to use the Linux Kernel, rather than forcing people to switch to SCO products, indicated that they like Linux and may well hope that it becomes a revenue stream.
This is not like MS running a GNU/Linux server or using GNU/Linux software. MS clearly promotes the concept that a shop must use only MS products, and their use of other product is hypocritical.
Martha Stewart was part of much bigger scandal that the SEC was very interested in pursuing. It involved insider trading, which the SEC does not like, but seems often to difficult to prove. Stewart's mistake was was selling her drugs in a public park rather than a country club.
I do not believe the SCO thing has yet resulted in anything illegal wrt to the SEC. Their claims may be false, but it has not been proven one way or another. The stock sales may well be the legal planned kind.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is a reasonable chance that SCOs intent is to enrich principles at the expense of the share holders, but proving that is often harder than it would seem. I have seen stock prices fluctuate wildly before material announcement are made public. It is clear that insider trading is happening. The SEC just usually can't or won't take action.
From the tax laws and the fact that the IRS has been told to concentrate the tax collection effort on the lower middle class, I assumed that the taxing authority had been transfered to corporate lobbyist.
It is way cheaper to get $1000 from 10,000 working poor families than $1 million from a corporation who would rather pay a lawyer $0.75 million that support their countries infrastructure and national defense.
What does it matter that SCO runs Linux. Their basic argument is that they own Linux. Is it unusual for a company to use the technology they claim to own? They want everyone to pay them for the privilege of running it. Shouldn't they be showing how wonderful it is so that more people will use it? If there is a long term strategy, it is to bring Linux under the control of SCO. Hopefully, like Unix, companies will still use it as a basis for development, but as in the past the new code will be the property of SCO.
Of course what will likely happen is that one of the other kernels will be used, and the GNU/OS supporting tools will be shown to be OK.
If people have to pay the $2K fees per proccesor, the MS can better compete.
While I do not use MS for many things, I think they probably do email properly.
I have a hotmail account that I use only for one specific purpose. I do not use the address in any registrations. I have opted out of all MS email. The address is not a common word or name. The address is not listed on the web.
MS is the market leader. When introducing a new product you must be competitive with the market leader so that people will have a reason to use the new product. In software, being competitive means that your product works enough like the market leader, and is compatible enough with the market leader.
Once you define yourself as a competitor, then you can start adding the cool stuff that differentiates your product.
MS knows this as well. Excel just didn't materialize from thin air. Spreadsheets started with Visicalc on the Apple ][. It was a truly innovative program that, to the people who understood it, justified the purchase of the machine. In much the same way that the graphics capabilities justified the purchase of a Macintosh, even if it had barely enough memory. The one truly imaginative thing MS has ever done is was combine the spreadsheet concept with the Macintosh concept. The original Excel was a truly beautiful and a deserving successor to Visicalc. But Excel was only a successor, not an original. And since them MS has lost the beauty in a bunch of extraneous crap.
I cannot say the same thing about word, as MacWrite was a superior product for many years.
Furthermore, it shows that corporations are largely responsible for frivolous suits. The know the court system is the primary methods that the average citizen can use to gain justice when harmed by the corporation, and therefore the corporation does all they can to swamp the court system with cases in which they clearly are at fault and probably would have cost them much less if they would have settled.
In the McDonlad case, they had 700 prior complaints. The current victim was willing to settle for a relatively small amount of money. McDonalds wasted the courts time taking this to trial, and were fined millions of dollars. Instead of paying this they wasted more of the courts time on appeals. The amount was reduced to a pittance. Instead of paying this pittance, they were obviously willing to waste more of the courts time, and the victim, being an average person, was forced to settle for what was probably a substantially smaller pittance. Remember, the victim did not want to go to court. The corporation knew exactly what it was doing. The frivolous part of the lawsuit was theirs.
A similar thing happened with the more recent state farm case in which a policy holder killed one person and crippled another in a car accident. The police, policy holder, State Farm's own investigator, everyone, agreed that the policy hold was at fault. The victims were willing to settle for policy limits. The firm's investigators recommended that the company settle for policy limits. Instead State Farm refused to settle and told the policy holder that the company would take care of everything. State Farm did not. In fact, State Farm began harassing the policy holder trying to get him to liquidate his assets so that he could pay the victims.
Eventually the policy holder went to court and won a settlement. The settlement was structured primarily to provide benefits to the victims, who up to this point had received almost no money. The victims who never wanted to waste the courts time, and were originally willing to set for policy limits. It was State Farm, against the recommendation of it's own investigators, that wanted to waste the time of court. It ultimately cost State Farm much more money, and there is nothing to blame but their own stupidity.
Again, this happens a lot, especially in the insurance industry. They don't want to pay their obligations, so they clutter the court with cases so it takes so long for the customer to get a fair hearing that in most cases the customer has to take a fraction of what is due to them. In my one dealing with the insurance company, we were fortunate enough to have the money to wait them out so we in fact did get the compensation we deserved.
It may not have happened, but the reality is that it could happen. The phone does have a small power spike when it rings or your turn it on, and the fumes from fueling can be highly combustible. It is really the same reason that the heating fuel companies spend so much money reminding people not to use the phone if they smell a gas leak, but to leave immediately.
Of course, some cell phone users, those that drive their SUVs at 70 miles an hour while talking on the phone, clearly have no concern for their or others safety, so I am sure such warning fall on many deaf ears.
And it is not a matter of marketing. MS has a monopoly, and people license Windows because they do not know how to do anything else. You buy a computer, and you get a license with it.
In fact, one could argue that Windows is not selling at the rate MS wants. Otherwise why would MS threaten charities about the legality of donated machines, and why would MS antagonize customers with licensing that forces them to upgrade on an annual basis.
Perhaps they should try a new method and actually give customers value.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondary students would probably do much better running simulations and puzzles on a computer than reading text books and filling worksheets. Genuine literature can be commissioned or bought outright and read on the computer with automatic reflective questions to help the student monitor comprehension and build reading skills. The student could build timelines and trees in social studies to help relate information to previous knowledge. Math classes already use graphing calculators to help the students connect function to non-abstract objects.
Much research exists that shows such activities would help at risk student improve and above average students develop personal higher order thinking skills.
The reality was I did not understand anything. I did not understand what a computer really was. I did not understand what i was really doing when i was using one. But I did understand that these things were very cool and I needed to learn and understand. i needed to get comfortable with them. I needed to become a user. I needed to own one ASAP
And that is why the laptop program is potentially so good for so many students. If they parent has a computer at home, then fine. But for many students this is the only way they will get the technology. This is what is going to get some of the non standard learners involved with school. Sure, the person who is focused on curriculum and 'quality activities' may not see any learning going on. There may be no measurable results. But often learning is going on.
We know that even in the distant future, one's survival may depend on embedding a morse coded message in the warp signature or scanning frequency!
Let me tell you a story. I once worked for a company that was able to charge a lot of money for an adequate product. There was no competition, so we could pretty much name our price. We had to keep quality at a tolerable level, but not the level the customer really wanted. We tended to use processes and equipment that was quite old.
These factors caused many economic problems. The company had money, but was not developing or consuming new technology at a rate comparable to the amount of cash on hand. This probably resulted in few overall jobs, but richer principles in the company. Also, the companies customers had to spend time working on our quality issues rather than creating better products for the end user. Also, the companies customers had to pay our 'inflated' prices rather that using that money to upgrade their facilities.
Eventually competition came in the form of Asian manufacturers with modern equipment and processes. The company spent money trying to quickly upgrade equipment and procedures. The competition produced products of equivalent quality at about half the price. Things were no longer great for the company, but times were much better for the companies vendors and customers. Quality increased and jobs were created in the US as the company was forced to modernize the facility.
Which is to say that the free market and capitalism depends on active competitions. While there may be nothing wrong with MS maintaining a monopoly on x86 systems, it does not help the American economy. Manufacturing jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, programming jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, and MS sits there with billions of dollars in the bank and an OS that desperately needs improvement in quality. They could do it.
But there is no competition. There is no other OS that threatens their market share. The vendors are in trouble because MS had no need to upgrade their facilities. The customers are in trouble because MS does not have to charge true market value. There has been no significant feature changes in Windows or Office for at least 5 years. Yet there has also been no retail price change. Admittedly Office now contains VPC, but still we are paying $200 for VPC and $250 for a five year old office suite.
I would suggest that if competition did exist the customer would pay a lower true market price. I suggest that MS would have to hire programmer and buy equipment. I suggest that the previously unemployed programmer would have money to buy durable goods. The manufactures of the durable goods would then hire workers to create the goods. And so on.
This is certainly a simplistic economic view, but the point is that we allow companies to create monopolies and these monopolies cause nothing but problems in the free market . Money collects in unproductive spaces. Technology and process stagnate. And China and India create better cheaper products while American CEO claim ignorance and disbelief at the unfairness of it all and demand that congress enact dangerous protectionist measure to help keep American jobs. They could have just spent some of thier cash reserves on implemeting the new technology, but that never occurs to the CEO.
With all due respect to Robert and Virginia, Requiem and Tramp Royale were very dissapointing. I do not believe that there was much editing or sense of his 'artistry' in either. But one of the great things about Heinlein was his directness and honesty. Writing was his professions, his way to support his family. It was only natural that the estate would milk writing for all they were worth. He was very good at the profession, but did not have the illusion that the books were more than just books, unlike some of the pompous writers we have to deal with today.
This directness made it very easy to forgive the mentioned books. After all, he gave us some many good things. My family probably has every book, many in first editions back to the fifties, some decaying paperback. The family discussions that the books provoked were priceless.
And if For us the Living only brings back memories of growing up with such writing and dialogues, then it be will be worth every penny, no matter how bad it is. I doubt it could do any more damage.
In Heinlein's case, like the other great masters of his time, writing was done to make money. He was good at creating things people wanted to read, and knew it. When one publisher did not want to distribute his work, he went across the street to another publisher who was happy for the opportunity.
The fact that they publish stuff at the end of their career, or even after their death to make money is no surprise. Tramp Royale, frankly, was an unreadable piece of crap. Outnumbering the Dead was way below par. Timequake was bad but not unreadable. And as far as The Salmon of Doubt is concerned, I think it was a very well done retrospective.
In this particular case, I think we can have high hopes concerning For us the Living. If we believe the hype, the masters did not spend a lot of time in revision. Heinlein's main concern seemed to hitting the required work count. Fahrenheit 451 was written in less than a week on rented library typewriter. In addition, Heinlien's other comedies, like Job, in which a the protagonist felt wronged by a murderer not because a man was shot, but because a man was shot at his table, were excellent. I believe a comedy of customs will be a great asset to the legacy.
This problem of repetitive stock photos go beyond brochures. There was recently a study examining the validity of Jr. High Science textbooks. Overall they found these book full of errors and often targeted to the politics of the districts rather than the needs of the students. One of the funniest finding of the study was that one book used the same photo of the same guy in the same yellow hat several times to illustrate several different science based careers. Very disturbing on many levels.
With the high cost of installing patches and downtime caused by MS inspired viruses, can anyone seriously consider the TCO of windows to be in any way reasonable. I mean is a *nix system, like a x86 linux or mac or even a sun blade be so expensive or hard to use that the having a systems down for days at a time be a necessary cost of doing business
Now I realize that some of us do nothing but read every story and every comment on /. in an attempt to fill our empty lives. And I realize that for those of us who depend on /. in this way, a repeat is as much of a distressful situation as if every channel on TV were to run Thirtysomething repeats all day. In such cases we are helpless. We are desperate to find other things to do. Maybe watch the electric meter run, or bang our head against the wall.
If a story is a repeat, don't read it. /. is not meant to be the sole form of entertainment. Find something else entertaining to do. Though i myself am not familiar with these activities, and certainly cannot recommend them form experience or condone them in any way, from the movies I see that people kill time with drugs, sex, and moving rhythmically to syncopated tonal beats.
Before that I had an Epson FX-80 and an Apple. It had some fonts, proportional fonts, and many other features, such as skipping a specific amount of vertical white space and margins. I used these features by embedding escape codes in my text. My habit was to use tabs because I coded a lot. In the back of my mind I seem to remember it doing automatic page numbers and footers.
That pretty much met all my term paper needs until the Epson died. Fortunately by that point MS had come out with an OS and word processor that was as good as the Apple/Epson combination, so i was able to do work even when I wasn't able to sign up for a Mac.
It is hardly new. MS Office can password protect documents. I have also noticed of late that several application will hapilly ignore the password and try it's very best to open the document, often with wild success. p. In particular, if the document is only protected, Openoffice.org will open it without protection.
I believe the problem with the current content market, from the point of view of the manufacturers, is that the consumer can store content effectively forever, as opposed to the content predictable degrading over time. Such degradation has occurred from the days of the wax cylinder, to vinyl, to generational effects of copying to tape. The manufacturers could depend on reselling the content to the same consumer.
Which is one reason, i believe, why they allowed CDs but not DAT. CDs offered them a boon to profit of mostly worthless content. Everyone, including me, eagerly replaced our bought and paid for content with equal content pressed onto CDs. We did not ask for discounts or any credits for previous purchases. On the other hand DATs represented a loss of control and return to the days when we would buy a single LP and copy it 10 times onto tape for everyone we knew.
With the early CDs, the manufacturers were in nirvana. They could charge more for CDs to compensate for the longer life-span of the media. There was an immense initial profit, and copying on analog tape severely degraded the content. Of course powerful computers and cheap CD burners have destroyed that business model, so what is a helpless music manufacturer on the edge of bankruptcy to do?
Get rid of all storage media. Cut out the existing retail chain, which are needed to sell product, but also kill product my reselling used media. Deliver content only over broadband. A copy of the music can be stored on a single computer. If the hard disk is moved to another computer, or if the computer is upgraded, for instance by adding a hard disk, adding memory, or changing video cards, the music files destroy themselves. The music may be downloaded to a single player, but if that player is attached to another machine, or if the song has been deleted when reattached to the original machine, the song destroys itself. The song may not be digitally copied to any other media.
Viola! Nirvana regained. Digital copies of music can be sold for $20 a album or $2.50 a track through the net. AOLTimeWarner becomes rich through the sale of content and sale of bandwidth. Movie theaters receive content only though dedicated lines and only onto DRM secured projectors that automatically destroy the content every week. At home, much like the original cable days, computer and TV are set up in matched pairs so that the consumer much purchase of copy of each movie for each TV. Happy Happy Joy Joy!
An antennae on each house, a central receiving station in each neighborhood, and peering agreements between the neighborhoods. Maintenance and internet access could be handled through civic association fees. If the association can control paint color to keep property values up, good internet connections can be equally justified.
This could even work for rural folks who always are griping about lack of broadband. I know that when my father had a farm electricity was handled in such a cooperative manner. Line of sight would be an issue, but not an insurmountable one.
Most major applications run, office, Mathematica, etc. X windows is running rather well, which gives you access to most OSS apps. I think it would be a great boon for science, math, engineering, and computer science people to use a computer in which they could learn from the code.
There are only two reasons I can think of. First, most school pay almost nothing for MS software. These discounts are almost certainly in exchange for running windows. Second, it appears that many schools are writing web applications that use IE as the front end. I do not know if it is the lack of competence of the programming staff or an agreement with MS to only support windows, but the reality is that many school applications will not run on OSS browsers.
Ob On Topic:
In addition to forcing all students to reinstall the OS, could you change student machines to PPOE and when they log on have periodic checks to insure the students computer are up to date and not effective.
They hate the GPL, they believe that Linux is a derivative of Unix and as such they own it. That is why they are asking licensing fees. The fact that they are bothering to create a licensing structure that allows people to use the Linux Kernel, rather than forcing people to switch to SCO products, indicated that they like Linux and may well hope that it becomes a revenue stream.
This is not like MS running a GNU/Linux server or using GNU/Linux software. MS clearly promotes the concept that a shop must use only MS products, and their use of other product is hypocritical.
I do not believe the SCO thing has yet resulted in anything illegal wrt to the SEC. Their claims may be false, but it has not been proven one way or another. The stock sales may well be the legal planned kind.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is a reasonable chance that SCOs intent is to enrich principles at the expense of the share holders, but proving that is often harder than it would seem. I have seen stock prices fluctuate wildly before material announcement are made public. It is clear that insider trading is happening. The SEC just usually can't or won't take action.
It is way cheaper to get $1000 from 10,000 working poor families than $1 million from a corporation who would rather pay a lawyer $0.75 million that support their countries infrastructure and national defense.
Of course what will likely happen is that one of the other kernels will be used, and the GNU/OS supporting tools will be shown to be OK.
If people have to pay the $2K fees per proccesor, the MS can better compete.
I have a hotmail account that I use only for one specific purpose. I do not use the address in any registrations. I have opted out of all MS email. The address is not a common word or name. The address is not listed on the web.
I do not get any spam on this account. None.
Once you define yourself as a competitor, then you can start adding the cool stuff that differentiates your product.
MS knows this as well. Excel just didn't materialize from thin air. Spreadsheets started with Visicalc on the Apple ][. It was a truly innovative program that, to the people who understood it, justified the purchase of the machine. In much the same way that the graphics capabilities justified the purchase of a Macintosh, even if it had barely enough memory. The one truly imaginative thing MS has ever done is was combine the spreadsheet concept with the Macintosh concept. The original Excel was a truly beautiful and a deserving successor to Visicalc. But Excel was only a successor, not an original. And since them MS has lost the beauty in a bunch of extraneous crap.
I cannot say the same thing about word, as MacWrite was a superior product for many years.
and let us not forget that Enron caused much bigger problems for the banks, brokerage houses, and governmnet officials that 9/11.
In the McDonlad case, they had 700 prior complaints. The current victim was willing to settle for a relatively small amount of money. McDonalds wasted the courts time taking this to trial, and were fined millions of dollars. Instead of paying this they wasted more of the courts time on appeals. The amount was reduced to a pittance. Instead of paying this pittance, they were obviously willing to waste more of the courts time, and the victim, being an average person, was forced to settle for what was probably a substantially smaller pittance. Remember, the victim did not want to go to court. The corporation knew exactly what it was doing. The frivolous part of the lawsuit was theirs.
A similar thing happened with the more recent state farm case in which a policy holder killed one person and crippled another in a car accident. The police, policy holder, State Farm's own investigator, everyone, agreed that the policy hold was at fault. The victims were willing to settle for policy limits. The firm's investigators recommended that the company settle for policy limits. Instead State Farm refused to settle and told the policy holder that the company would take care of everything. State Farm did not. In fact, State Farm began harassing the policy holder trying to get him to liquidate his assets so that he could pay the victims.
Eventually the policy holder went to court and won a settlement. The settlement was structured primarily to provide benefits to the victims, who up to this point had received almost no money. The victims who never wanted to waste the courts time, and were originally willing to set for policy limits. It was State Farm, against the recommendation of it's own investigators, that wanted to waste the time of court. It ultimately cost State Farm much more money, and there is nothing to blame but their own stupidity.
Again, this happens a lot, especially in the insurance industry. They don't want to pay their obligations, so they clutter the court with cases so it takes so long for the customer to get a fair hearing that in most cases the customer has to take a fraction of what is due to them. In my one dealing with the insurance company, we were fortunate enough to have the money to wait them out so we in fact did get the compensation we deserved.
Of course, some cell phone users, those that drive their SUVs at 70 miles an hour while talking on the phone, clearly have no concern for their or others safety, so I am sure such warning fall on many deaf ears.
Also take into the fact the Universities take these ratings seriously and spend quite a bit of time figuring out how to play the numbers.
MS does not sell windows, MS licenses it.
And it is not a matter of marketing. MS has a monopoly, and people license Windows because they do not know how to do anything else. You buy a computer, and you get a license with it.
In fact, one could argue that Windows is not selling at the rate MS wants. Otherwise why would MS threaten charities about the legality of donated machines, and why would MS antagonize customers with licensing that forces them to upgrade on an annual basis.
Perhaps they should try a new method and actually give customers value.