I said this before and I will say this again. Google, just like MS, is playing the version game so they make an immature browser seem equal to other browser, at least to the unsophisticated portion of the customer base.
This is not to say that Google is not catching up fast, just that they are focusing on version numbers in their add copies, while primarily fixing bugs in actuality.
Compare this to firms that are actually trying to deliver a useful feature set to customers, rather than just focusing on metrics that have long been shown to be meaningless. Firefox is happy at 3.6 Safari is happy at 5. Opera, which may have been around longer than google itself, is only at 10.63. These are people who deliver useful browser.
It would not be a horrible idea, it simply would not be a real university. Community colleges and some tier two regional universities are not unlike this. While they have tenured faculty, the students can have effect on employment, which, IMHO, results in degradation of the curriculum. Lecturers are there to attract perhaps more casual students, not to explore their field of study and communicate the wonder and excitement to the students. I know that many will say professors do not communicate wonder, but I think those people perhaps are not interested in their field of study.
So why should this option exist? Because we want more people to become more educated. Most private option, ITT, UofPhoenix, are largely methods to extract tax dollars from the public coffer to private profit at the expense of millions of naive students who have no idea what a student loan really is. So if we are to educate the masses, and a traditional university can only educate 25%, and private schools are scams, then what is the solution?
A school like this with much less infrastructure. Standard curriculum taught by people who can relate and provide relevant to the students. Standard consensus based tests that can insure learning on the curriculum occurred. Schools do not pay lecturers a livable wage. If a lecturer was given the freedom to acquire the curriculum and accreditation if she or he followed it gave the test, students might be able to pay as little as $2000 total for a full course load, and get an education, with little government subsidies. They would be required to buy some equipment, and for certain lab courses they might have additional fees, but without the huge expense incurred by an otherwise useless administration this could be the way to educate another 50% of the people.
Re:In the End...
on
Why Microsoft?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If we had the chance is the issue. Although everyone makes a big deal about how the many of the leaders of Tech companies got that way because they were smart and motivated, not because they had a big degree, I find it interesting that such an emphasis is placed on recruiting from top tier colleges.
If one believes that a mix of workers is best, those that have been trained in the status quo at top tier schools, those that have not been brainwashed by the top tier schools into thinking all their creative ideas are bad because they don' conform, and those that are just plain smart, then the problem with MS is obvious.
They are controlled by what has been deemed a good idea by b-schools, not what are in reality good ideas.
So yes, if MS did hire people who were innovative, and not just those that have awarded a degree, then it would be worth to be given a chance of working there.
At some point it became cost effective to outsource the computer. A long time ago it wasn't. Now there is not savings, mostly because of reliability and the huge savings of buying from a big OEM.
There are two big reasons for this. First, one has to factor in the total cost of assembly and in house repair. This is the total costs, including supervision and hiring. Facilities to build the machines, facilities to build the parts. Facilities to repair and diagnos problems. It adds up.
Second, there is the reliability of parts. When I was in manufacturing, we would ship out parts based on customer volume. For our best customers we woud ship the best as it came off the line. These customers also had QA on their end, and would often return parts that were not quite within specs. The represented product on the order of hundreds of dollars so they might be reworked, or might be shipped to smaller customers who would accept barely in spec products.
Which is to say that even if it cost effective to roll your own, the added expense to purchase and verify quality products might still make the process prohibitive. It is not like one can just mail order the products and expect to get quality. Many of us know this just from the number of defective memory cards we have received over the years.
Fox has no interest in keeping viewers happy. Many of you may not know it, but The Simpsons was not the show that allowed Fox to enter, literally, the prime time game. It was Married with Children. Married got the rating that allowed Fox to charge the advertising rates that allowed other shows, such as The Simpsons to flourish. No one knew that Fox existed back them, except for Married.
And how did Fox reward the show that made the network and the reward the fans. By Canceling it without a goodbye episode. Experienced networks knew not to do this. Fox, however, even after all this time, is still an adolescent vunerable to tempter tantrums.
Firefly was a good show with a good concept. It was certainly the amateurish Fox executives that kiled it. Futurama the same thing. I must give them credit for Dollhouse. It was not a long term concept, and the two seasons were long enough to tell the story.
Most 60's American cars no longer exist. Nostalgia makes us sad that they do not exist. OTOH, we now are quite aware that there is nothing like a free lunch. The issue is not just changing energy sources every time there is a crisis, but using those energy sources more efficiently.
I have often this was also an issue with a hover car. If we are constantly providing a normal force to keep the car, say, 50 centimeters above the ground, then for a typical car this would be 5000 joules or W*s. Given the standard inefficiencies, a gallon of gas might give one 20-30 minutes of flight. Around here where many people commute an hour, this would add 20 gallons a week to consumption, which would more than double the fuel needed. As this energy consumption would rise linearly with mass, this doubling relationship would persist. Aa such we have a cool technology that makes no sense from an energy point of view.
While mostly I think books pay for large building, fancy cars, and drugs for the executives, which is really no different than any other industry, from what I see the one legitimate service they do provide is objective editing.
Someone I knew self published in the early days of his trend. The book while very good, was not up to standards of a professionally published books. Way more spelling and grammer errors than in edited book. Way more material than needed to be there. All in all, though he had an editor, since the focus was on minimizing cost, the editing was not thorough.
But I am not sure if editing or any of this is really the issue. Back in the day we had pulp publishing. Many authors made a lot of money. Now such publishing does not seem to exist, so if an author wants to make money, they are clearly going to have to bypass the publisher. At $.57 a copy, 100,000 copies is real money, and an average author is more likely to do that at $3 than $15.
The cost of an e-book is $10 new, $5 over time. This cannot support the current publishing inefficiencies. Clearly publishing houses are going to have to the same thing as recording studios if they are to stay relevent.
I wish we could do the same in the states. Right now many churches, especially christian churches, are private clubs with athletic facilities, single evening facilities, and adult facilities. These are paid for by tax deductible tithes and public subsidies through forgiveness of land tax. In effect, the church is used by middle class to evade taxes, and the uppeer class to shield assets from taxes.
Obviously we would not allow money spent at a gym or a bar to be tax deductible, but we do for a church even though many modern churches are similar. Many are privately owned not be an periodically elected board, but by individuals. The land that might be used to expand the economy, is instead socialized into a non-economic tax generating purposes.
The tax evasion aspect of the modern church is not just a liberal secular issue. When he conservative republican web site AmericanSpeakOut.com was fist set up, one of the first issue to rise to the top of activity was the idea that church subsidies should be eliminated. As such a plan would deny million of republicans from their fruity clubish mega churches, it is never mentioned in the official documents. But that some fetus should die because there is no money because someone want a million dollar private basketball court is indefensible.
As a person who used the networks of yore, I can remember many times when the users broke the network. That is why, for instance, outlook has added so many layers of optional protection' like the blocking of attachments and the like.
I am not sure why everyone, all of the sudden, is forgetting 10 years of DDOS and worm and virus attacks that used to regularly take down networks. We are protected from this not, partly because of more sophisticated software and users, but also because higher bandwidths and lower ping times make such attacks less trivial.
But ping time and bandwidth and the sophistication of younger users, and older users with no corporate control, make such an attack more probable on a phone network. Ping times on my cell network at about 5-10X as long wifi. Such times might lead to opportunities for rouge apps to degrade the user experience. Combine with lower bandwidth it might be conceivable that we will see some of the same attacks as we did at the turn of the century.
I am not saying that networks should be closed like Apple, but that until we learn how to use the tools, such disruptions will occasionally occur either accidentally or deliberately. it will be for us to decide if we want to deal with the dropped calls, as we did with the occasionally site becoming unreachable.
The iPad is not a streaming device. A single movie will eat up all of the 250MB ration. What it is good for is to watch movie you own or rent at home. As much of a rip off as many would consider an iPad to be, the 64GB can hold an very large amount of media. With planning, or renting and downloading under WiFi conditions, it makes an every effective mobile device. I have also started playing games again.
The only option for unlimited movie streaming, as far as I can see, is a cricket or sprint plan, 60 GB It is separate device, but is wireless.
For a functional efficient calculator, the HP scientific can't be beat. Like many professional devices, there is a learning curve, but that time can be recouped quickly. The TI, OTOH, is popular in the US because it has a relatively short learning curve, and is designed for the need of schools and test administrators, not end users. In particular, the Ti nspire is not that user friendly, and is only popular because of TI inertia.
In terms of actual usability, I would say an internet enabled smart phone is the way to go. They have color screens, can create graphs, and most have HP type RPN calculator software. The best of all worlds. In addition, they can go to wolfram|alpha, which makes them infinitely more useful than any traditional calculator.
Let us work though the numbers. At four months, the iPhone 4 has a return rate of 47 phones per thousand. According to the graph, 82% of this was due to broken glass, so this is 39 phones per thousand whose glass broke. The iPhone 3GS had a return rate of 28 phones per thousand at that time, 76% were broken screen, or may 21 phones.
Of course the iPhone has two pieces of glass to break instead of one, so, for the careless consumer who has insurance because they want to break the phone and get a new one every few months, this provides twice the opportunity to break the phone.
My orginal iPhone suffered a couple traumatic events, and the back is dented. This may in fact have broken the iPhone 4. Many of us are not used to protecting the back of our devices. Therefore initial breakage is bound to be much more.
From the insurance industry point fo view such numbers are literal gold. Make the phone sound less reliable, more people buy their $99 dollar insurance. Make the phone sound less reliable, and you can charge $99 for a $200 phone, that, according to their own numbers, only have a 8 in one hundred chance of breaking, probably much less if all iPhone owners are included. From a hones person point of view, there is probably the iPhone 4 is probably no more like to break than the other phones, when used carefully. In particular the extrapolation sound like pure and simple markting hyperbole.
Before this I did not realize what squaretrade did, and now that I see this deceptive report, I certainly will do everything I can to not use them. Not to say that some people don't need insurance. But if one didn't need for the old iPhone, one likely does not need it now.
I would say most communication is ignored. How much of the daily babble do we really pay attention to? How many millions of dollars are spent on advertising, and how many of those do we really take the time to comprehend, at least from a product point of view. I often analyze ads from design perspective, but the message. Very seldom.
Unless a tweet is in your timeline, there is an effort involved in reading it. Therefore the number that are ignored is measurable. But what about all the other stuff that is passive. I think if we were honest, the majority of that is ignored as well. The amount of information we are expected to consume is too immense. The advantage of twitter is that it is not controlled by entities that want me to buy something. The information is genuine. There is not a day that I don't get some useful bit of information. I have to go through lots of trivia, but that is no different from any other media.
If technology teaches kids how to decode words, or add, or write their lettes in cursive, is not the point. There are skills that kids need to know in addition to those of the 1950. Like typing 50 words a minutes. Or having file management skills. Or having practice logging into accounts. Right now many of the skills a kid knows has to do with playing games on the computer. It would be useful to have the kid also see the computer as a formal learning tool.
This of course would require schools to incorporate computers into the classroom. Some assignments done on the computer. Labs to be done on the computers. Reading with assessment done on the computer.
I know that the computer is not the only technology. But the general purpose computer can be a hub. A camera can act as a microscope. A sensor can collect data. The computer can read aloud while the child follows along. Videos of history, videos of math, etc. It will take some creativity to transform the classroom from black board to computer based, but it has to happen. otherwise our kids will graduate with skills of how to use facebook, but not of how to use the computer.
Flash is becoming less and less relevant. It is used for some things, but if MS buys it that will put the nail in the coffin. Look at what happened to IE when went really hardball and pulled it for Mac. MS Office 2010 ia not selling well, not necessarily because of quality, but because of trust.
If Flash is pulled for linux, it would probably be enough to tip many people over to other technologies, if for no other reason than they would be afraid that MS may pull the Mac version. No one can afford to lose 10% of potential customers, especially when that 10% has cash(hear me blockbuster?).
Apple TV is primarily meant to drive traffic to ITMS with the result of revenue for rental. Google is going to be another method to drive traffic to Google with the result of revenue from ads. Both have the markets, and both are far from ideal.
I think the one that will win is the one that will allows a harddisk with content to be wireless networked to all the boxes in a house. I already know people who have content centralized and can watch whatever wherever they are. If you dedicate a computer to serving content one can already do this with itunes.
Alternatively, plug an external hard disk into the box. Anything that comes with the box is going to be too small. I suppose the Apple TV will be hacked to allow this.
I am not sure what the transcoding issue is. The specs indicate it can play most standard formats. I know itunes has issues with some formats.
Some want to run government like business, but it can't be. Government can't borrow money today then take interest off taxes and amortize the amount over years. If Government borrows money, it immediately goes on the deficit and the so-called conservatives, who would have no problem with business borrowing for capital investments, call it irresponsible. When government tries to raise taxes to cover fixed costs, so-called conservatives who would have no problem raising pricing in their firms call it overtaxation.
Additionally, the government can't go out and a government loan when they make incompetent decisions. The government is not inefficient. It just has to hold itself to a higher standard. Contract are awarded as fairly as possible. Budgets are debated by representatives. Laws are made that are fair to everyone. Would anyone in their right mind want a business based on the practices of AIG, or GM, or practically any large business that depends on government hand outs to survive. I mean look at it this way. We tried to take Clear Lake off the teat of government grant, and failed even that.
Of course for $2 I can go iTunes and buy a copy of ATHF. Actually, if I buy a season pass, it is quite a bit less than that.
Google is clearly late to the game, and will likely only seek to increase the cost to the viewer, which is good for the produces but bad for us. Producers are whining that the norm for tv is 15-20 minute of commercials per hour, while Hulu is 2-5 minutes.
What I would like to see Google do is have targeted text ads along with show. What would really be cool is to return to have hour long tv shows that were more than 40 minutes long.
When I was in college there was one polisci grad student who loved to write for the college paper. It was clear that he had no context of reality, all he wanted to do was force his opinion on other people. He was repeatedly denied a doctorate, and he repeatedly claim liberal bias. It was in fact just a lack of willingness to recognize reality. It would be like building a thesis on the 'fact' that Obama was not America, or that Palin never shot anything in her life, or Limbaugh takes trips to the DR to molest boys. There are a large number of people who think this is true, but it is not reality.
So if we are talking about video games, what is the point of a "North Koreanish dictatorial" attitude. It serves nothing but to lead us to name calling, which admittedly is all that most pundits can do. The reality is that video games on consoles are the definition of corporate control. They require a payment to be written, they require a payment for every copy sold. We don't hear about the games that don't make it because the cost is so great that no one would develop a game that would not make it past the corporate censors. Furthermore, a game has to sell millions, so no one is going to write a game that would piss of a large group. Just look at the pulling of the Taliban theme in Medal of Honor. This is precisely the example of self censorship that has plagued the corporate game industry.
What has changed is that Apple has provided a platform with minimal upfront costs and reasonable distribution costs. This has allowed developers to experiment with games in a way that previously only available on PC platforms. This is not being an apple-apologist. This is reality, and comparing kiwis to kiwis. The iPad is much more a console, with a relatively simple IDE, than a PC. On a PC everything is possible. The console requires a tribute. Apple requires less of a tribute. We will see what tributes are required for the Android console, and if, as assumed many times on/., developers will be putting all the games banned by Apple on Android devices. The market will decide, much like the Wii vesus xbox, if people want to have fun or bash seals brains in. I think the dead heat between the two says that there is room in the market for both, even though both are massively controled by large corporations.
It seems to me that a data center needs tax breaks for building it, and then cheap electricity for running it. The cool climate cuts down on electricity costs.
I think maintenance requires some skill, and requires a number of people on site, or at least close to it. It will help with the job situation, especially since low skilled jobs are the ones that are not be being created right now. Skilled educated labor has jobs, for the most part.
I went ahead and upgraded to MS Windows 7 on my macbook for some work I was doing this summer. My XP Partition was dead, so I thought I would just buy a 7 upgrade, load it, and everything would be happy. Of course 7 won't upgrade with just the presence of licensed disk, so I had to reinstall lots of stuff, and, suffice it say that the upgrade was not such a bargain. It is in the ilk of 'Linux is free only if your time is free.'
I suspect cost is a major issue in upgrade. Many computers I use still run XP because the cost of the actual upgrade would be monumental, mostly due to the licensing requirements of MS. We probably have the actual licenses, but how do we get MS to accept them. I once spent a day convincing MS genuine advantage that my duly paid for licenses were valid, and my time is not free.
In specific response to the parent, actually licensing costs are not trivial, and not geared toward the home user. It would be one thing in MS sold a home premium 5 pack for $200, but for six computers they want $800 for a stripped down OS. One reason upgrading my macs are a no brainer is that for $100 I can get a five license pack.
Windows 7 is good, and it is a indication of the incompetence of MS that everyone is not using it. I have used it off and for a few months, and have had real issues. The problem is that MS has turned into a boutique outfit, selling only to the chosen few.
The likes of Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Ron Paul are not people who want small government, they just want to make sure as much money as possible makes it into the pockets of themselves and their people. Reevaluating NASA is one of the small ways we could have made government smaller, but it would also require that these legislators lose a bit of their income. We have seen this before, for instance when Paul pushed through millions of dollars for his fishing buddies. Small government is not really the thing in Texas, where we have new laws that invade privacy by forcing adults to wear seat belts in the back seat, as if useless laws make government smaller. And we can't really blame Pete Olson. He is one of those Texas Republicans that, like Perry, really have no concept of small government or entrepreneurship. He has been on the government payroll his entire life, so he thinks that is the order of things. For the government to give you a job, and pay you to do nothing your entire life. It is no wonder that he has no idea that the people of Clear Lake could actually go out into the real world and get a private job, or start a small business, if and when they lose their government jobs.
"For us, apps are all about adding real value to the end-user's life and creating revenue for developers," said Alan Panezic. "We don't need 200 fart apps in App World. Those are apps you'll use three or four times then never open again. You're not looking at ads, clicking on ads or buying premium upgrades, and the app isn't adding any value to your device."
I quoted this in full from the article to because it does not sound like RIM is primarily concerned with serving business interests here. It sounds like they are trying to maximize profits by selling apps and advertising that they will take a cut of. The issue with silly apps is not that they are silly, but that they will not generate enough revenue through advertising.
Now, if I have a firm, I do not want to spend time looking at ads to subsidize apps that could easily be paid for. I want to pay a bit up front for a useful item, and then use it, like with Apple. I can buy an app, use it, and get free upgrades. I do not want be in a situation where RIM is continuously looking for how to get more money out of me.
And, of course, it is really judgmental to decide what will add real value to the end users life. This is MS telling us what to do.
Given the focus on Flash and video output, it is probably a 'play with yourself book.' It has enough business use that it can be written of the taxes, but still be primarily used for entertainment.
A business device has no need for flash, unless one wants the firm to pay broadband for advertising. My favorite thing about the iPad is that I do not have use my limited broadband to download the flash ads. Sucks for firms that use flash ads, but that is their choice. Mostly I do not block non-flash ads.
Of course day care workers are an interesting example. One thing that unions, and professional groups do, is apply pressure to meet a reasonable level of quality. It is just like a group of egg and dairy manufacturers going to congress to make sure the laws are reasonable, but not overbearing. One wants to insure a reasonable level of safety, but not so much so that no one can make a profit.
The second step is to make sure that everyone complies with these consensus regulations. The expensive way to do this is to create a federal bureaucracy that can fine violators or take away licenses based on court hearing by person with no experience in the field. The cheaper way is to insure that all actors belong to a group that self regulate. For business, these are the industry groups. For individuals, these are the unions. The unions, like the industry groups, will allow the bad actors to be removed, but protect the rest from arbitrary punishment by persons who do not have an understanding of the vagaries of the profession. We would not want someone fired for an honst mistake any more than we would an egg producer put out of business for temporarily losing control of his stock.
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This is not to say that Google is not catching up fast, just that they are focusing on version numbers in their add copies, while primarily fixing bugs in actuality.
Compare this to firms that are actually trying to deliver a useful feature set to customers, rather than just focusing on metrics that have long been shown to be meaningless. Firefox is happy at 3.6 Safari is happy at 5. Opera, which may have been around longer than google itself, is only at 10.63. These are people who deliver useful browser.
So why should this option exist? Because we want more people to become more educated. Most private option, ITT, UofPhoenix, are largely methods to extract tax dollars from the public coffer to private profit at the expense of millions of naive students who have no idea what a student loan really is. So if we are to educate the masses, and a traditional university can only educate 25%, and private schools are scams, then what is the solution?
A school like this with much less infrastructure. Standard curriculum taught by people who can relate and provide relevant to the students. Standard consensus based tests that can insure learning on the curriculum occurred. Schools do not pay lecturers a livable wage. If a lecturer was given the freedom to acquire the curriculum and accreditation if she or he followed it gave the test, students might be able to pay as little as $2000 total for a full course load, and get an education, with little government subsidies. They would be required to buy some equipment, and for certain lab courses they might have additional fees, but without the huge expense incurred by an otherwise useless administration this could be the way to educate another 50% of the people.
If one believes that a mix of workers is best, those that have been trained in the status quo at top tier schools, those that have not been brainwashed by the top tier schools into thinking all their creative ideas are bad because they don' conform, and those that are just plain smart, then the problem with MS is obvious.
They are controlled by what has been deemed a good idea by b-schools, not what are in reality good ideas.
So yes, if MS did hire people who were innovative, and not just those that have awarded a degree, then it would be worth to be given a chance of working there.
There are two big reasons for this. First, one has to factor in the total cost of assembly and in house repair. This is the total costs, including supervision and hiring. Facilities to build the machines, facilities to build the parts. Facilities to repair and diagnos problems. It adds up.
Second, there is the reliability of parts. When I was in manufacturing, we would ship out parts based on customer volume. For our best customers we woud ship the best as it came off the line. These customers also had QA on their end, and would often return parts that were not quite within specs. The represented product on the order of hundreds of dollars so they might be reworked, or might be shipped to smaller customers who would accept barely in spec products.
Which is to say that even if it cost effective to roll your own, the added expense to purchase and verify quality products might still make the process prohibitive. It is not like one can just mail order the products and expect to get quality. Many of us know this just from the number of defective memory cards we have received over the years.
And how did Fox reward the show that made the network and the reward the fans. By Canceling it without a goodbye episode. Experienced networks knew not to do this. Fox, however, even after all this time, is still an adolescent vunerable to tempter tantrums.
Firefly was a good show with a good concept. It was certainly the amateurish Fox executives that kiled it. Futurama the same thing. I must give them credit for Dollhouse. It was not a long term concept, and the two seasons were long enough to tell the story.
I have often this was also an issue with a hover car. If we are constantly providing a normal force to keep the car, say, 50 centimeters above the ground, then for a typical car this would be 5000 joules or W*s. Given the standard inefficiencies, a gallon of gas might give one 20-30 minutes of flight. Around here where many people commute an hour, this would add 20 gallons a week to consumption, which would more than double the fuel needed. As this energy consumption would rise linearly with mass, this doubling relationship would persist. Aa such we have a cool technology that makes no sense from an energy point of view.
Someone I knew self published in the early days of his trend. The book while very good, was not up to standards of a professionally published books. Way more spelling and grammer errors than in edited book. Way more material than needed to be there. All in all, though he had an editor, since the focus was on minimizing cost, the editing was not thorough.
But I am not sure if editing or any of this is really the issue. Back in the day we had pulp publishing. Many authors made a lot of money. Now such publishing does not seem to exist, so if an author wants to make money, they are clearly going to have to bypass the publisher. At $.57 a copy, 100,000 copies is real money, and an average author is more likely to do that at $3 than $15.
The cost of an e-book is $10 new, $5 over time. This cannot support the current publishing inefficiencies. Clearly publishing houses are going to have to the same thing as recording studios if they are to stay relevent.
Obviously we would not allow money spent at a gym or a bar to be tax deductible, but we do for a church even though many modern churches are similar. Many are privately owned not be an periodically elected board, but by individuals. The land that might be used to expand the economy, is instead socialized into a non-economic tax generating purposes.
The tax evasion aspect of the modern church is not just a liberal secular issue. When he conservative republican web site AmericanSpeakOut.com was fist set up, one of the first issue to rise to the top of activity was the idea that church subsidies should be eliminated. As such a plan would deny million of republicans from their fruity clubish mega churches, it is never mentioned in the official documents. But that some fetus should die because there is no money because someone want a million dollar private basketball court is indefensible.
I am not sure why everyone, all of the sudden, is forgetting 10 years of DDOS and worm and virus attacks that used to regularly take down networks. We are protected from this not, partly because of more sophisticated software and users, but also because higher bandwidths and lower ping times make such attacks less trivial.
But ping time and bandwidth and the sophistication of younger users, and older users with no corporate control, make such an attack more probable on a phone network. Ping times on my cell network at about 5-10X as long wifi. Such times might lead to opportunities for rouge apps to degrade the user experience. Combine with lower bandwidth it might be conceivable that we will see some of the same attacks as we did at the turn of the century.
I am not saying that networks should be closed like Apple, but that until we learn how to use the tools, such disruptions will occasionally occur either accidentally or deliberately. it will be for us to decide if we want to deal with the dropped calls, as we did with the occasionally site becoming unreachable.
The only option for unlimited movie streaming, as far as I can see, is a cricket or sprint plan, 60 GB It is separate device, but is wireless.
In terms of actual usability, I would say an internet enabled smart phone is the way to go. They have color screens, can create graphs, and most have HP type RPN calculator software. The best of all worlds. In addition, they can go to wolfram|alpha, which makes them infinitely more useful than any traditional calculator.
Of course the iPhone has two pieces of glass to break instead of one, so, for the careless consumer who has insurance because they want to break the phone and get a new one every few months, this provides twice the opportunity to break the phone.
My orginal iPhone suffered a couple traumatic events, and the back is dented. This may in fact have broken the iPhone 4. Many of us are not used to protecting the back of our devices. Therefore initial breakage is bound to be much more.
From the insurance industry point fo view such numbers are literal gold. Make the phone sound less reliable, more people buy their $99 dollar insurance. Make the phone sound less reliable, and you can charge $99 for a $200 phone, that, according to their own numbers, only have a 8 in one hundred chance of breaking, probably much less if all iPhone owners are included. From a hones person point of view, there is probably the iPhone 4 is probably no more like to break than the other phones, when used carefully. In particular the extrapolation sound like pure and simple markting hyperbole.
Before this I did not realize what squaretrade did, and now that I see this deceptive report, I certainly will do everything I can to not use them. Not to say that some people don't need insurance. But if one didn't need for the old iPhone, one likely does not need it now.
Unless a tweet is in your timeline, there is an effort involved in reading it. Therefore the number that are ignored is measurable. But what about all the other stuff that is passive. I think if we were honest, the majority of that is ignored as well. The amount of information we are expected to consume is too immense. The advantage of twitter is that it is not controlled by entities that want me to buy something. The information is genuine. There is not a day that I don't get some useful bit of information. I have to go through lots of trivia, but that is no different from any other media.
This of course would require schools to incorporate computers into the classroom. Some assignments done on the computer. Labs to be done on the computers. Reading with assessment done on the computer.
I know that the computer is not the only technology. But the general purpose computer can be a hub. A camera can act as a microscope. A sensor can collect data. The computer can read aloud while the child follows along. Videos of history, videos of math, etc. It will take some creativity to transform the classroom from black board to computer based, but it has to happen. otherwise our kids will graduate with skills of how to use facebook, but not of how to use the computer.
If Flash is pulled for linux, it would probably be enough to tip many people over to other technologies, if for no other reason than they would be afraid that MS may pull the Mac version. No one can afford to lose 10% of potential customers, especially when that 10% has cash(hear me blockbuster?).
I think the one that will win is the one that will allows a harddisk with content to be wireless networked to all the boxes in a house. I already know people who have content centralized and can watch whatever wherever they are. If you dedicate a computer to serving content one can already do this with itunes.
Alternatively, plug an external hard disk into the box. Anything that comes with the box is going to be too small. I suppose the Apple TV will be hacked to allow this.
I am not sure what the transcoding issue is. The specs indicate it can play most standard formats. I know itunes has issues with some formats.
Additionally, the government can't go out and a government loan when they make incompetent decisions. The government is not inefficient. It just has to hold itself to a higher standard. Contract are awarded as fairly as possible. Budgets are debated by representatives. Laws are made that are fair to everyone. Would anyone in their right mind want a business based on the practices of AIG, or GM, or practically any large business that depends on government hand outs to survive. I mean look at it this way. We tried to take Clear Lake off the teat of government grant, and failed even that.
Google is clearly late to the game, and will likely only seek to increase the cost to the viewer, which is good for the produces but bad for us. Producers are whining that the norm for tv is 15-20 minute of commercials per hour, while Hulu is 2-5 minutes.
What I would like to see Google do is have targeted text ads along with show. What would really be cool is to return to have hour long tv shows that were more than 40 minutes long.
So if we are talking about video games, what is the point of a "North Koreanish dictatorial" attitude. It serves nothing but to lead us to name calling, which admittedly is all that most pundits can do. The reality is that video games on consoles are the definition of corporate control. They require a payment to be written, they require a payment for every copy sold. We don't hear about the games that don't make it because the cost is so great that no one would develop a game that would not make it past the corporate censors. Furthermore, a game has to sell millions, so no one is going to write a game that would piss of a large group. Just look at the pulling of the Taliban theme in Medal of Honor. This is precisely the example of self censorship that has plagued the corporate game industry.
What has changed is that Apple has provided a platform with minimal upfront costs and reasonable distribution costs. This has allowed developers to experiment with games in a way that previously only available on PC platforms. This is not being an apple-apologist. This is reality, and comparing kiwis to kiwis. The iPad is much more a console, with a relatively simple IDE, than a PC. On a PC everything is possible. The console requires a tribute. Apple requires less of a tribute. We will see what tributes are required for the Android console, and if, as assumed many times on /., developers will be putting all the games banned by Apple on Android devices. The market will decide, much like the Wii vesus xbox, if people want to have fun or bash seals brains in. I think the dead heat between the two says that there is room in the market for both, even though both are massively controled by large corporations.
I think maintenance requires some skill, and requires a number of people on site, or at least close to it. It will help with the job situation, especially since low skilled jobs are the ones that are not be being created right now. Skilled educated labor has jobs, for the most part.
I suspect cost is a major issue in upgrade. Many computers I use still run XP because the cost of the actual upgrade would be monumental, mostly due to the licensing requirements of MS. We probably have the actual licenses, but how do we get MS to accept them. I once spent a day convincing MS genuine advantage that my duly paid for licenses were valid, and my time is not free.
In specific response to the parent, actually licensing costs are not trivial, and not geared toward the home user. It would be one thing in MS sold a home premium 5 pack for $200, but for six computers they want $800 for a stripped down OS. One reason upgrading my macs are a no brainer is that for $100 I can get a five license pack.
Windows 7 is good, and it is a indication of the incompetence of MS that everyone is not using it. I have used it off and for a few months, and have had real issues. The problem is that MS has turned into a boutique outfit, selling only to the chosen few.
The likes of Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Ron Paul are not people who want small government, they just want to make sure as much money as possible makes it into the pockets of themselves and their people. Reevaluating NASA is one of the small ways we could have made government smaller, but it would also require that these legislators lose a bit of their income. We have seen this before, for instance when Paul pushed through millions of dollars for his fishing buddies. Small government is not really the thing in Texas, where we have new laws that invade privacy by forcing adults to wear seat belts in the back seat, as if useless laws make government smaller. And we can't really blame Pete Olson. He is one of those Texas Republicans that, like Perry, really have no concept of small government or entrepreneurship. He has been on the government payroll his entire life, so he thinks that is the order of things. For the government to give you a job, and pay you to do nothing your entire life. It is no wonder that he has no idea that the people of Clear Lake could actually go out into the real world and get a private job, or start a small business, if and when they lose their government jobs.
I quoted this in full from the article to because it does not sound like RIM is primarily concerned with serving business interests here. It sounds like they are trying to maximize profits by selling apps and advertising that they will take a cut of. The issue with silly apps is not that they are silly, but that they will not generate enough revenue through advertising.
Now, if I have a firm, I do not want to spend time looking at ads to subsidize apps that could easily be paid for. I want to pay a bit up front for a useful item, and then use it, like with Apple. I can buy an app, use it, and get free upgrades. I do not want be in a situation where RIM is continuously looking for how to get more money out of me.
And, of course, it is really judgmental to decide what will add real value to the end users life. This is MS telling us what to do.
A business device has no need for flash, unless one wants the firm to pay broadband for advertising. My favorite thing about the iPad is that I do not have use my limited broadband to download the flash ads. Sucks for firms that use flash ads, but that is their choice. Mostly I do not block non-flash ads.
The second step is to make sure that everyone complies with these consensus regulations. The expensive way to do this is to create a federal bureaucracy that can fine violators or take away licenses based on court hearing by person with no experience in the field. The cheaper way is to insure that all actors belong to a group that self regulate. For business, these are the industry groups. For individuals, these are the unions. The unions, like the industry groups, will allow the bad actors to be removed, but protect the rest from arbitrary punishment by persons who do not have an understanding of the vagaries of the profession. We would not want someone fired for an honst mistake any more than we would an egg producer put out of business for temporarily losing control of his stock.