There is a lot to be said for basic supplies and allowing a kid to create. One skill that many people never learn is how to start with a blank sheet of paper, or a blank screen,and create an orignal work. For example vellum and embossing tools can be weeks of fun. When I was young, I got a hold of some wood burning tools and blanks. That ate up a summer.
There are also some advances in building kits. Erector set is still available. Fischertechniks is also worth a look.
Also look at software. Alice, out of Carnegie Mellon, has a Storytelling module, which is generally targeted to 10-14 year old kids and allows them to program a story.
To his credit, Paul did not vote for most these Bush initiated police state bills that created a bureaucracy spy on Americans. OTOH, simply prosecuting employee that are doing what they have been authorized to do by congress is silly. While many like Rand believe the laws of land someone come from elsewhere, the fact is that if congress says it is legal, then it is legal. The only time that it can be made illegal is if it is a constitutional issue, in which case the Supreme can deal with it. AFAIK, the supreme court has said this is an extra-constitutional issue.
Many of these laws were enacted in a time when the country was in pain. Paul, along with the newly elected republicans, can use their power to permanently rid this country of the attack on our liberty that excess screening imposes on us. We no longer have the freedom to move about the country as we did a decade ago. These virtual strip searches are going to have the effect of preventing travel, and that is exactly what the socialists want. If conservatives want to prove they value liberty over anything else, they can rid us of the DoHS, Putting a screener into bankruptcy is going to do nothing when the bureaucrats are the ones saving all the kiddie pron collected by the machines.
To back up what other people have said, an observation is a a measurement. In the act of measuring a quantity, we fix certain properties of the object being measured.
IMHO, part of this is due to the historical language we use to communicate. We speak of massive particles and waves even though we do not know if these words apply for very small things. It is the same way we talk about electricity and magnetism as if they are separate things. There are several ambiguous words that are used in science because the physical understanding is still being ferreted out. To wit, position and momentum are concept that date back to the beginning of physics, and we are now perhaps in the third iteration.
Then, there is the issue of using the term 'does not exist'. By measuring something we presuppose it's existence, and may even be aware of an approximate value, and merely want an precise value. We may then attempt a precise measurement, which will force, in some sense, the object to conform to our method of measurement, but even then the measurement may not accurately represent the value that we presupposed existed. Systematic errors, especially when techniques are first being developed, are pretty rampant.
What is pretty clear is that measurement can only be made to a finite precision, and those precision are effected by how and what one is measuring, and one thing science tries to do in quantify the level of uncertainty in the uncertaintly.
Pretty much what has been going on over the past 10 years is that certain politicians have been trying to scare the shit out of the populous, while using these fear based tactics to remove the tools that can help us keep safe. While calling 911 while driving is not necessarily a sufficient need, the fact that we are all so scared that we believe it is a sufficient need is telling.
And, of course, firms will feed off this fear and the corresponding laws that result from this fear. You can't have a phone, but you we can charge more for the scrambling technology, and then charge for Onstar to make you feel safe. You can't have a cell phone booster, unless you pay our elevated charges. You can't have a safe computer because of pirates but you can pay us for virus software.
The fear works both ways, and we live in fear, then we really get screwed.
It is only a bad thing if the monoculture is enforced. MS Windows, although open to third parties, never used open standards. Each standard was an arbitrary attempt by a special interest to gain market share through lockin. MS used MS Office and IE. Hardware vendors created arbitrarily complex device drivers. It was a mess. Even today one has to install a piece of spyware for every USB drive. Contrast that to Apples use of standards such as RS-422, SCSI, USB without meaningless drives and Firewire. My ability to connect Apple products to useful devices has always been a superior experience. Those devices may cost more, but one get what one pays for.
If Apple and Google support open interfaces, as they are, then life will only get better as more devices are in the market place, and the dominant device won't matter. Recall that Apple originally wanted all applications written using the web browsers. Recall that it was vendors who wanted the native applications, and agreed to the closed garden. We see the value of the HTML approach in that Google today has Googles Docs working on the iPad and other mobile devices.
In fact, if Android devices dominate the market, this will not be a bad thing. There is real competition between OEMs, not the fake competition that exists in the MS Windows world, where MS limits innovation to insure it remains a dominant player. Google seems primarily interested in remaining dominant in the Ad world, and seems to want to do this by creating products that insures that closed standards do not develop that exclude Google. To this end Android prevents Apple from creating closed standards in the Mobile market, while the fragmentation of the Android platform prevents closed standards from developing there.
It is a basic retro phone, so all there should be are buttons. You see in the good old days there was no way to know if you dialed a number correctly. In the old old days you could ask what number was at the receiver end, but later you could only say the number you intended to dial and receive a negative of positive response for accuracy. The phone book was literally a book that one had to have in addition to the phone.
My only complaint about the phone is that it does not have rotary dial. If one is going to make a useless bit on ancient technology, at least make it ancient.
here is what I want in an anti-smart phone. I want a small rectangular form factor. I want a battery that will last a week, and talk for a couple days. I want one button to end a call and turn off the phone. I want to import a list of phone numbers. I want to say who i am calling and confirm it from a screen, or choose from a screen. Voice recognition for phones numbers not in the phone.
The reason we have smart phones is that once you have the tech in to make a phone easy to use, like a touch screen, voice recognition, etc, It is not much more of a leap to just make it a computer. We don't have to, it is just the expected feature bloat.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has stated on multiple occasions that illegal aliens come to the US to have babies which they then raise to be terrorists, or use as human bombs that will pass security checks simply because the baby has a US papers, even though the parents are from terrorist countries, for instance, to choose a random country that is so dangerous that US citizens are prevented travel, Cuba. Recall that n the later part of 1962 Cuba tried to nuke the US out of existence. While we might suspect a Cuban adult, and do a virtual strip search, who would suspect that a Cuban baby was filled with plastique. Clearly, we must search babies, because, as was said in congress, if given a choice people would chose a thoroughly screened plane than an completely unscreened plane.
And if we think this anchor baby threat is to be taken lightly, realize that we have at least on anchor baby in congress. This anchor baby has access to the top leaders of the US and all our security plans. In one step, he could give Cuba, who is still under the same government that wanted to kill every man, woman and child in US, the means and opportunity to kill every man, woman, and child in the US.
There is something to be said for the integrity of certain albums. While most are just songs put together so they can be sold for $20, some do honor the vinyl format. And it is not just original work. Megadeth Countdown to extinction, Rush 2112, Was(Not Was), Haggad and Nelson doing Poncho and Lefty. Of course there are many others, and of course any defense that they have about these works being one work is somewhat reduced when they put together a 'greatest hit'.
Of couse music is now made, largely, to be sold one at a time and played through tiny little earbuds. Of course most of us heard the Beatles through tinny stereo speakers, or, moe likely, ineffective mono speakers of our transistor radio or TV. In any case, no one can really say the sound quality of this music suffers in any meaningful way.
I certainly have respect for musical acts that honor the art enough to not just follow any trend of the marketplace. There is no reason to prostitute a group, especially when the group is not in desperate needs of funds, and it is always good to leave the fans wanting a little more.
Some think that colleges are there to force students to learn. Far from this, schools are there to provide opportunity. Some students will take advantage of this, some will not. Suffering becomes immediate because they are wasting their money. The solution to this is accept and fund students who are interested in learning, rather than just hanging out and partying.
In terms of 100% finals, this should almost be the norm. Paper should be formative assessment, with a combination of in class and out of class writing. Finals cannot typically be essay as they must be graded quickly. Thesis should be rather difficult to buy as they must be defended.
I think what we are actually seeing is a rise in the "professional" degree, often funded by corporate. Schools are willing to play because these degrees are profit centers, often $50-100K for a degree.Corporate trusts schools to award valid grades, which is then used for reimbursement. In fact no party has great incentive to prevent cheating, so all parties are complicit.
IMHO, it is a mistake to make business decisions based on dogma, or rigidly use past experience to make current decisions.
In this case, the simplistic answer to question is to licensee MS Office. MS Office, amazing enough, reads MS Word files. Now there may be issue of not wanting to pay for software or wanting open software, but if that was the case OO.org would have no issues. At this moment it is just a people trying to enact a self fulfilling prophecy. I have heard nothing that Oracle has done, just the they don't like Oracle.
I use OO.org as one of many products. I also use iWork because pages lets me create simple documents incredible quickly and Keynote because it does great animation. iWorks also opens all MS formats. For technical reports and presentations I use one of many wonderful Latex fron ends. I must admit I never used Neooffice because it seemed to me that they were more concerned with trashing OO.org rather than creating a stable product. I wonder if Libreoffice is going to fall for to the same demons.
Just to be clear I don'tuse MS Office because since about 2005 it did not meet my needs.
To answer the question, one reasonable solution is Google office. It is not open source, but it is free and will open almost anything.
This is same question I have about Flash on the iPhone. Do we really want a hack solution on an otherwise well devised. The reason to allow such a resource hog is so we can get access to content. The downside is that if Flash is allowed them developers will have incentive to write cappy Apps.
It is interesting that Flash was touted on Android because it would solve problems like this. The remakable thing is, apparently, flash does not solve problems. Even on the PC, netflix uses Silverlight.
So the answer is that DRM is needed because it solves a problem that many people want solved. Without it the market is limited to those that do not see it is a problem. In the case of Android, phones sales may never suffer due to not having Netflix. OTOH some are producing android tablets, and those may be hurt because of lack of netflix.
So what he is saying is that a country that is taking extreme austerity measures should find monies to pay businesses to do what they will have to do anyway. I suspect that google is going to get some of this feee money, n'est pas?
I suspect that the UK has enough of free market so that if the established companies can't provide the service, others will step in. I also suspect that if established companies can't provide the services, it may very well be cheaper to nationalize them, pay for upgrades, and then recoup costs from the profits.
It annoys me that private firms always holds the perceived public goods hostage in order to extort public funds. In the US the nuclear and fossil fuel industry are refusing to move forward without huge sums from the taxpayers, yer cry foul when wind and solar do the same thing. According to what I have read over the years, the Chevy Volt has been in some state of readiness since late 2007, but we are only seeing it now, after GM has swollowed a few billion of taxpayer money.
The way to innovate is to simply allow firms to fail that do not. There are too many people, at least in the US, who just expect to have a job yet never expect to have to do anything new at that job. Things change. Customers expect new things. A firm should not be expcted to survive if they do not produce new things.
Going back to a logic of a company we all know, this is clearly a feature. We clearly need to be to be able to install updates automatically. Once the App is installed, the user has already given permission to have the App on the device. What is the point of wasted the users time to confirm updates. Won't users be happy to have additional functionality. Isn't this the benefit of the Android open garden? Not to have to deal with all that bureaucracy that keeps the best Apps off more closed platforms, such as companies that want to trade minimal content for access to a user full browsing history, contact list, installed Apps, and locations list?
When I read it my thoughts were that it might be more complex than this.
My first thought is that people are reporting bugs that Google simply thought were too minor and did not want to devote resources. For example, intermittent bugs that can be solved with a page refresh are not likely going to cost customers, or cost Google very much, but could be very costly not only to diagnose, but to fix in such a way that everything else does not break.
Alternatively they may not wish to pay the small bounty on many minor issues in hopes of making it up with a small bounty on a major issue. If they are going to differentiate small and large issues, then they should differentiate with small and large payments, say 137 for minor bug and 133337 for a major bug. I would imagine that some researchers are funding their search for larger bugs with the payments on smaller bugs. I imagine that the search for larger bugs might slow if the payment disappear.
I suspected that the exorbitant charges that Verizon levied on a phone targeted towards young adults who no longer had access to parents money and did not likely yet have a lucrative job was a big part of the problem. Sure it was a good idea but for someone who had $500 of expendable income a month it would be a stretch.
The question now is what can a gutted kin do that a phone from Walmart or cricket cannot. In the later an Android phone and year of unlimited service can be had for around $1K, which is better than anything MS can put together. Unless MS is target the rural teen crowd, I can't see how it will work.
I would agree that the business model is why unlocked phones are not popular. I will pay the same monthly tarrifs for an unlocked phone as for a locked phone. I can use my locked phone anywhere in the continental US for no additional charge. I can get a pay-as-you go phone for next to nothing, and only pay for the minutes I use.
For the average US resident that has little reason to use their phone outside the US, the only reason to have an unlocked phone is simply to say one has an unlokced phone. For some people, buying the lock phone and breaking it is half the fun. For people who travel outside the US, it is probably more likley that there will be a cost advantage to buy a prepaid phone in the destination country if a phone is needed. For instance, AFIK, if I went to the UK a phone with a hour of air time and many text messages would be less than 30 GBP. It would probably cost me more to use my own phone with international plan charges and roaming charges.
I am realizing that this may be much more clever than many people realize. An OS is not going to last forever, and, as MS found out, deploying a new OS and expecting users to mindlessly migrate is not such a good idea. MS DOS was essentially useful from the early 80's to the mid 90's when MS Windows was finally useful, a little more than 10 years. Apple DOS ran around from the late 70's to mid 80's when ProDos took over and lasted to the late 80's when people were pretty much on the Mac platform. MS Windows to the XP and NT era was less 10 years. Apple messed up getting a new OS in the late 90's, just like MS did in the 2006.
So whatever a real tablet is, Apple is prototyping the next incarnation of the OS, not WMP, but touch based. There was no way to get the hardware out there to make this work on the Mac, just like there was no hardware support for Vista. Likewise the functionality fo the now iOS is not much better than System 5, but that is ok. Over the next few years we will see a transition that does not have the disruptions of previous new releases.
Irrespective of change in scale, the real issue is that MS is not going to attract developers if they can only sell 40K on opening day. It is doubtful if at this rate they can the several million a year that is required to compete with Android and iPhone. If they cannot reach this volume, it is doubtful that people will leave the security of iPhone, and the new found users of Android to develop for a platform that could ultimate have as few as half a million users. We must remember Kin.
It is unclear how MS is competing. The software, like kin, seems to be targeted at ADD adolescents rather than those who need a useful tools. Yes the widgets could ultimately allow the production of those tools, but it far from certain. Many buy Android because it is not Apple and their workflow centers around Google, not MS. Many buy RIM because their workflow centers around MS and RIM lets them use the MS tools as well as get useful information. It is unclear if the MS phone gives Android or RIM users anything new, especially since Phone 7 doesn't seem to use the proper tools.
Here is the thing that some people don't realize. Many buy the iPhone to crack. It makes them feel like they are sticking it to the man. One is not sticking anything to any man when one buys an MS product.
Kinect seems to be one of those products that is really innovative. MS has put together technology that would be useful in many situations. So the question is why are they selling it as a toy and why are they selling it for only $150.
On the later, if anyone thinks that $150 pays all costs on this thing they are out of their mind. I think on hardware we are used to MS not transferring development costs to the consumer. However, the xBox is a successful product, so I think we are going to see more of MS expecting to get a more immediate return on investments. They probably did figure to recoup costs on sales, while the profit would come from increased sales of other higher margin products, much like the giving MS Windows to the OEM, and making money off Office.
The toy is a cleaver ploy. It has always been the case that toys are at the forefront of technology. The thing about a toy, unlike a business computer, is that it does not always have to work, and it has the freedom of being free for all innovative. That was what was so cool about everyone calling Mac a toy way back when. It kind of validated it as a truly innovate concept. Kinect is the same thing. It has the freedom to not quite work perfectly, but gives MS the opportunity to test and refine the design. Eventually if MS can figure out to make use of it, we will see it on robot and business devices. This is essentially what we are seeing with iOS. Apple is prototyping it's next OS on toys.
Absolutely agreed. In many cases, the amont of deterrent, for many people, seems to be based on the value they wish others to place on objects rather than the value of the objects. In other cases, people go out of their way to exceed the norms of neighborhood, in which case what do the expect?
There was another recent article about the use of cameras to monitor personal property. I know people who do this. They have often have a overexcite sense of personal property. It is not only that they do not want people walking on their property, but get upset if they walk too near the property, or can be heard from the street. In some cases the damage are legitimate and there is a reason to go after the culprit. But I figure when one's entire existence is centered around explicitly security, one letting other people control one's life, and one no longer has any real self determination.
So, to me , the question is whether the big screen TV, the SUV, the valuable jewelry, is worth the opportunity cost to secure it. If life, on net, would be better without such outlandish objects. Or if the possessions are an excuse to have cameras everyone where so can have a value not necessarily voluntarily bestowed in normal day to day life.
As consumers we want products we can afford that will do what we want for a reasonable amount of time. Because many costs are externalized, and credit is often expensive to the average person, it is usually the case that it is not affordable to buy a long term product. This si not because of any conspiracy by business owners, this is just life. One can buy a car for $15K that will last 5-10 years with little maintenance, or $50K on a car that will last 20-30 years with regular maintenance. Since most people do not have 50K, and the externalization of costs makes maintenance cost more than purchasing a new car, most people wil not choose the later option, so firms are not going to reach for that market.
Furthermore there are genuine technological advances that are net readily retrofitting into old kit, at least not without replacing all the relevent parts. This is particularly true with computers. I am not sure what is gained when the only the case of a computer is reused. On the other end, how many years is a microprocessor going to swappable with new models? The reality is that most users could buy a $3000 computer and use it for five years, but most users would rather spend $300 on a new computer every couple years. It might be that if electricity were charged at true market rates, taking into account pollutant costs, and if we were charged real market rates for disposal, the $3000 computer might be viable. But without consumer willingness to pay the real costs of products, the cheap commoditized product is going to win out over the well designed reusable product.
I saw an example of this years ago when traveling outside the US. The cost for a soft drink was minimal when one either drank it our of a glass bottle at the shop or traded in one glass bottle for another. Basically most houses got crates of glass bottles, which they paid for once, and then just reused. OTOH, if one were to buy a can, then one literaly had to buy the can and then figure out how to get the money back through someone who would remanufacture the can. Since the can was not reusable, and the country did not have a trash industry that depended on people discarding perfectly good products(most families would trow away maybe a couple gallons of trash), the economy was set up for good that could be reused.
The Apple \\\ had Visicalc and a CP/M card that could run all sorts of legacy Apps. It has a fortran and pascal compiler. It had Applewrite that allowed simple control code entry so you could markup your text and create whatever effect the printer was capable of producing. It was capable of automating all sorts of things. But programing was still often done on big iron, and so many times I used it as a terminal. Since everything was open back them, simply because standards such as USB and Firewire did not exist, it was simply enough to do hard hacks to get other incompatible systems to work. Such a things today are not necessary since we have standards.
It took about seven years for MS to create a WIndows People stayed with DOS for the same reason they stay with XP. The new solution is not superior enough to change. I was writing my own GUIs in DOS because the MS GUI was so unusable. The memory constraints with the Intel solution made the software unusable. The focus on cost meant that the critical graphics coprocessor was usually not present.
In terms of toolkits, the Mac has a superior toolset. MS Excel with intra-sheet linking and scripting made it a superior solution on the Mac. There were many data base solutions that could be combined for a superior workflow, glued together with Apple Script. Businesses that had existing automated workflows did not necessarily have a need to upgrade, but many business at the time were on a manual paper system. Since vertical market solutions were key, and many solutions were eventually ported to MS Windows 3.11, that became the dominant single vendor OS.
Apple TV is $99. Although in many ways inferior to other devices, I can't imagine any mass market device going above the $99 price point, as is the case with Roku. Maybe if it came with a hard disk it might be $200. Given what Android phones costs, Verizon can only match Apple prices on Adroid phones with a sleazy rebate, I doubt google devices are going to be competitive on price.
The implication Roku licensing is certainly the inclusion of a media player built into the TV. I can imagine that this would be a big selling point. No external cable box, no external DVD player, just broadcast and streaming on demand.
For some kids it starts after elementary. One must get into the right school for the middle grades, and then one is supposed to apply to all major high schools in the area. If the right high school is not achieved, life is over.
Or that is what some want us to think. High schools are using the same trick of exclusivity. The 'prestigious' schools get tons of applications, and then they can say that 90% of applicants are turned away. That way it seems they get the best of the best, when the real case is that kids have other concerns when looking for a high school, and maybe only 20% of those that apply seriously considered attending. I know middle schools where kids are required to apply to several high schools in the area
A better metric is the percentage of students that were accepted who decided to go to another school. Or the number of students who were accepted who had offers from other schools. Rejection is no better a metric than the number of kids who fail out the first year.
Ultimately schools should want the best of whomever has decided that a college education is right for them. Increasingly, unfortunately, schools are targeting kids who have no interest in college, who already know enough and smart enough to do what they want to do. This leads to motivated students having to deal with less motivated and intersting students, and wasted resources.
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There are also some advances in building kits. Erector set is still available. Fischertechniks is also worth a look.
Also look at software. Alice, out of Carnegie Mellon, has a Storytelling module, which is generally targeted to 10-14 year old kids and allows them to program a story.
Many of these laws were enacted in a time when the country was in pain. Paul, along with the newly elected republicans, can use their power to permanently rid this country of the attack on our liberty that excess screening imposes on us. We no longer have the freedom to move about the country as we did a decade ago. These virtual strip searches are going to have the effect of preventing travel, and that is exactly what the socialists want. If conservatives want to prove they value liberty over anything else, they can rid us of the DoHS, Putting a screener into bankruptcy is going to do nothing when the bureaucrats are the ones saving all the kiddie pron collected by the machines.
IMHO, part of this is due to the historical language we use to communicate. We speak of massive particles and waves even though we do not know if these words apply for very small things. It is the same way we talk about electricity and magnetism as if they are separate things. There are several ambiguous words that are used in science because the physical understanding is still being ferreted out. To wit, position and momentum are concept that date back to the beginning of physics, and we are now perhaps in the third iteration.
Then, there is the issue of using the term 'does not exist'. By measuring something we presuppose it's existence, and may even be aware of an approximate value, and merely want an precise value. We may then attempt a precise measurement, which will force, in some sense, the object to conform to our method of measurement, but even then the measurement may not accurately represent the value that we presupposed existed. Systematic errors, especially when techniques are first being developed, are pretty rampant.
What is pretty clear is that measurement can only be made to a finite precision, and those precision are effected by how and what one is measuring, and one thing science tries to do in quantify the level of uncertainty in the uncertaintly.
And, of course, firms will feed off this fear and the corresponding laws that result from this fear. You can't have a phone, but you we can charge more for the scrambling technology, and then charge for Onstar to make you feel safe. You can't have a cell phone booster, unless you pay our elevated charges. You can't have a safe computer because of pirates but you can pay us for virus software.
The fear works both ways, and we live in fear, then we really get screwed.
If Apple and Google support open interfaces, as they are, then life will only get better as more devices are in the market place, and the dominant device won't matter. Recall that Apple originally wanted all applications written using the web browsers. Recall that it was vendors who wanted the native applications, and agreed to the closed garden. We see the value of the HTML approach in that Google today has Googles Docs working on the iPad and other mobile devices.
In fact, if Android devices dominate the market, this will not be a bad thing. There is real competition between OEMs, not the fake competition that exists in the MS Windows world, where MS limits innovation to insure it remains a dominant player. Google seems primarily interested in remaining dominant in the Ad world, and seems to want to do this by creating products that insures that closed standards do not develop that exclude Google. To this end Android prevents Apple from creating closed standards in the Mobile market, while the fragmentation of the Android platform prevents closed standards from developing there.
My only complaint about the phone is that it does not have rotary dial. If one is going to make a useless bit on ancient technology, at least make it ancient.
here is what I want in an anti-smart phone. I want a small rectangular form factor. I want a battery that will last a week, and talk for a couple days. I want one button to end a call and turn off the phone. I want to import a list of phone numbers. I want to say who i am calling and confirm it from a screen, or choose from a screen. Voice recognition for phones numbers not in the phone.
The reason we have smart phones is that once you have the tech in to make a phone easy to use, like a touch screen, voice recognition, etc, It is not much more of a leap to just make it a computer. We don't have to, it is just the expected feature bloat.
And if we think this anchor baby threat is to be taken lightly, realize that we have at least on anchor baby in congress. This anchor baby has access to the top leaders of the US and all our security plans. In one step, he could give Cuba, who is still under the same government that wanted to kill every man, woman and child in US, the means and opportunity to kill every man, woman, and child in the US.
Of couse music is now made, largely, to be sold one at a time and played through tiny little earbuds. Of course most of us heard the Beatles through tinny stereo speakers, or, moe likely, ineffective mono speakers of our transistor radio or TV. In any case, no one can really say the sound quality of this music suffers in any meaningful way.
I certainly have respect for musical acts that honor the art enough to not just follow any trend of the marketplace. There is no reason to prostitute a group, especially when the group is not in desperate needs of funds, and it is always good to leave the fans wanting a little more.
In terms of 100% finals, this should almost be the norm. Paper should be formative assessment, with a combination of in class and out of class writing. Finals cannot typically be essay as they must be graded quickly. Thesis should be rather difficult to buy as they must be defended.
I think what we are actually seeing is a rise in the "professional" degree, often funded by corporate. Schools are willing to play because these degrees are profit centers, often $50-100K for a degree.Corporate trusts schools to award valid grades, which is then used for reimbursement. In fact no party has great incentive to prevent cheating, so all parties are complicit.
In this case, the simplistic answer to question is to licensee MS Office. MS Office, amazing enough, reads MS Word files. Now there may be issue of not wanting to pay for software or wanting open software, but if that was the case OO.org would have no issues. At this moment it is just a people trying to enact a self fulfilling prophecy. I have heard nothing that Oracle has done, just the they don't like Oracle.
I use OO.org as one of many products. I also use iWork because pages lets me create simple documents incredible quickly and Keynote because it does great animation. iWorks also opens all MS formats. For technical reports and presentations I use one of many wonderful Latex fron ends. I must admit I never used Neooffice because it seemed to me that they were more concerned with trashing OO.org rather than creating a stable product. I wonder if Libreoffice is going to fall for to the same demons.
Just to be clear I don'tuse MS Office because since about 2005 it did not meet my needs.
To answer the question, one reasonable solution is Google office. It is not open source, but it is free and will open almost anything.
It is interesting that Flash was touted on Android because it would solve problems like this. The remakable thing is, apparently, flash does not solve problems. Even on the PC, netflix uses Silverlight.
So the answer is that DRM is needed because it solves a problem that many people want solved. Without it the market is limited to those that do not see it is a problem. In the case of Android, phones sales may never suffer due to not having Netflix. OTOH some are producing android tablets, and those may be hurt because of lack of netflix.
I suspect that the UK has enough of free market so that if the established companies can't provide the service, others will step in. I also suspect that if established companies can't provide the services, it may very well be cheaper to nationalize them, pay for upgrades, and then recoup costs from the profits.
It annoys me that private firms always holds the perceived public goods hostage in order to extort public funds. In the US the nuclear and fossil fuel industry are refusing to move forward without huge sums from the taxpayers, yer cry foul when wind and solar do the same thing. According to what I have read over the years, the Chevy Volt has been in some state of readiness since late 2007, but we are only seeing it now, after GM has swollowed a few billion of taxpayer money.
The way to innovate is to simply allow firms to fail that do not. There are too many people, at least in the US, who just expect to have a job yet never expect to have to do anything new at that job. Things change. Customers expect new things. A firm should not be expcted to survive if they do not produce new things.
Going back to a logic of a company we all know, this is clearly a feature. We clearly need to be to be able to install updates automatically. Once the App is installed, the user has already given permission to have the App on the device. What is the point of wasted the users time to confirm updates. Won't users be happy to have additional functionality. Isn't this the benefit of the Android open garden? Not to have to deal with all that bureaucracy that keeps the best Apps off more closed platforms, such as companies that want to trade minimal content for access to a user full browsing history, contact list, installed Apps, and locations list?
My first thought is that people are reporting bugs that Google simply thought were too minor and did not want to devote resources. For example, intermittent bugs that can be solved with a page refresh are not likely going to cost customers, or cost Google very much, but could be very costly not only to diagnose, but to fix in such a way that everything else does not break.
Alternatively they may not wish to pay the small bounty on many minor issues in hopes of making it up with a small bounty on a major issue. If they are going to differentiate small and large issues, then they should differentiate with small and large payments, say 137 for minor bug and 133337 for a major bug. I would imagine that some researchers are funding their search for larger bugs with the payments on smaller bugs. I imagine that the search for larger bugs might slow if the payment disappear.
The question now is what can a gutted kin do that a phone from Walmart or cricket cannot. In the later an Android phone and year of unlimited service can be had for around $1K, which is better than anything MS can put together. Unless MS is target the rural teen crowd, I can't see how it will work.
For the average US resident that has little reason to use their phone outside the US, the only reason to have an unlocked phone is simply to say one has an unlokced phone. For some people, buying the lock phone and breaking it is half the fun. For people who travel outside the US, it is probably more likley that there will be a cost advantage to buy a prepaid phone in the destination country if a phone is needed. For instance, AFIK, if I went to the UK a phone with a hour of air time and many text messages would be less than 30 GBP. It would probably cost me more to use my own phone with international plan charges and roaming charges.
So whatever a real tablet is, Apple is prototyping the next incarnation of the OS, not WMP, but touch based. There was no way to get the hardware out there to make this work on the Mac, just like there was no hardware support for Vista. Likewise the functionality fo the now iOS is not much better than System 5, but that is ok. Over the next few years we will see a transition that does not have the disruptions of previous new releases.
It is unclear how MS is competing. The software, like kin, seems to be targeted at ADD adolescents rather than those who need a useful tools. Yes the widgets could ultimately allow the production of those tools, but it far from certain. Many buy Android because it is not Apple and their workflow centers around Google, not MS. Many buy RIM because their workflow centers around MS and RIM lets them use the MS tools as well as get useful information. It is unclear if the MS phone gives Android or RIM users anything new, especially since Phone 7 doesn't seem to use the proper tools.
Here is the thing that some people don't realize. Many buy the iPhone to crack. It makes them feel like they are sticking it to the man. One is not sticking anything to any man when one buys an MS product.
On the later, if anyone thinks that $150 pays all costs on this thing they are out of their mind. I think on hardware we are used to MS not transferring development costs to the consumer. However, the xBox is a successful product, so I think we are going to see more of MS expecting to get a more immediate return on investments. They probably did figure to recoup costs on sales, while the profit would come from increased sales of other higher margin products, much like the giving MS Windows to the OEM, and making money off Office.
The toy is a cleaver ploy. It has always been the case that toys are at the forefront of technology. The thing about a toy, unlike a business computer, is that it does not always have to work, and it has the freedom of being free for all innovative. That was what was so cool about everyone calling Mac a toy way back when. It kind of validated it as a truly innovate concept. Kinect is the same thing. It has the freedom to not quite work perfectly, but gives MS the opportunity to test and refine the design. Eventually if MS can figure out to make use of it, we will see it on robot and business devices. This is essentially what we are seeing with iOS. Apple is prototyping it's next OS on toys.
There was another recent article about the use of cameras to monitor personal property. I know people who do this. They have often have a overexcite sense of personal property. It is not only that they do not want people walking on their property, but get upset if they walk too near the property, or can be heard from the street. In some cases the damage are legitimate and there is a reason to go after the culprit. But I figure when one's entire existence is centered around explicitly security, one letting other people control one's life, and one no longer has any real self determination.
So, to me , the question is whether the big screen TV, the SUV, the valuable jewelry, is worth the opportunity cost to secure it. If life, on net, would be better without such outlandish objects. Or if the possessions are an excuse to have cameras everyone where so can have a value not necessarily voluntarily bestowed in normal day to day life.
Furthermore there are genuine technological advances that are net readily retrofitting into old kit, at least not without replacing all the relevent parts. This is particularly true with computers. I am not sure what is gained when the only the case of a computer is reused. On the other end, how many years is a microprocessor going to swappable with new models? The reality is that most users could buy a $3000 computer and use it for five years, but most users would rather spend $300 on a new computer every couple years. It might be that if electricity were charged at true market rates, taking into account pollutant costs, and if we were charged real market rates for disposal, the $3000 computer might be viable. But without consumer willingness to pay the real costs of products, the cheap commoditized product is going to win out over the well designed reusable product.
I saw an example of this years ago when traveling outside the US. The cost for a soft drink was minimal when one either drank it our of a glass bottle at the shop or traded in one glass bottle for another. Basically most houses got crates of glass bottles, which they paid for once, and then just reused. OTOH, if one were to buy a can, then one literaly had to buy the can and then figure out how to get the money back through someone who would remanufacture the can. Since the can was not reusable, and the country did not have a trash industry that depended on people discarding perfectly good products(most families would trow away maybe a couple gallons of trash), the economy was set up for good that could be reused.
It took about seven years for MS to create a WIndows People stayed with DOS for the same reason they stay with XP. The new solution is not superior enough to change. I was writing my own GUIs in DOS because the MS GUI was so unusable. The memory constraints with the Intel solution made the software unusable. The focus on cost meant that the critical graphics coprocessor was usually not present.
In terms of toolkits, the Mac has a superior toolset. MS Excel with intra-sheet linking and scripting made it a superior solution on the Mac. There were many data base solutions that could be combined for a superior workflow, glued together with Apple Script. Businesses that had existing automated workflows did not necessarily have a need to upgrade, but many business at the time were on a manual paper system. Since vertical market solutions were key, and many solutions were eventually ported to MS Windows 3.11, that became the dominant single vendor OS.
And 20 years ago it was frogs
The implication Roku licensing is certainly the inclusion of a media player built into the TV. I can imagine that this would be a big selling point. No external cable box, no external DVD player, just broadcast and streaming on demand.
Or that is what some want us to think. High schools are using the same trick of exclusivity. The 'prestigious' schools get tons of applications, and then they can say that 90% of applicants are turned away. That way it seems they get the best of the best, when the real case is that kids have other concerns when looking for a high school, and maybe only 20% of those that apply seriously considered attending. I know middle schools where kids are required to apply to several high schools in the area
A better metric is the percentage of students that were accepted who decided to go to another school. Or the number of students who were accepted who had offers from other schools. Rejection is no better a metric than the number of kids who fail out the first year.
Ultimately schools should want the best of whomever has decided that a college education is right for them. Increasingly, unfortunately, schools are targeting kids who have no interest in college, who already know enough and smart enough to do what they want to do. This leads to motivated students having to deal with less motivated and intersting students, and wasted resources.