Kids have little impulse control. This why 10 year old students are not allowed to bring toys to class, and are usually told to go to bed without distractions. Increasingly though older students are demanding to use their communication devices 24 hours a day. This does cause a problem because the lack of impulse control means that most kids, especially teems who parents are increasingly unable to control every aspect of their lives, end up spending much of the night online, sometimes being bullied, to the point where a few have committed suicide, even though it was just a matter of uninstalling an app. They do not have the ability to just turn it off or uninstall it. This is why Facebook grew so fast, and is not falling fast as teens find other shiny things. Lack of impulse control.
Therefore anything that is going to succeed in the market. If/. were for kids, there would be a problem with some stuff here. But it is not. Apps that are targeted to kids do limit content.
So they literaly buy a cop instead of just investing in the neighborhood like a normal megamaniacal corporation. A cop, unless the cop is being paid to apply the law differentially and go beyond the law when needed, is not going to do much good. Most revitalization depends on land prices going up enough so that people move out in a large enough area. Cops are useful, but harassment is not usually enough to get people out, and stupid people with money just tends to attract criminals.
I know this is going sound like an attack, but congestion is due to a number of factors. In my area the congestion has increased rapidly. One factor I have seen is that there are once again many trucks and SUVs on the road. In 2010, with gas prices usually around $4, I saw a decrease in the number of these large vehicles. Now gas is back down to around 3.50, which is what is was back in 2007. Cheaper gas not only means people can afford to drive more, it means they can afford less efficient cars.
Less efficient not only in fuel consumption, but also in road consumption. A while back Texas A&M did a road study on how traffic is effected by these large trucks. One finding is a stop lights they take about 1.5 times a long to transverse as a car. Check which cars make you miss the light next time you are trying to go through an intersection.
For consumer OS, the claimed support of six years is not exceptional. While Apple may only support an OS for 3 or 4 years, a new OS does tend to run on hardware that is 5-6 years old. Also Apple has only released major upgrades that borks every past system 10 years. Apple DOS to System, System to Mac OS for PowerPC, Mac OS to Mac OS X.
As far as the comparison to RH, et al, part of the issue here is not support of an old OS, but support for a legacy OS. For example, OS/2 was effectively mothballed by IBM at the turn of the century. However IBM still sells support. This is what businesses require. They have built their businesses on a product, and as long as it is profitable, IBM will support it. MS,OTOH, seems to be more interested in other things, not supported customers.
No, they are doing for clicks. It is more irresponsibility from the like of fox news and other bottom feeders. Shame on them. I wish the family my best in their effort to get through this in the middle of all these horrible people who just want to profit off the tragedy.
Microsoft's right to kill XP is unquestioned, but the company appears to have no insight into why its customers continue to use the OS.
MS is a public firm, so if XP is losing money, and share holder value is not being honored, then yes MS has every reason to kill it.
But if customers are still finding enough value to pay MS to support it, then MS is just making arbitrary decisions that are hurt long term value. If business customers are not going to be able to trust MS to support core technology that is good enough, they will go somewhere else. Business customers can't be expected to change their business models just because MS want to sell a new toy.
This is my thought. Now that the Obama administration opposes Aereo, we can expect all the conservatives, tea party people, Ted Cruz, to support it. Those of us who like Aereo are all but guaranteed a win!
If this is true or not, it reminds me of the sacrifice of the giraffe in Copenhagen. Now, I am sure that many of us would rather live in captivity than be dead, but speaking for me captivity would not be such a good life.
Here is the thing. I choose to minimize the number of animals that are necessary for me to kill to live. It is a choice and I don't expect others to make the same choice. I realize that some people think it their right to maximize the destruction. That is OK.
But, unlike those that fight PETA, I realize that an animal is an animal and a human is human and that those things are different, so I am not going to fight PETA on the basis that killing an animal is the same as killing a human, or that some animal deaths, like some human deaths, are acceptable. I don't think even PETA claims to want to stop all animal deaths, any more than evangelical Christians want to stop all human deaths. Many, for instance, support the death penalty, and many in the us support stand your ground laws.
In both cases there is a thoughtful process by which we examine and take responsibility for our impact on the world. The later is the critical thing. Take responsibility for your actions.
I would hate to be judged on my hours worked. Sometimes I am less efficient than others and have to work more hours, sometimes I am more efficient and have to work less. I have generally been salary, generally been expected to work enough to get my work done, and generally been paid for the getting work done.
Now, if I were a paper pusher then the hours worked would be a good metric. If I were a check out person at walmart then the hours worked would be a good metric. But hours worked has never seemed to me a good metric for technical people, unless you are talking about the geek squad.
Yeah, I don't see how this is any different that advertising acne and psychotropic drugs to teens. Yes, some people have a medical need for the drug, but most are being given drugs with no benefits and significant side effects.
As far as advertising naked internet webcam show for pay to kids, yes this is illegal, but face the facts. If a kid is interested in modeling, the most likely way to make money without allowing oneself to be physically molested and becoming addicted to drugs and actually making money is the web cam route. It is not ideal, but I suspect most of these ads are not for any kind of modeling career, but scams to separate parents from the hard earned money, and sell young people fake dreams.
According to the article, the problem is that a significant amount of the traffic is genitalia,ad the officers are just spending all day having to look at these, and general porn shoots, and therefore are not able to get to actionable material. As such they are just trying to filter out the couples engaged in phone sex or real sex.
Therefore, the best way to keep you conspiracy secret is simply have discussion while you are engaged in sex, or make sure that all participants are at least naked the camera prominently display the naughty bits. These will be deemed to be simple pron, and the terrorists will be free to plan the bombing of whatever place they desire.
The point was that reading biographies of individuals often focus on their personality and sometimes makes it appear that their contribution was greater than it was, and sometimes does not expose the very real and important research and engineering work that allowed their creativity to flourish.
This is the dichotomy of futurism. The future does depend, to some extent, of a single genius who can integrate all that is in the world in such a way that a novel idea or product can be produced. We see this repeatedly in the sciences. But the single genius is seldom the one to develop the only one involved in developing the concept. It is a convenient short hand to say so and so invented something, but it only a fiction that we create so we can teach a simpler form of history.
By reading about the development of products that changed the world, instead of just the people who received credit, I think we are better able to identify the pieces that some future genius will put together into the next big thing, if that is at all possible. For instance in the late 1970's did anyone know that the proto-spreadsheet floating around and the introduction of the prebuilt Apple computerwould lead to Visicalc and the revolution of how the average person relates to numbers?
Reading biographies of individual people implies that individual people have individually changed the world. By and large that is not true. On can read a biography on Edison, but that does not tell you the complex story of how that technology actually came to pass and how it effected the world.
Reading fiction and non-fiction that explores the possibilities or technology, and even the rejection of technology can lead to discussion on the various factors effected the adoption and exploration of technology. For instance Guns, Germs, and Steel puts forward many hypothesis on why some civilizations developed technology, some borrowed it, and some rejected it. It related to the distribution and adoption of technology today and in the future, and how those futurist who think technology is the answer can make it more widely available. On the fiction side, The Difference Engine imagines a world where we had computers in the victorian era. This can lead to a discussion on the differences between an idea, a manufacturing process, and an affordable mass manufacturing process. For instance, was the technology for manufacturing hundreds of identical gears present in the 1800's?
One this I find interesting is that we know have simplified the process of programming computers to the point where an slightly above average kid with an average education can develop an App. This only took 50 years, two generations. This reflects something that we see repeatedly. The spread of technology does not depend on a special person making a technology, rather the development of a process that makes the technology available to greater number of people. For instance, the process to make a precision screw was incredible important to much of what we do today, even if many of the people who have used the screw do not understand what it does.
There is a lot to be said about having cash in hand, and benefits. Is part of the idea that the small firm may get big and you will be rewarded greatly? That usually does not happen, so it is a gamble.
If they desperately need someone to do all this great stuff, I wonder why you have to take a pay cut. Sure, you may be overpaid at you current job because of stress and what not, but i wonder if this new firm is just looking to find someone who will fix the problems cheap and then go away when they do not get a raise.
Life is certainly more about money. but that is mostly said by people who have it.
This would be my impression. If people were 'more sophisticated' and worried about data harvesting, they would not use gmail. As it is, I don't know anyone who uses their facebook email. I don't see any difference between data collected on the site and data collected through email. It is probably just that no one is using it.
The pentagon appears to want to cut spending. The congress does not. For several sessions that congress has refused to cut pentagon spending even though the pentagon says it can. The sequester, which just pissed everyone off, was an exception.
The thing is that the military has been, for a few decades, the primary means of pumping unquestioned deficit dollars into he US economy. If one complained about the debt, one would be branded a traitor. So when the interests rate were 10% in the 80's, the military was boosted to create jobs. Unfortunately these jobs were expenses not just in interest rates, but in benifits and the fact that after 20 years the tax payer is indebted to the military person for life.
Now that interest rates are 3%, the government makes a profit off borrowing money, there should be a rational for boosting speding and propping up the economy through civil jobs. Military jobs and spending should be seen as extremely wasteful. But we are still in the old mold.
I recall when someone went down my block and the window of every car parked on the street. It was a crime, but really there was no easy way to catch the perp, and we just replaced the glass. We continued to park on the street, did not pay for huge security expense, and it never really happened again. Some kids probably just goofing off. No real profit in the crime. Just hooliganism.
Which is what this seems like. The process of science is not going to jeopardize itself just because some board kids want to vandalize the walls and get attention. If we change the process not to improve it, but just to defend against the Justin Beibers of the world, what good would that do?
As it is there are safeguards in place. As much as people deride the cost of publishing, this reduces the incentive of hooligans to publish purely fake papers. Peer review, which does not protect against purposeful fraudulent papers, does keep a reign on the problem. Then there is simple principle that a single paper is just that, a single paper. It is one data point, and even if referenced widely, is in no way fact.
This also makes me recall the 'confusing' health debate. Like what to eat, what not to eat, etc. The problem is that many people read a popular media report based on a single piece of research and think it is true. This misconception indicates the problem with science education in America. That one result is meaningful. That our basic principles of science were developed fully in one paper, with no background, and no adjustment as more data was taken. For instance, relativity was based on at least hundred years of research. Einstein pretty much observed single discrepancy in the magnetic/electrical field and formulated a correction.
MS provides a solution for some problems, but also provides problems that are difficult to solve. These have not gone away. For instance I still have to use websites for work that were originally designed when MS was trying to take over the Internet, placing arbitrary restrictions on which browsers, you know IE only, could be used. The sins of outlook will never be lived down.
MS did a wonderful job providing management tools for independent machines that could given to worker drones but centrally controlled. This was a critical feature for some customers. They provide a reasonable value in productivity tools for some customers. OTOH, their path to profit still seems to be based in crushing any innovative force that might weaken their market dominance.
MS provides, IMHO, no tools that are useful to anyone that is not a corporate hack. The one innovation they have come up with in the past decade, Kinect, does not seem to be moving forward after 4 years of development. I mean how hard would it be to incorporate it into Surface to provide gesture based input?
Which is my issue with MS. They different parts do not seem to play well together. There appears to a top level desire to place MS concerns for profit above all others, meaning there can be no real risks take to meet customer needs. And if this is just taken a a person with generational grudges, well that just proves my point that MS cannot provide useful product because they just think they are perfect and in no need of modifications.
I thought this meant that user would be able to boot to a Windows 7 type interface. That is about the only way to improve the user experience. Apple made the same mistake. In trying to make their office productivity suite work on the iPad, they destroyed many useful features. The also killed compatibility between file format as MS did in the late 90's.
In a profit driven world, the changes are going to follow the perceived direction of the market. For MS, who still makes most of it's money from corporate clients, the rush toward mobile computers and Metro makes little sense. I don't know why they did not make a decision to create a fork, like they did with NT, and keep two operating systems in the market.
I recall talking about 'time outs' for young kids. Using this as a punishment, some people think, is silly, but using it as a way to manage a child can be very useful. For instance, the behavior charts that provide immediate visual feedback to younger students is well understood and can be very useful in fulfilling the need of such children for concrete and fair feedback.
With data walls, viewable to kids, they have to understand what they mean. I can tell you even fro adults some data walls are incomprehensible. Simply posting data and using it rank students or whatever is quite meaningless. If data is going to be used to help students meet a goal, then the best way to do that is on a individual basis. Use the data to choose lesson to help the individual students improve. Part of this is the administration providing tools to direct the data toward student improvement instead of student or teacher punishment.
My theory is that in this point they are pretty much willing to give a pair to anyone who has $1500 to blow. In my case it will closer to $2000 because I want the prescription frames.
The fact that everyone seems to be getting an invite indicates that I theory I have held since the first Google Android phone came out might be true. Google does not know how to make an affordable piece of consumer technology. Google does not know how to market a piece of consumer technology except through marketing process like this where they try to make the device seem very scarce and available only to a select group. Google has not built up the trust with the public to make anyone who buys something like this feel anything other than an extreme early adopting Guinea pig.
I might buy it if I get external funding. However the horror stories of lack of customer support for the first Google phone, and those who paid for other Google services, make me realize that I am giving two grand for a product, not for help from any company backing it. It is also the reason why I tend not to use MS products. If something is only supported by third parties, and not by the manufacturer, it make me worry about quality.
I bought a 360. Thought the kinetic would be very much used. It made the video game a much more physical activity. Turns out we don't want a physical activity, or developers don't know how to create one. In any case the kinetic did not end up being a key part of the play.
It is instructive to recall that pundits and MS were saying something similar about Sony when they included the expensive bluray.
It is a bad argument because it was treated as such 30 years ago when Apple made it. The Computer For The Rest of Us did not mean the computer that the Rest Of Us could afford, but the computer that the Rest Of Us might have a slightly less steep learning curve. The allusion, in case the youngsters do not get it, was that a regular person would no longer have to go the IT department to get stuff done. We were no longer indebted to the geeks who watched over the mainframe. The new reality, shown in the IT Crowd, is where the losers are securely contained in the basement.
The problem is that a GUI is limiting. The first thing even a non-power user wants is scripting. Apple quickly put in scripting, but it was broken and only worked under certain circumstances. Other work around were envisioned, but everyone breathed a sigh of relief when we one again had a shell with command line. One reason excel was popular was that it had scripting that worked and was accessible to the average user.
So yes, if this were 30 years ago them MS would have an interesting argument. In 2014, however, we know how a general purpose computer is to work. Less general computing devices, like a iPad or a phone, can sacrifice some of this. But all Metro devices are marketed as equivalent to the desktop,or at least the laptop.
The was also an issue 25 years ago, when the PDA was a thing. They were marketed as small computers. Everyone was uniformly disappointed with them. Palm was the only one that had the sense to market it as an extension to your computer.
Every once in while people claim that the universe works at our current level of technology. Right now we are at the computer and simulation stage. This has been going for years. In fact there are a couple interesting books that posit certain things in our universe, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, on the basis of information theory, i.e. that we can only know limited things about the universe as there are only a limited number of bits that can be stored.
The flaw in all these hypothesis is that although we have modeled the universe for the past 400 years using math, those models have always been a simplification of our observations. The predication we make from them have always been an projection of what we think exists. In most cases we do not observe these predictions directly, so it may be that we create the formulation we expect to see.
This is not to say that science models are not the best we have available. These models allow us to fly to far off planets, build computers, and create complex networks. The practical extent to science cannot be underestimated. But that is actually explains what is happening 'for real'. The is epistemology. It unscientific. It is extrapolating outside of the domain of our knowledge with no real way of testing if the extrapolation is valid.
Doing this stuff is very hard. There are things that happen even in low earth orbit that we don't think about, that we can't relate to, because all our experience and all our common sense is tied up in this atmosphere laden gravity well.
I have done stuff like this, and even if the top level mission objectives are not met, i.e. three month mission to explore and get data, I am sure that this mission could be listed as more than 50% successful. Things like soft landing on the moon, deploying and activating the robot, whatever the robot has done for a month, etc.
I am sure that everyone will learn a lot from this mission. NASA has had a lot of mission that it took on with partners that probably were not even as successful as this, but there was a lot to learn from the experience.
Again, going to space is very hard. Doing things in space is very hard, and there are a bunch of stuff that can trip you up. Not everything is going to work perfectly. NASA and the US has a great reputation because we have things like Curiosity and Voyager. But we must also remember that Hubble space telescope was almost lost, and Kepler barely completed it's primary mission and was nowhere near completing it's extended mission.
Not saying any of this reflects poorly on anyone. Just saying space is hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Kids have little impulse control. This why 10 year old students are not allowed to bring toys to class, and are usually told to go to bed without distractions. Increasingly though older students are demanding to use their communication devices 24 hours a day. This does cause a problem because the lack of impulse control means that most kids, especially teems who parents are increasingly unable to control every aspect of their lives, end up spending much of the night online, sometimes being bullied, to the point where a few have committed suicide, even though it was just a matter of uninstalling an app. They do not have the ability to just turn it off or uninstall it. This is why Facebook grew so fast, and is not falling fast as teens find other shiny things. Lack of impulse control. Therefore anything that is going to succeed in the market. If /. were for kids, there would be a problem with some stuff here. But it is not. Apps that are targeted to kids do limit content.
So they literaly buy a cop instead of just investing in the neighborhood like a normal megamaniacal corporation. A cop, unless the cop is being paid to apply the law differentially and go beyond the law when needed, is not going to do much good. Most revitalization depends on land prices going up enough so that people move out in a large enough area. Cops are useful, but harassment is not usually enough to get people out, and stupid people with money just tends to attract criminals.
Less efficient not only in fuel consumption, but also in road consumption. A while back Texas A&M did a road study on how traffic is effected by these large trucks. One finding is a stop lights they take about 1.5 times a long to transverse as a car. Check which cars make you miss the light next time you are trying to go through an intersection.
For consumer OS, the claimed support of six years is not exceptional. While Apple may only support an OS for 3 or 4 years, a new OS does tend to run on hardware that is 5-6 years old. Also Apple has only released major upgrades that borks every past system 10 years. Apple DOS to System, System to Mac OS for PowerPC, Mac OS to Mac OS X. As far as the comparison to RH, et al, part of the issue here is not support of an old OS, but support for a legacy OS. For example, OS/2 was effectively mothballed by IBM at the turn of the century. However IBM still sells support. This is what businesses require. They have built their businesses on a product, and as long as it is profitable, IBM will support it. MS,OTOH, seems to be more interested in other things, not supported customers.
No, they are doing for clicks. It is more irresponsibility from the like of fox news and other bottom feeders. Shame on them. I wish the family my best in their effort to get through this in the middle of all these horrible people who just want to profit off the tragedy.
MS is a public firm, so if XP is losing money, and share holder value is not being honored, then yes MS has every reason to kill it.
But if customers are still finding enough value to pay MS to support it, then MS is just making arbitrary decisions that are hurt long term value. If business customers are not going to be able to trust MS to support core technology that is good enough, they will go somewhere else. Business customers can't be expected to change their business models just because MS want to sell a new toy.
This is my thought. Now that the Obama administration opposes Aereo, we can expect all the conservatives, tea party people, Ted Cruz, to support it. Those of us who like Aereo are all but guaranteed a win!
If this is true or not, it reminds me of the sacrifice of the giraffe in Copenhagen. Now, I am sure that many of us would rather live in captivity than be dead, but speaking for me captivity would not be such a good life. Here is the thing. I choose to minimize the number of animals that are necessary for me to kill to live. It is a choice and I don't expect others to make the same choice. I realize that some people think it their right to maximize the destruction. That is OK. But, unlike those that fight PETA, I realize that an animal is an animal and a human is human and that those things are different, so I am not going to fight PETA on the basis that killing an animal is the same as killing a human, or that some animal deaths, like some human deaths, are acceptable. I don't think even PETA claims to want to stop all animal deaths, any more than evangelical Christians want to stop all human deaths. Many, for instance, support the death penalty, and many in the us support stand your ground laws. In both cases there is a thoughtful process by which we examine and take responsibility for our impact on the world. The later is the critical thing. Take responsibility for your actions.
I would hate to be judged on my hours worked. Sometimes I am less efficient than others and have to work more hours, sometimes I am more efficient and have to work less. I have generally been salary, generally been expected to work enough to get my work done, and generally been paid for the getting work done. Now, if I were a paper pusher then the hours worked would be a good metric. If I were a check out person at walmart then the hours worked would be a good metric. But hours worked has never seemed to me a good metric for technical people, unless you are talking about the geek squad.
As far as advertising naked internet webcam show for pay to kids, yes this is illegal, but face the facts. If a kid is interested in modeling, the most likely way to make money without allowing oneself to be physically molested and becoming addicted to drugs and actually making money is the web cam route. It is not ideal, but I suspect most of these ads are not for any kind of modeling career, but scams to separate parents from the hard earned money, and sell young people fake dreams.
Therefore, the best way to keep you conspiracy secret is simply have discussion while you are engaged in sex, or make sure that all participants are at least naked the camera prominently display the naughty bits. These will be deemed to be simple pron, and the terrorists will be free to plan the bombing of whatever place they desire.
This is the dichotomy of futurism. The future does depend, to some extent, of a single genius who can integrate all that is in the world in such a way that a novel idea or product can be produced. We see this repeatedly in the sciences. But the single genius is seldom the one to develop the only one involved in developing the concept. It is a convenient short hand to say so and so invented something, but it only a fiction that we create so we can teach a simpler form of history.
By reading about the development of products that changed the world, instead of just the people who received credit, I think we are better able to identify the pieces that some future genius will put together into the next big thing, if that is at all possible. For instance in the late 1970's did anyone know that the proto-spreadsheet floating around and the introduction of the prebuilt Apple computerwould lead to Visicalc and the revolution of how the average person relates to numbers?
Reading fiction and non-fiction that explores the possibilities or technology, and even the rejection of technology can lead to discussion on the various factors effected the adoption and exploration of technology. For instance Guns, Germs, and Steel puts forward many hypothesis on why some civilizations developed technology, some borrowed it, and some rejected it. It related to the distribution and adoption of technology today and in the future, and how those futurist who think technology is the answer can make it more widely available. On the fiction side, The Difference Engine imagines a world where we had computers in the victorian era. This can lead to a discussion on the differences between an idea, a manufacturing process, and an affordable mass manufacturing process. For instance, was the technology for manufacturing hundreds of identical gears present in the 1800's?
One this I find interesting is that we know have simplified the process of programming computers to the point where an slightly above average kid with an average education can develop an App. This only took 50 years, two generations. This reflects something that we see repeatedly. The spread of technology does not depend on a special person making a technology, rather the development of a process that makes the technology available to greater number of people. For instance, the process to make a precision screw was incredible important to much of what we do today, even if many of the people who have used the screw do not understand what it does.
If they desperately need someone to do all this great stuff, I wonder why you have to take a pay cut. Sure, you may be overpaid at you current job because of stress and what not, but i wonder if this new firm is just looking to find someone who will fix the problems cheap and then go away when they do not get a raise.
Life is certainly more about money. but that is mostly said by people who have it.
This would be my impression. If people were 'more sophisticated' and worried about data harvesting, they would not use gmail. As it is, I don't know anyone who uses their facebook email. I don't see any difference between data collected on the site and data collected through email. It is probably just that no one is using it.
The thing is that the military has been, for a few decades, the primary means of pumping unquestioned deficit dollars into he US economy. If one complained about the debt, one would be branded a traitor. So when the interests rate were 10% in the 80's, the military was boosted to create jobs. Unfortunately these jobs were expenses not just in interest rates, but in benifits and the fact that after 20 years the tax payer is indebted to the military person for life.
Now that interest rates are 3%, the government makes a profit off borrowing money, there should be a rational for boosting speding and propping up the economy through civil jobs. Military jobs and spending should be seen as extremely wasteful. But we are still in the old mold.
Which is what this seems like. The process of science is not going to jeopardize itself just because some board kids want to vandalize the walls and get attention. If we change the process not to improve it, but just to defend against the Justin Beibers of the world, what good would that do?
As it is there are safeguards in place. As much as people deride the cost of publishing, this reduces the incentive of hooligans to publish purely fake papers. Peer review, which does not protect against purposeful fraudulent papers, does keep a reign on the problem. Then there is simple principle that a single paper is just that, a single paper. It is one data point, and even if referenced widely, is in no way fact.
This also makes me recall the 'confusing' health debate. Like what to eat, what not to eat, etc. The problem is that many people read a popular media report based on a single piece of research and think it is true. This misconception indicates the problem with science education in America. That one result is meaningful. That our basic principles of science were developed fully in one paper, with no background, and no adjustment as more data was taken. For instance, relativity was based on at least hundred years of research. Einstein pretty much observed single discrepancy in the magnetic/electrical field and formulated a correction.
MS did a wonderful job providing management tools for independent machines that could given to worker drones but centrally controlled. This was a critical feature for some customers. They provide a reasonable value in productivity tools for some customers. OTOH, their path to profit still seems to be based in crushing any innovative force that might weaken their market dominance.
MS provides, IMHO, no tools that are useful to anyone that is not a corporate hack. The one innovation they have come up with in the past decade, Kinect, does not seem to be moving forward after 4 years of development. I mean how hard would it be to incorporate it into Surface to provide gesture based input?
Which is my issue with MS. They different parts do not seem to play well together. There appears to a top level desire to place MS concerns for profit above all others, meaning there can be no real risks take to meet customer needs. And if this is just taken a a person with generational grudges, well that just proves my point that MS cannot provide useful product because they just think they are perfect and in no need of modifications.
I thought this meant that user would be able to boot to a Windows 7 type interface. That is about the only way to improve the user experience. Apple made the same mistake. In trying to make their office productivity suite work on the iPad, they destroyed many useful features. The also killed compatibility between file format as MS did in the late 90's.
In a profit driven world, the changes are going to follow the perceived direction of the market. For MS, who still makes most of it's money from corporate clients, the rush toward mobile computers and Metro makes little sense. I don't know why they did not make a decision to create a fork, like they did with NT, and keep two operating systems in the market.
With data walls, viewable to kids, they have to understand what they mean. I can tell you even fro adults some data walls are incomprehensible. Simply posting data and using it rank students or whatever is quite meaningless. If data is going to be used to help students meet a goal, then the best way to do that is on a individual basis. Use the data to choose lesson to help the individual students improve. Part of this is the administration providing tools to direct the data toward student improvement instead of student or teacher punishment.
The fact that everyone seems to be getting an invite indicates that I theory I have held since the first Google Android phone came out might be true. Google does not know how to make an affordable piece of consumer technology. Google does not know how to market a piece of consumer technology except through marketing process like this where they try to make the device seem very scarce and available only to a select group. Google has not built up the trust with the public to make anyone who buys something like this feel anything other than an extreme early adopting Guinea pig.
I might buy it if I get external funding. However the horror stories of lack of customer support for the first Google phone, and those who paid for other Google services, make me realize that I am giving two grand for a product, not for help from any company backing it. It is also the reason why I tend not to use MS products. If something is only supported by third parties, and not by the manufacturer, it make me worry about quality.
It is instructive to recall that pundits and MS were saying something similar about Sony when they included the expensive bluray.
It is a bad argument because it was treated as such 30 years ago when Apple made it. The Computer For The Rest of Us did not mean the computer that the Rest Of Us could afford, but the computer that the Rest Of Us might have a slightly less steep learning curve. The allusion, in case the youngsters do not get it, was that a regular person would no longer have to go the IT department to get stuff done. We were no longer indebted to the geeks who watched over the mainframe. The new reality, shown in the IT Crowd, is where the losers are securely contained in the basement. The problem is that a GUI is limiting. The first thing even a non-power user wants is scripting. Apple quickly put in scripting, but it was broken and only worked under certain circumstances. Other work around were envisioned, but everyone breathed a sigh of relief when we one again had a shell with command line. One reason excel was popular was that it had scripting that worked and was accessible to the average user. So yes, if this were 30 years ago them MS would have an interesting argument. In 2014, however, we know how a general purpose computer is to work. Less general computing devices, like a iPad or a phone, can sacrifice some of this. But all Metro devices are marketed as equivalent to the desktop,or at least the laptop. The was also an issue 25 years ago, when the PDA was a thing. They were marketed as small computers. Everyone was uniformly disappointed with them. Palm was the only one that had the sense to market it as an extension to your computer.
Every once in while people claim that the universe works at our current level of technology. Right now we are at the computer and simulation stage. This has been going for years. In fact there are a couple interesting books that posit certain things in our universe, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, on the basis of information theory, i.e. that we can only know limited things about the universe as there are only a limited number of bits that can be stored. The flaw in all these hypothesis is that although we have modeled the universe for the past 400 years using math, those models have always been a simplification of our observations. The predication we make from them have always been an projection of what we think exists. In most cases we do not observe these predictions directly, so it may be that we create the formulation we expect to see. This is not to say that science models are not the best we have available. These models allow us to fly to far off planets, build computers, and create complex networks. The practical extent to science cannot be underestimated. But that is actually explains what is happening 'for real'. The is epistemology. It unscientific. It is extrapolating outside of the domain of our knowledge with no real way of testing if the extrapolation is valid.
I have done stuff like this, and even if the top level mission objectives are not met, i.e. three month mission to explore and get data, I am sure that this mission could be listed as more than 50% successful. Things like soft landing on the moon, deploying and activating the robot, whatever the robot has done for a month, etc.
I am sure that everyone will learn a lot from this mission. NASA has had a lot of mission that it took on with partners that probably were not even as successful as this, but there was a lot to learn from the experience.
Again, going to space is very hard. Doing things in space is very hard, and there are a bunch of stuff that can trip you up. Not everything is going to work perfectly. NASA and the US has a great reputation because we have things like Curiosity and Voyager. But we must also remember that Hubble space telescope was almost lost, and Kepler barely completed it's primary mission and was nowhere near completing it's extended mission.
Not saying any of this reflects poorly on anyone. Just saying space is hard.