And how is this new, or secure? Presumably they could already receive signals from our phone. The US government has already received records from all the phone companies, and there is no reason to believe that those records are not updated in a an effectively continuous fashion. The only reason that they may not continuously track us using our phones is that the communication and computing hardware is simply too expensive. This is why paranoid people buy prepaid cell phones and then minutes with cash.
OTOH this would be the most stupid way to screen passengers. If a terrorist was going to carry an iPhone, it could be register to a perfectly legitimate person. Is it illegal to carry a phone that is not registered to you? What people are missing is that as soon as you buy a ticket, all this information is available. I don't think they are talking abut dumping all your content into a government computer. That can be done already when you hook your phone to a USB charger at the airport. What they are talking about is using your phone for ID. And that is a stupid thing to do. Driver licensees are already forgeable. If an iPhone is ID, then we will have planes being blown up all over the place.
Apple is patent trolled all the time. They often have the sense just to pay the people off.
Google, unlike the other players in the phone market, is a young player who does not have decades of R&D experience that results in patents, nor did they did acquire patents before getting into the hardware game. Google has about 3000 patents, presumably many of them software, other than the ones it bought to play the game well. Everyone is going to complain that the game is unfair when they are new and don't understand the rules. Sometimes the rules are unfair.
Even so, Google seems happy to let the Android OEM suffer and hang on the end of the line. Many are feeding the trolls by paying MS and of course google is trying to play both ends with it's own investments.
The reality is that Apple is still the disruptive force, while Google is the middle aged person trying to protect the few things it can do from a more agile world. When MS can make a better product than your core business and take 5% a year, you know you are in trouble. This is netscape trouble.
Some people really hate that the iphone can't stream movies to a TV. I don't care about that, so it is not an issue. I am in the US, so i assume that I will have the same data. I will tell you the traffic data on google is crap, so when I want such data I go to the local web site that is dedicated to my city. This 'crowdsourcing' of traffic may be better for me on a day by day basis, as there must be a lot of phones around here as there are like 5 Apple stores I can get to within 30 minutes.
This is like the ATT thing. If you live or frequently visit an area without service buying a iPhone from ATT would be silly. But you know what, in my area the online coverage map frequently rates ATT #1, so for me it was a good decision. Likewise, since I am not in brazil, and although spent a lot of time the tropics but never in the southern hemisphere. it really does not apply to me. So yes, if someone buys an iPhone where the feature set is not available, that would be silly. And yes, it is unfortunate if an iOS upgrade is going to result in loss of functionality. Then the solution is not to upgrade. But implying everyone is silly because they don't have the same requirements as you is silly.
I take it to mean that Sourceforge, Slashdot, and even Thinkgeek is the past. Dice has to be one of the most sleazy job sites on the net. I am sure they are going to do anything they have to in order to increase the profits on these properties. Already I am reading slashdot less because of the pop over ads on tablets. Why does everyone think if you have a tablet you like to have more intrusive ads.
Its like I am a very ambivalent about this because, you know, the sun also rises to whatever crap is going to happen will happen. If/. et al is not profitable, and the owners want to take the money and run, then that is life. If/. has been taken over by radicals and corporate interests who care more about protecting revenue than having a discussion, then these are the consequences. I am pretty sure Google has a legion of employees here to protect their interests, as well as everywhere else. Have you seen the android wiki page? Total market speak, and unlike other pages, there is no one calling them on it. Can't have a discussion here on Google without getting moded down immediately. But enough of the conspiracy theories. It is just wait and see.
On a more serious note, the interest in this in terms of miniaturization and power optimization. The Cray was built for nuclear weapons testing. It was beyond the state of the art for the time. We are now seeing the state of the art in consumer toys, efficient use of electricity, materials, space.
I know what you are saying, and this fantasy is very popular, but lets look at it reasonably in the phone market. First, it is hard to see how iPhones are going to end up in the landfill. An iPhone 4 with a broken screen is still worth $100. Even if the software can't be upgraded, the phone can be sold. Second the only major dangerous component in the iPhone is the battery. The cover is glass, and metal, all relatively safe of valuable enough to be reused, not just recycled which is crap. The sealed battery insures that it does not end up in a landfill.
Installing linux does not depend on the openness of the system, not really. Mac laptops are considered closed, but they are probably the best system to run Linux, or now even MS Windows, or whatever you choose. This was true even in the days of the PowerPC and 68K where there were *nix distributions for both. On the desktop PC the renewed life usually came from the upgrading of the mother board, where the old one,with all the lead and mercury were just tossed into the nearest ditch.
1) In the US teachers try to value all students. Just because one student does not excel in one particular area does not mean that she or he has less value. The #1 student is not necessarily any better in any meaningful way from #20. I am not talking about the fake self esteem that some use instead of actual productivity. I am taking about about valuing the ability to participate and learn and be creative on a daily basis as opposed to just doing well on a test.
2) The American system has tended to encourage people to share wealth. We see this in court decisions that redistribute money among school district(the robin hood case), school integration at the primary to advanced level, as well as federal funds that allow districts to buy equipment that will need to know for future careers. For instance, every school district no matter how small can have computer, CAD software for mechanical, electrical, architectural, and ancillary equipment for the students to produce professional like results. This means that a kid, no matter how poor, can exit school with the experience of creating original product and the computer skills it all they want to be is a technician. There is often no entrance selection to make sure only appropriate students are exposed to this. In a comprehensive high school any student who wants to put forth some effort can get trained.
3) As I understand it, the european tends to segregate students in an educational path at an early age. I can tell you that I was very immature as I entered my teen years, and college, and if I had been in system that forced me into an educational path I probably would not have been in college. In the US college is cheap enough so that if you want to go, most can afford it. A years tuition can still be much less than 10K a year. No cheap, but doable. I was able to do things even though I was nowhere near the top of anything. In school we were never focused on the 1% of earners. We were focused on the corps who were creating cool things. Apple, Honda, etc.
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4. Which is what I said. It is not only that you can go back to school, it is that you are not penalized early for not meeting federal expectations, This is changing with the silly high stakes testing. Ultimately the US was the best because we tried really hard to put a good teacher in every classroom and then let them teach. We understood that letting a teacher teach what would motivate the students and excite the teacher was more important than forcing some sort of nation-state mandated curriculum. What was taught was much less important than the opportunity of the student to be exposed to various topics and technology.
It is funny, but if we are honest we can admit the following. That if one spends all day doing ones nail and hair, or at the mall, or trying to impress a mate, that lives little time to work on skills. There are professions that do not require mad skills beyond a good complexion and natural talent. Programming is not one of those. You have to sit at a keyboard and code. You have to learn the math and the logic. If some social niceties are forgone for a while, I look at it this way. At some point a skilled programmer can afford a personal trainer, a stylists, and bloomies. OTOH, a person who never developed skills is going to be able to get those skills at 30.
As a percentage of GDP. Debt itself is not so meaningful. A family who earns $20K a year and has 20K in debt is in much more trouble than a family who makes 100K a year and has 20K in debt. The national debt as a percentage of GDP fell or was the same from after the war to the mid 70's, when there were time of short increases, but not sharp rises. From around 1980 to the mid 90's the debt rose from about 30% to almost 70%. From the mid 90's to early years of 2000 it fell to perhaps 60%. After that it has been steadily rising to now approaching to over 100%.
The good news, if there is any, is that interest payments are not hurting us as much as it it could. Right now our interest payments are less than 2% of GDP. Some are saying these are so high they will destroy America, but we survived the entire 80's to mid 90's paying over 3% of our GDP to interest. Of course it could be argued that more of that money was simply paid to ourselves.
I think the public debt is a problem. I enter life at the tail end of it falling, then in the 80's it doubled as a percentage of GDP and we say a lot of problems from it. Not so much the interest rate, which only hurt families that lived on debt, but the lack of good jobs at the end of the 80's. Then in the 90's we got good jobs with the debt was falling, and then those went away in 2000's as the debt began to double as percentage of the GDP again. We are seeing the end of that doubling now. The only thing that saves us is that interest rates are low, so the US government is actually paying less on interest than we have in a very long time. Many of us over the past 10 years asked for spending not to be so high, for instance the trillion dollar home land security and the trillion dollar medicare part d, AKA the drug addiction program for old people, but pretty much no one listened. There there was unlimited funds to kill people we did not like.
The sequestration program was enacted because it was the only way that we could agree to manage our debt. It cut things that some people hated and some people liked. That is what compromise is. It is like a family cutting out salon visits and the football package on cable. It hurts, no one wants it, but if the money is not there, there money is there. That combined with ending of temporary tax cuts is going to solve the problem in a very direct way. I know we wished there was vodoo of a faith based economic solution, but there is not. The invisible hand is not going to come down and magically provide everything we need. If it could we would be communist, but in reality one has work and spend responsibly as individuals.
There will be some negative effects. People with less expendable income will have even less, so walmart will have a reduction in sales so they will have to lay off some poorly paid employees who will have to go on welfare or find other poorly paid jobs. People will buy less gas so those of us who live in states with petroleum economies won't be making quite so much money. The military will no longer be able to absorb so many semi skilled employees, so the unemployment rate may go up until those people can be convinced to get a skill and start to do real work. Doctors and hospitals will have to be punished for over billing medicare/medicaid.
But we are talking about a bipartisan plan that was passed and signed by the president because it was the best deal everyone would agree to and would solve the problem. That a few people are complaining now that they did not understand what the deal was, well, then, they should leave office. If you aren't smart enough to understand what it is your voting for, then stop stealing the tax payers money. This is not a great solution, we are going to lose some programs, but what else is there to do? Raise taxes on the top 5%? Stop tax write-offs for yachts? Ask the pentagon to not waste so much money on poorly executed military activities? I would say cut welfare checks, but then Wal Mart would hardly have enough customers to survive.
Also, this may be seen as a concession by the employer rather than a restriction on the employee. In most cases I have seen employees much be given an unpaid lunch break after four hours and a short personal break every 2 hours. In 1996 Nabisco was sued because they did not let employees leave the line to use the toilet, even with a doctors note. That lawsuit was settled. It seems to be that a prudent employer, therefore, would allow bathroom breaks as needed, but also provide a means of tracking it to make sure that line workers, do not abuse it. I have heard of engineering firms tracking time in this way.
It is certainly unfair, which is why I seldom am jealous of people who tell me how much easy money they make at jobs where they are treated like animals. I may not make the most money, and really don't really get to go to the bathroom whenever i want, but as long as I am responsible there is not a lot of tracking of my time.
Most 70's era microprocessor pretty much had 50 opcode and a few registers. It was possible to memorize these all and decompile from hex in your head. I never had the mental acuity to do so, but many of my friends in high school could. By the 1980's, there was a lot of big iron that used RISC, but as I recall these had more opcodes than, say, a 6502, and I know that RISC does not just mean reduced instruction. It is a simplified instruction set. Right now I think we have a lot of hybrid chips on the market. The war between CISC and RISC has come to place where both are used as needed. In the x86 space, legacy is an issue. MS has not done what Apple does which is to say support a machine for 3-5 years, then develop something that meets current demands. The common person would not even see a RISC processor until Apple switched to the PowerPC, which brought the conflict between CISC and RISC to the public. It is interesting to have this conversation now because this was exactly what was said back them. RISC is more efficient, so the chip can be about half as fast, and still be as fast as the CISC chip.
So this OS specific chip is nothing new, and *nix exclusion is not new. Many microcomputers could not run *nix because they did not have a PMMU. The ATT computer ran a 68K processor with a custom PMMU. Over the past 10 years there have been MS Windows only printers and cameras which offloaded work to the computer to make the peripheral cheaper.
Which is to say that there are clearly benefits for RISC and CISC. MS built and empire on CISC, and clearly intends to continue to do so, only moving to RISC on a limited basis for high end highly efficient devices. For the tablet for the rest of us, if they can ship MS Windows 8 on a $400 device that runs just like a laptop, they will do so., If efficiency were the only issue, then we would be running Apple type hardware, which, I guess, on the tablet we are. But while 50 million tablets are sold, MS wants the other 100 million laptop users that do not have a tablet, yet, because it is not MS Windows.
Practically speaking we don't have freedom of speech as a pure right, but a right tightly coupled with responsibility. ll religions, christians, Mormons, jews, muslim, whoever, tend to protect their idols and tend to not to want them overly analyzed. Most of us, being religious or at least people who respect religion, know that it make no sense to go out our way and antagonize people. So, for instance, though it may make perfect sense for a bunch of LGBT activis to protest at wedding where a divorced man is marrying a divorced woman, such a thing does not happen. We all know that if a church opposes gay marriages, but promotes adultery, a protest is not going to change anything, but wil escalate. Intelligent people prefer accommodation and slow change to escalation.
Even when attacking religions, it is often better done with a bit of finesse. For instance when south park lampooned Mormons, they did not overly focus on the seedy side of Joseph Smith. That is, they attacked the convoluted belief system over the person. They could have focused on Smiths Adultery, showing him in sexual situation with multiple women married to other people, and such a depiction would be somewhat supported by fact. But this would only antagonize and take away from the message, which was even things we don't understand have value to other people.
Then we must remember that all this stuff, freedom of speech, is a construct we use in the US. IN Germany, for instance, the right to deny the holocaust is restricted. if we believe that the internet is international, we must act like it and not always want the benefits of US laws while whining that the responsibilities are unfair.
One implication of this is that not everyone deals with problems the way we might. For instance, the Westboro Baptist church has every right, and maybe even a religious mandate, to protest the funerals of military personel. Now some sensitive people object to such protests and want desperately to infringe their right to express their religious viewpoints in a perfectly peaceful manner. In the US we have a process and protocol in which the courts decide what is acceptable freedom of speech. Outside of such protocols, some might come up with the bright idea that this church is simply a single family, and eliminating the family would eliminate the problem. Fortunately we do not have to resort to such a messy solution.
If it is HTML 5, there are developers. The only problem is that many developer develop for a specific screen size, so though HTML and CSS should be able to automatically adjust to devices, it seems we mostly do not have the tools to allow the average developer to do so.
The limitation of such a device is the limitations of all networked devices. The network must be always on and efficient. The advantage of Apps is that even when one is not in a good coverage area, one can still do quite a lot. This is one disadvantage of the Chomebook. With no connection there is very limited functionality, and an always on data plan is expensive.
In any case many phones should be able to do what they are saying. A smart phone is now less than $100 and a data plan is around $50 a month. An old iPhone is now going be free and the plans are not that expensive. It is unclear how this is going to be less expensive.
Nobody cares about Zune or Bing, which is why an Android phone sells. It has Google search and access to third party music services and maps and often unlimited data plans with phone connections to the TV so the phone doubles a free video player.
No one cares about Google play, which is why iPhone sells. Store you entire library on Apple servers and download as you want to use it. Like MS used to be, any almost any App you want is in the store, and often for free. It will cost money, but people have money. Paul McCartney tickers are currently on sale for $2000 a piece.
Honestly MS is doing a good job developing a phone that is not iPhone or Android. They have no excuse not to as they have been in the biz as long as anyone. MS WIndows CE and Nokia Communicator are both vintage 1996. The blackberry was two or three years later.
I think as in many MS ventures that are no core MS WIndows, it is unclear what the goal is. Even in Windows, as we saw with Vista, and now with Metro née Modern née App Store Applications, or whatever, there is a high level of confusion. On one hand they want MS to rule the planet, OTOH they are getting free money from every Android phone sold. Clearly they could take over the market, but that would be work and it is unclear if money from work is better than free money.
MS does not have properties that are going to be promoted by the phone. They have search, but if they make it good enough they will not have to force people to use it. They have pretty much given up forcing people to use IE through cheap tricks, and there has never been any integration with the phone and computer. They do not have that level of service. They tried to leverage social media with the Kin, and it failed miserably. People want, as hard it is to believe, and so-called ecosystem. This makes sense as the phone cannot do that much alone. Can you imagine entering all the information into a phone. I have had to do it. It sucks. Much better to use the computer for data entry.
The only reason the phone might matter is that MS might be able to make a better table than Android, and might be able to gain that market share. There would be benefit to MS from being on the forefront of the tablet market, which is still up for grabs. And, maybe, the might be real and intangible benefits to the consumer to having matching phone and tablet. Perhaps some people will be less likely to buy a MS tablet if they don't have a matching phone. I don't know. But the phone itself seems pretty silly after 15 years of failure with no real period of success.
About 20 years ago, when i first got a cell phone, I went to visit what most would consider a developing country. It is developed, but isn't anywhere near a G-12. In any case when i got there I found many people had cell phones, and even had cell phone boosters for their home. The reality was that the phone company had overpriced land lines, so the cell companies could come in a provide what honestly was not 100% reliable service to the consumers. The companies that provided the infrastructure, mostly european made a ton of money selling the equipment. If these firms had just thought about what would work locally, as so many US firms do, they would never had made this profit.
There are many places in the world that need power. Building power as we do in the developed countries is not going to be economical. More local power, even if not 100% reliable, can be a solution. Even in the US those of us who live in areas where communications and power can be provided economically pay not insignificant sums to provide these this to those who chose to live in areas where such things are more expensive to provide. Perhaps more local renewable might be the solution that can provide a decent level of service for these people without excessive subsidies.
The reality is when arguing against any change the vested intests are always going to state how the new technology cannot meet the idealized conditions of the current state. Of course the pie in the sky idealized conditions do not exist, or at most exist for a small number of customers. 20 years ago there was a very clear notion that we could not afford for every person on the planet to have access to a refrigerator. The energy requirements would be overwhelming. What we now see is with solar, wind, and good batteries, we might be able to make sure that everyone has access to refrigeration for safe foods and medicine. Of course wind and energy is such a threat to those who are afraid of innovation that it may never happen.
Universities need a number of scientist who can build departments and bring in funding. If you went a major research University you can thank these researchers for the availability of professors who can expound on a subject in more than a superficial form. They bring in the funds that pay the professors, graduate students, equipment and even buildings. If they are an evil, they are a necessary and often benign evil. They are either the first or last author on a paper. These professors are high profile, but are no where near the majority. Other professors, researchers, and post docs do need to bring in funding and write papers, but they can be much more focused on the research and teaching. Despite what most believe, I find that professors are real schools do care about doing a good job teaching. It is just that they are not trained in it, and the students still have middle school mentality in which they foster an adversarial relationship.
In terms of papers, actual researchers understand there is a context. Papers are published as communication between scientists to exchange processes, use of equipment, and finding. I recall on paper which focused on a particular feature of a particular graph taken with well known equipment. The paper asserted that this feature indicated a particular characterization of a sample. I knew my samples showed the same feature, but did were definitely not characterized as such. Some might say the paper was bad, but it showed an interesting use of equipment, showed indicated that they feature which I often saw was not indicative of a feature, and therefore allowed us to explore the feature more deeply. The media, who is only interested in results not the advancement of science, would have certainly not have anything useful to say on this.
So it is the medias fault in that it tries to make science about reactionary ultimate findings instead of a slow process intent on acquiring knowledge. Of course given that a large number of people in the world believe that all knowledge is contained in their particular fiction, there is not much the media can do.
I think this 'coding on the device the program is to run' is simply a misconception of the kids who don't program, and the less programing one has done, the more of misconception is it. In reality, one can code on the iPad and even iPhone, though I don't know who would be dumb enough to do the later. All one would have to do is create text files on the iPad, send them to a mac to be complied and linked, and then run the executable on the iPad. Except for the later step, this is who I coded for many years.
What people are complaining about is the lack of an IDE on the iPad. This is only an issue if all you have ever done is simple programs for single platforms. Most of us have done more. For instance, how many Java programs of web pages run only on one platform. Sure if you are a MS programmer this may be true, but for most people they may code on a Mac, but most of the programs are run on PC. This cross platform skill is one that may be lost in time. I know the two situations are not parallel, but the point is. Basic coding and debugging is often platform independent. It is the fact that one can only emulate the iOS that is the difficulty. But even that is not such a big deal. There are now several distinct devices that a program must function on. Even if you coded in iOS, and only had it running on the latest iPad, one would lose the market share of all the other devices.
Unfortunately, no one can escape buzzword compliance. It was one of the intangible advantages to moving to the Intel platform. Processor speed numbers became more comparable, so you were not comparing 666mhz PPC to a 1 GHZ x86. Of course we now have the question of how much faster a core duo has to be to equal an i7. So I would say that the 4" is going to cause more problems than it is worth, initially, and a taller phone is going to suck. But we will get used to it, and some people are going to like it.
I don't know if these students are being given an education or denied an education. I know in the US vocational students borrow huge sums of money that they then give to a for profit corporation who has no accountability that they actually give an education. These students are then forced to work to pay off the loans the the for-profit corporation convinced them to take out. We now know that the tactics used to convince these student to take out these never-to-be-forgiven-loans-even-in-bankruptcy verge of criminal.
Even in legit schools, work-study programs are common. These programs use 20 hours a week. For a student in a real degree program, with 15 hours of classes, the work schedule turns a horrendous 50-60 hour week into an 70-80 hour week,which leave just enough time for sleep. This is such an issue that many ivy league schools offer their best scholarship students beyond a full ride, to make sure they don't work.
So no, I am not going to judge another culture with different norms based on what we consider appropriate. Just like our students in they US, they may very have to make a choice between temporary hardship and an education. Even our Republican candidate said he had to suffer to get an education, in a tiny apartment without a creme brûlée in sight. I think many of us have been there and would have been thankful for any opportunity to help fund our eduction. In the US the only opportunity is often loans. Would I have worked in a factory for a summer for tuition. Probably. Is this what is happening in Chine? I don't know. But I think a lot of radical elements are jumping on this with no information, simply because they don't like Chine or Apple, or even the Capitalist system that leverages efficiencies so we can buy cheap stuff at wal mart. That is their right. But we should stick with facts and not mistake what we wish were true for reality.
I commend them for being hones with their mistake. As an alleged premier top level domain name reseller, though, we would expect that they had the facilities to prevent both internal errors and external attacks. If I were superstitious, I would say something in the Juju right now. Lots of computer stuff going down.
I don't see it this way at all. What I see is a website that has palusible deniability. This is only so much money one can donate directly to a political candidate. Given that it is ok to donate unlimited amounts to a PAC not directly associated with a candiate, it makes sense that websites like this would be set up. It makes sense that lobbyist and insiders would feighn ignorance. OTOH, the political party or candidate could likely take such sites down with a simple DCMA notice if they were in fact phising operations and in fact did do harm to the candidate. But these are not phising sites. They do not appear to be stealing personal information, nor do they appear to be misusing the money. I mean maybe not all the moeny is being used to promote the candidate, and certainly the candidate does not have control, but that is normal and the later is the definition of how these PACS are supposed to work. They are not supposed to controlled in any way by the cadidate.
But that is so not the point the article is making. The article is advocating that we should make child porn legal becaue in our brave new world everyone is going to be wearing glasses that will record everything in such high quality that if we happen to run accross a child having sex behind a bush we will captrue it in enough detail that we can see the genetailia caressign each other, and that such video will be forcibly uploaded toi central servers that will immidiatyely be shot off to every law enforcement agency in the area and we will be immidiately swooped down upon by the authorities who will probably shoot us on site. The article does not mention rape of adults, or penguins, or murder, or whatever. It does not do so because if we saw such an event everyone would agree the video would be evidence, not contraband, just like when a cop is caught murdering a suspect. It was the author, not I, that chose to limit the scope of the discussion to a single exploitable fantasy to try to argue a position that really has no support. Just like George Bush did when he socialized the US Government by creating Homeland security and the TSA and forced us to undress in front of them. It is said the Goerge Washington never left his office without his jacket.
The problem in the us is variation in density. Delaware is 460 per square mile. Ohio 282. Texas 96 per square mile near national average? Utah 33, Nevada 24, Montana 20' north Debora 10. Leaving control to local interests with small populations would lead to what in the UK was once known as a rotten borough.
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH this would be the most stupid way to screen passengers. If a terrorist was going to carry an iPhone, it could be register to a perfectly legitimate person. Is it illegal to carry a phone that is not registered to you? What people are missing is that as soon as you buy a ticket, all this information is available. I don't think they are talking abut dumping all your content into a government computer. That can be done already when you hook your phone to a USB charger at the airport. What they are talking about is using your phone for ID. And that is a stupid thing to do. Driver licensees are already forgeable. If an iPhone is ID, then we will have planes being blown up all over the place.
Google, unlike the other players in the phone market, is a young player who does not have decades of R&D experience that results in patents, nor did they did acquire patents before getting into the hardware game. Google has about 3000 patents, presumably many of them software, other than the ones it bought to play the game well. Everyone is going to complain that the game is unfair when they are new and don't understand the rules. Sometimes the rules are unfair.
Even so, Google seems happy to let the Android OEM suffer and hang on the end of the line. Many are feeding the trolls by paying MS and of course google is trying to play both ends with it's own investments.
The reality is that Apple is still the disruptive force, while Google is the middle aged person trying to protect the few things it can do from a more agile world. When MS can make a better product than your core business and take 5% a year, you know you are in trouble. This is netscape trouble.
You know I did sell out to the corporations until I was nearly 30. How precious for slashdot.
This is like the ATT thing. If you live or frequently visit an area without service buying a iPhone from ATT would be silly. But you know what, in my area the online coverage map frequently rates ATT #1, so for me it was a good decision. Likewise, since I am not in brazil, and although spent a lot of time the tropics but never in the southern hemisphere. it really does not apply to me. So yes, if someone buys an iPhone where the feature set is not available, that would be silly. And yes, it is unfortunate if an iOS upgrade is going to result in loss of functionality. Then the solution is not to upgrade. But implying everyone is silly because they don't have the same requirements as you is silly.
Its like I am a very ambivalent about this because, you know, the sun also rises to whatever crap is going to happen will happen. If /. et al is not profitable, and the owners want to take the money and run, then that is life. If /. has been taken over by radicals and corporate interests who care more about protecting revenue than having a discussion, then these are the consequences. I am pretty sure Google has a legion of employees here to protect their interests, as well as everywhere else. Have you seen the android wiki page? Total market speak, and unlike other pages, there is no one calling them on it. Can't have a discussion here on Google without getting moded down immediately. But enough of the conspiracy theories. It is just wait and see.
On a more serious note, the interest in this in terms of miniaturization and power optimization. The Cray was built for nuclear weapons testing. It was beyond the state of the art for the time. We are now seeing the state of the art in consumer toys, efficient use of electricity, materials, space.
Installing linux does not depend on the openness of the system, not really. Mac laptops are considered closed, but they are probably the best system to run Linux, or now even MS Windows, or whatever you choose. This was true even in the days of the PowerPC and 68K where there were *nix distributions for both. On the desktop PC the renewed life usually came from the upgrading of the mother board, where the old one,with all the lead and mercury were just tossed into the nearest ditch.
2) The American system has tended to encourage people to share wealth. We see this in court decisions that redistribute money among school district(the robin hood case), school integration at the primary to advanced level, as well as federal funds that allow districts to buy equipment that will need to know for future careers. For instance, every school district no matter how small can have computer, CAD software for mechanical, electrical, architectural, and ancillary equipment for the students to produce professional like results. This means that a kid, no matter how poor, can exit school with the experience of creating original product and the computer skills it all they want to be is a technician. There is often no entrance selection to make sure only appropriate students are exposed to this. In a comprehensive high school any student who wants to put forth some effort can get trained.
3) As I understand it, the european tends to segregate students in an educational path at an early age. I can tell you that I was very immature as I entered my teen years, and college, and if I had been in system that forced me into an educational path I probably would not have been in college. In the US college is cheap enough so that if you want to go, most can afford it. A years tuition can still be much less than 10K a year. No cheap, but doable. I was able to do things even though I was nowhere near the top of anything. In school we were never focused on the 1% of earners. We were focused on the corps who were creating cool things. Apple, Honda, etc.
' 4. Which is what I said. It is not only that you can go back to school, it is that you are not penalized early for not meeting federal expectations, This is changing with the silly high stakes testing. Ultimately the US was the best because we tried really hard to put a good teacher in every classroom and then let them teach. We understood that letting a teacher teach what would motivate the students and excite the teacher was more important than forcing some sort of nation-state mandated curriculum. What was taught was much less important than the opportunity of the student to be exposed to various topics and technology.
It is funny, but if we are honest we can admit the following. That if one spends all day doing ones nail and hair, or at the mall, or trying to impress a mate, that lives little time to work on skills. There are professions that do not require mad skills beyond a good complexion and natural talent. Programming is not one of those. You have to sit at a keyboard and code. You have to learn the math and the logic. If some social niceties are forgone for a while, I look at it this way. At some point a skilled programmer can afford a personal trainer, a stylists, and bloomies. OTOH, a person who never developed skills is going to be able to get those skills at 30.
The good news, if there is any, is that interest payments are not hurting us as much as it it could. Right now our interest payments are less than 2% of GDP. Some are saying these are so high they will destroy America, but we survived the entire 80's to mid 90's paying over 3% of our GDP to interest. Of course it could be argued that more of that money was simply paid to ourselves.
The sequestration program was enacted because it was the only way that we could agree to manage our debt. It cut things that some people hated and some people liked. That is what compromise is. It is like a family cutting out salon visits and the football package on cable. It hurts, no one wants it, but if the money is not there, there money is there. That combined with ending of temporary tax cuts is going to solve the problem in a very direct way. I know we wished there was vodoo of a faith based economic solution, but there is not. The invisible hand is not going to come down and magically provide everything we need. If it could we would be communist, but in reality one has work and spend responsibly as individuals.
There will be some negative effects. People with less expendable income will have even less, so walmart will have a reduction in sales so they will have to lay off some poorly paid employees who will have to go on welfare or find other poorly paid jobs. People will buy less gas so those of us who live in states with petroleum economies won't be making quite so much money. The military will no longer be able to absorb so many semi skilled employees, so the unemployment rate may go up until those people can be convinced to get a skill and start to do real work. Doctors and hospitals will have to be punished for over billing medicare/medicaid.
But we are talking about a bipartisan plan that was passed and signed by the president because it was the best deal everyone would agree to and would solve the problem. That a few people are complaining now that they did not understand what the deal was, well, then, they should leave office. If you aren't smart enough to understand what it is your voting for, then stop stealing the tax payers money. This is not a great solution, we are going to lose some programs, but what else is there to do? Raise taxes on the top 5%? Stop tax write-offs for yachts? Ask the pentagon to not waste so much money on poorly executed military activities? I would say cut welfare checks, but then Wal Mart would hardly have enough customers to survive.
It is certainly unfair, which is why I seldom am jealous of people who tell me how much easy money they make at jobs where they are treated like animals. I may not make the most money, and really don't really get to go to the bathroom whenever i want, but as long as I am responsible there is not a lot of tracking of my time.
So this OS specific chip is nothing new, and *nix exclusion is not new. Many microcomputers could not run *nix because they did not have a PMMU. The ATT computer ran a 68K processor with a custom PMMU. Over the past 10 years there have been MS Windows only printers and cameras which offloaded work to the computer to make the peripheral cheaper.
Which is to say that there are clearly benefits for RISC and CISC. MS built and empire on CISC, and clearly intends to continue to do so, only moving to RISC on a limited basis for high end highly efficient devices. For the tablet for the rest of us, if they can ship MS Windows 8 on a $400 device that runs just like a laptop, they will do so., If efficiency were the only issue, then we would be running Apple type hardware, which, I guess, on the tablet we are. But while 50 million tablets are sold, MS wants the other 100 million laptop users that do not have a tablet, yet, because it is not MS Windows.
Even when attacking religions, it is often better done with a bit of finesse. For instance when south park lampooned Mormons, they did not overly focus on the seedy side of Joseph Smith. That is, they attacked the convoluted belief system over the person. They could have focused on Smiths Adultery, showing him in sexual situation with multiple women married to other people, and such a depiction would be somewhat supported by fact. But this would only antagonize and take away from the message, which was even things we don't understand have value to other people.
Then we must remember that all this stuff, freedom of speech, is a construct we use in the US. IN Germany, for instance, the right to deny the holocaust is restricted. if we believe that the internet is international, we must act like it and not always want the benefits of US laws while whining that the responsibilities are unfair.
One implication of this is that not everyone deals with problems the way we might. For instance, the Westboro Baptist church has every right, and maybe even a religious mandate, to protest the funerals of military personel. Now some sensitive people object to such protests and want desperately to infringe their right to express their religious viewpoints in a perfectly peaceful manner. In the US we have a process and protocol in which the courts decide what is acceptable freedom of speech. Outside of such protocols, some might come up with the bright idea that this church is simply a single family, and eliminating the family would eliminate the problem. Fortunately we do not have to resort to such a messy solution.
The limitation of such a device is the limitations of all networked devices. The network must be always on and efficient. The advantage of Apps is that even when one is not in a good coverage area, one can still do quite a lot. This is one disadvantage of the Chomebook. With no connection there is very limited functionality, and an always on data plan is expensive.
In any case many phones should be able to do what they are saying. A smart phone is now less than $100 and a data plan is around $50 a month. An old iPhone is now going be free and the plans are not that expensive. It is unclear how this is going to be less expensive.
No one cares about Google play, which is why iPhone sells. Store you entire library on Apple servers and download as you want to use it. Like MS used to be, any almost any App you want is in the store, and often for free. It will cost money, but people have money. Paul McCartney tickers are currently on sale for $2000 a piece.
Honestly MS is doing a good job developing a phone that is not iPhone or Android. They have no excuse not to as they have been in the biz as long as anyone. MS WIndows CE and Nokia Communicator are both vintage 1996. The blackberry was two or three years later.
I think as in many MS ventures that are no core MS WIndows, it is unclear what the goal is. Even in Windows, as we saw with Vista, and now with Metro née Modern née App Store Applications, or whatever, there is a high level of confusion. On one hand they want MS to rule the planet, OTOH they are getting free money from every Android phone sold. Clearly they could take over the market, but that would be work and it is unclear if money from work is better than free money.
MS does not have properties that are going to be promoted by the phone. They have search, but if they make it good enough they will not have to force people to use it. They have pretty much given up forcing people to use IE through cheap tricks, and there has never been any integration with the phone and computer. They do not have that level of service. They tried to leverage social media with the Kin, and it failed miserably. People want, as hard it is to believe, and so-called ecosystem. This makes sense as the phone cannot do that much alone. Can you imagine entering all the information into a phone. I have had to do it. It sucks. Much better to use the computer for data entry.
The only reason the phone might matter is that MS might be able to make a better table than Android, and might be able to gain that market share. There would be benefit to MS from being on the forefront of the tablet market, which is still up for grabs. And, maybe, the might be real and intangible benefits to the consumer to having matching phone and tablet. Perhaps some people will be less likely to buy a MS tablet if they don't have a matching phone. I don't know. But the phone itself seems pretty silly after 15 years of failure with no real period of success.
There are many places in the world that need power. Building power as we do in the developed countries is not going to be economical. More local power, even if not 100% reliable, can be a solution. Even in the US those of us who live in areas where communications and power can be provided economically pay not insignificant sums to provide these this to those who chose to live in areas where such things are more expensive to provide. Perhaps more local renewable might be the solution that can provide a decent level of service for these people without excessive subsidies.
The reality is when arguing against any change the vested intests are always going to state how the new technology cannot meet the idealized conditions of the current state. Of course the pie in the sky idealized conditions do not exist, or at most exist for a small number of customers. 20 years ago there was a very clear notion that we could not afford for every person on the planet to have access to a refrigerator. The energy requirements would be overwhelming. What we now see is with solar, wind, and good batteries, we might be able to make sure that everyone has access to refrigeration for safe foods and medicine. Of course wind and energy is such a threat to those who are afraid of innovation that it may never happen.
In terms of papers, actual researchers understand there is a context. Papers are published as communication between scientists to exchange processes, use of equipment, and finding. I recall on paper which focused on a particular feature of a particular graph taken with well known equipment. The paper asserted that this feature indicated a particular characterization of a sample. I knew my samples showed the same feature, but did were definitely not characterized as such. Some might say the paper was bad, but it showed an interesting use of equipment, showed indicated that they feature which I often saw was not indicative of a feature, and therefore allowed us to explore the feature more deeply. The media, who is only interested in results not the advancement of science, would have certainly not have anything useful to say on this.
So it is the medias fault in that it tries to make science about reactionary ultimate findings instead of a slow process intent on acquiring knowledge. Of course given that a large number of people in the world believe that all knowledge is contained in their particular fiction, there is not much the media can do.
What people are complaining about is the lack of an IDE on the iPad. This is only an issue if all you have ever done is simple programs for single platforms. Most of us have done more. For instance, how many Java programs of web pages run only on one platform. Sure if you are a MS programmer this may be true, but for most people they may code on a Mac, but most of the programs are run on PC. This cross platform skill is one that may be lost in time. I know the two situations are not parallel, but the point is. Basic coding and debugging is often platform independent. It is the fact that one can only emulate the iOS that is the difficulty. But even that is not such a big deal. There are now several distinct devices that a program must function on. Even if you coded in iOS, and only had it running on the latest iPad, one would lose the market share of all the other devices.
Unfortunately, no one can escape buzzword compliance. It was one of the intangible advantages to moving to the Intel platform. Processor speed numbers became more comparable, so you were not comparing 666mhz PPC to a 1 GHZ x86. Of course we now have the question of how much faster a core duo has to be to equal an i7. So I would say that the 4" is going to cause more problems than it is worth, initially, and a taller phone is going to suck. But we will get used to it, and some people are going to like it.
Even in legit schools, work-study programs are common. These programs use 20 hours a week. For a student in a real degree program, with 15 hours of classes, the work schedule turns a horrendous 50-60 hour week into an 70-80 hour week,which leave just enough time for sleep. This is such an issue that many ivy league schools offer their best scholarship students beyond a full ride, to make sure they don't work.
So no, I am not going to judge another culture with different norms based on what we consider appropriate. Just like our students in they US, they may very have to make a choice between temporary hardship and an education. Even our Republican candidate said he had to suffer to get an education, in a tiny apartment without a creme brûlée in sight. I think many of us have been there and would have been thankful for any opportunity to help fund our eduction. In the US the only opportunity is often loans. Would I have worked in a factory for a summer for tuition. Probably. Is this what is happening in Chine? I don't know. But I think a lot of radical elements are jumping on this with no information, simply because they don't like Chine or Apple, or even the Capitalist system that leverages efficiencies so we can buy cheap stuff at wal mart. That is their right. But we should stick with facts and not mistake what we wish were true for reality.
I commend them for being hones with their mistake. As an alleged premier top level domain name reseller, though, we would expect that they had the facilities to prevent both internal errors and external attacks. If I were superstitious, I would say something in the Juju right now. Lots of computer stuff going down.
I don't see it this way at all. What I see is a website that has palusible deniability. This is only so much money one can donate directly to a political candidate. Given that it is ok to donate unlimited amounts to a PAC not directly associated with a candiate, it makes sense that websites like this would be set up. It makes sense that lobbyist and insiders would feighn ignorance. OTOH, the political party or candidate could likely take such sites down with a simple DCMA notice if they were in fact phising operations and in fact did do harm to the candidate. But these are not phising sites. They do not appear to be stealing personal information, nor do they appear to be misusing the money. I mean maybe not all the moeny is being used to promote the candidate, and certainly the candidate does not have control, but that is normal and the later is the definition of how these PACS are supposed to work. They are not supposed to controlled in any way by the cadidate.
But that is so not the point the article is making. The article is advocating that we should make child porn legal becaue in our brave new world everyone is going to be wearing glasses that will record everything in such high quality that if we happen to run accross a child having sex behind a bush we will captrue it in enough detail that we can see the genetailia caressign each other, and that such video will be forcibly uploaded toi central servers that will immidiatyely be shot off to every law enforcement agency in the area and we will be immidiately swooped down upon by the authorities who will probably shoot us on site. The article does not mention rape of adults, or penguins, or murder, or whatever. It does not do so because if we saw such an event everyone would agree the video would be evidence, not contraband, just like when a cop is caught murdering a suspect. It was the author, not I, that chose to limit the scope of the discussion to a single exploitable fantasy to try to argue a position that really has no support. Just like George Bush did when he socialized the US Government by creating Homeland security and the TSA and forced us to undress in front of them. It is said the Goerge Washington never left his office without his jacket.
The problem in the us is variation in density. Delaware is 460 per square mile. Ohio 282. Texas 96 per square mile near national average? Utah 33, Nevada 24, Montana 20' north Debora 10. Leaving control to local interests with small populations would lead to what in the UK was once known as a rotten borough.