Re:If they can do it to Google, they can do it to
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The Case For Oracle
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Here is the problem. If Java was not defended the likes of MS and Google and even Adobe would do everything in their power to splinter it into a confusing mess. MS tried to create extensions to make certain virtual machines work only on MS technology.
Some say this is only because Oracle now has Java, but if the issue is the mobile platform, we also see that Google is playing hardball with the phone. Google is suing companies that use Google tech on Android without Google approval. Google is charging $5 to play in the Chrome field. Google is clearly aggressively protecting it's IP. Not allowing Sun to do the same is hypocritical.
With a unified Java we have a language that one can do many interesting technical things in without a required $1000 IDE. The applications from Java is about the only thing that competes with MS and Adobe. Openoffice.org is one of the very few alternative we have to paying MS a huge amount of money or giving Google control over our data. Defending Java is a big deal. Taking it down would provide competitive advantages to many big players.
If all they want to do is verify identify that can just run a dollar. This is what most people do.
The five dollars has to be to cover costs, which is fair. One wonders, however, why Chrome is such a risk that it can't use the same model as firefox. I suppose it is simply that Google has to protect itself since Chrome is it's products. They have to create a closed garden to insure security.
There is nothing new or interesting here. When we were first using the Web, certain things would work on certain machines. When MS starting pushing IE as an application front end, not everything would work will all version of IE. An upgrade could break a page and one would have to look for an older machine. There have always been incompatibilities associated with any change in technology.
It seems to me what people want is the convenience of a corporate produced product without the inevitable compromises that such a product entails. I mean if you are going to use MS products you are going to have deal with security and the occasional changes that are not end user friendly. If you are going to use google products,you have to deal with the fact that most of the time the end user is not the customer, so all decisions go back to ad revenue. If you are going to use apple, you are going to have to deal with a culture of aesthetics and novelty, which means anything ancient, more than three years old, the old way of doing things, is not going to work.
Is anyone making anyone use these products.No. We choose to use them because on balance they provide a piratical solution. If they do not provide a solution, don't use them. If your life is based around yahoo maps, then then Apple products may not be for you, just like if life is based around Flash or IE. You know, ancient tech.
High school football has some redeeming qualities, and it is only in the backwater rural and suburban parts of Texas where they actively weed out players.
It is exposing younger players to the injuries of this and other sports that is going to be a problem for an already strained healthcare system and limit the opportunities for gainful employment due to physical and mental disabilities. I have seen parents as young as 10 in situations where they can be injured. Though young children are plastic, injuries do occur. It is reported that ACL injuries, for example, cannot effectively be treated in adolescents. Brain injuries, of course, are not treatable at any age. Concussions,the subject of the present report, simply have more time to accumulate.
The sad thing is that many skills that some say can only be achieved through hgih impact sports can often be achieved with superior results in other ways. Fine motor control, of course, is legos. Hand eye coordination can be achieved by disassembly and things such as soldering. I can assemble mechanical system without even looking at them, just by touch. Lower impact sports, like running, casual futbol, and tennis or even simple hoops provides superior fitness without as much risk to injury. And of course, increasingly school are only giving partial scholarships for sports while full scholarships are still available to students with useful skills.
Lack of match of DNA found at a crime scene, like a fingerprint, provides reasonable doubt, so that suspect tends to go free. Note that it does not certainty of innocence, merely reasonable doubt. Since, in the US, we are required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, it is often sufficient to kill a case.
DNA, like a fingerprint, should not be enough to convict. Many articles have been written on the faulty statistics that are used by prosecutors to posit faulty odds like 1 in a million, when in fact the odds are more like there are many possible people who could have done this, and we have randomly chosen one. The job is then to prove that this is not just a random choice from a database, but, based on other evidence, this is person who actually committed the crime.
This is going to become more of an issue as we get more DNA in databases and solve crimes by matching DNA to the database. In this case, the match will be a random choice between several people, and it will be a mistake to convict based primarily on DNA evidence.
It is not lying,but it may be deceptive,and deceptive advertising is an actionable offense. Two examples of not lying that got retailers in trouble.
Many years a US discount retailer would make up prices and discount off these prices. The ad copy basically said they were made up, but in such a way that the consumer would think there were based in fact. This enabled the retailer to offer 50% savings on almost everything, though the prices were comparable with any other discount retailer. The company, whose name slips my mind, is out of business.
A department store, maybe Foley's, also got in trouble due to a tactic that many would think was legitimate. They would offer clothing at a rather high price,then advertise a sale discounting off the high price. Now, these products were actually offer for sale, so the retail price was legitimate, but it was still seen as deceptive as there was no intention by the retailer to actually make a sale at this price, just to set a price for advertising a discount. There might have been some sales at the high price, but that was not an issue. This practice is not illegal, but one will see ad copy that states no sales may have occurred at the advertised high price.
So really, on one hand this is not a big deal. The 'up to' might be enough. But given these two cases, and the fact that so few people get the 'up to' amount(much les than 10%), I would say additional ad copy would be required to make this legit. At minimum I would think a note saying that nearly no one achieves this speed. Ideally I would like to see a listing of the speed that the second and third quartile gets, in this case 0.5-2 mb. This would be most useful for the consumer as it would at least help the consumer know the kind of speeds they are likely to get. The fact that this is not done clearly indicate the 'up to' numbers are meant to be deceptive.
As any American High School student knows, driving is a right not a privilege. Many people forget this, go out drinking, critically injure a family of four, then complain that they can no longer drive to work and support their family. But driving should not be a right.
I have no problem with this. To be caught for drunk driving one must not only make a choice to drink, but either be foolish enough to drive through a checkpoint, most of which are announced in advance, or drive erratically enough to be caught by the law. Look at the number of people leaving a bar drunk, and compare to the number who gets stopped. For the most part the cops seems to be stopping those who pose some danger and lack reasonable self control. Such a device may help these people maintain their driving privileges.
I would hope that first time offenders might be able to 'graduate' from the device after an amount of time, and that the number of licenses revoked due to abuse of the privilege would not be reduced.
I know one school were mold is a major issue. Most teachers are not effected. Most students are no effected. A few do have sensitivities. If the hygiene theory of allergies is correct, then it would make sense that parent who are paranoid about germs and power lines and the like would have trouble in the modern world, which in general still includes germs and power lines. A large part of living is acclimation. One gets used to environmental stressors, and tend to compensate.
Look at it this way. If one is raised in the city, then one might have problems dealing with rabbits running around the perimeter, taking baths in the cold creek, the pitch blackness of night, and the crickets singing you to sleep. Some would die of pneumonia within a week. But that does not mean we have to kill all the crickets and use the creek to cool a nuclear power plant.
What people do not get is that learning is hard work, with stress. One can make it easier by selectively enrolling a kid in school, my two years in private school were the easiest and least productive of my life, but that hardly prepares one for the real world, where one might not be able to find employment in a faraday cage that is sanitized and hermetically sealed.
From a plot persepective it may of little consequence, but 'Hans shooting first' is important because it provides character development, something that is important for a well written work. We know that Obi-Wan made a huge mistake, paid for it by living in exile, and gave his life so that the twins, he had to know who they were, could escape and fix the mistake.
Hans is introduced as an amoral smuggler with little regard for life. All he wants is cash. He hangs out the bar not as a person who has to due to his chosen profession, but as a person who enjoys the life. There is no question that he is going to shoot first, because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge the needs of others. Obi-wan sees this in his character which is why he offers a small fee up front, to tweak his interest, with a large fee at completion. The thought that goes into this not only insures that Hans will not space them as soon as they leave the planet, but will continue on to the rebel base instead of doing the logical thing and abandoning them at the death star. There is a reason that Harrison Ford has a career. He was able to pull off a very complex character.
By the end of the movie the Force and Luke had changes Hans from a self centered opportunist to a person willing to acknowledge that the universe was greater than himself. He was willing to risk his life for something that would not benefit him. Of course it is hard to believe that such a huge transformation could occur in a person, but that is why Star Wars is a fairy tale. Unfortunately, like all fairy tales, it has been cleaned up to suite a wider audience to gain more profit. In effect, Star Wars, and many of Lucases project, has taken the opposite trajectory of Hans Solo. Rather than progressing from amoral to enlightened, Star Wars started out as a rather gruff view of the Transformative power of Faith, to an amoral tool of profit.
If I understand the middle school pedagogy, the idea is to transition to a form used with symbolic manipulation and variables, but to allow the kids to use the the guess and check tools they learned in earlier grade. In particular, the use of the blank instead of a variable prevents confusion over variables, which I believe is the bigger problem.
IMHO, what this study show is a more generic issue with abstraction. On way to solve this is to teach simple coding skills in middle school. Proper coding is, by definition, abstracting a process so if a students knows the bascis of coding, they also have learned the basics they need in math. The difference between equality and assignment, the difference between a constant and a variable, how to swap numbers. I would argue that the equal thing is a symptom of deeper issues.
It will depend on the price. One big reason that the iPod was never nixed by the Zune is that the MS sold zune a c competitive price, not a cut rate price. Typically MS does not discount it's products, rather expecting the OEM to pay a premium price for MS product then working out how to cut costs in manufacturing. Therefore a 32 GB Zune and iPod touch are both around $250. If a PC costs $2000, would so many people not be buying Apple. Then, of course, Apple has option for those that only want to spend $150 on an iPod.
Apple has learned to compete on price. This is why a base iPad is $500, and the phone is $200 with contract. Android, which is essentially free, can be used to make phones that compete on features and price. MS Mobile, obviously, cannot. What I think we have seen is that the MS model of gouging OEMs is not going to work in the mobile market. This is why so many of the 2010 competitors have failed to materialize.
Near term I think the threat is going to Blackberry. RIM, like Apple, has control of hardware and software, and unlike apple to some degree the network, and has corporate tools. They should be able to put together something nice, and people will buy it.
On a longer scale, 2012, Android will become a major player as it moves from being simply a phone stack to a full mobile OS. I think Google et al is going to have to more liberal about the requirements if it wants to stay in the game. I think HP will be a major player with WebOS.
I don't see MS going head to head with Android or Web OS. The tablets will simply be too expensive. The HP Windows 7 model is listed as $549. I spent quite a bit of time this summer on Windows 7, it still sucks. Explorer crashed at least every other day. Rebooting your Pad is not acceptable. And this was fresh install. $500 for an iPad, $300 for an Android Pad, $600 for a Windows 7 Pad. I think a $250 WebOS pad could kill the iPad in the same way that the $500 Palm V put the death nail in the Newton.
This is the same old anti-regulation argument, and for some things I agree. If one is talking about the price of widgets, the only rule should be that the free market must be free to operate, that is competing businesses can't collude to set prices. The Nixon price fixing scheme does not work. The rules against collusion simply set up a even playing field that enhance the free market, by setting an initial state from which to compete. Things like the minimim wage and the forty hour work week, extremely ill thought liberal plots that codify the disastrous theory that we have to pay people just because they have done some work, are beneficial as they set limits which helps a business compete on more useful things, like innovative product and process rather than simply trying to minimize cost of labor.
So what does this mean to net neutrality. Net neutrality is a basic rules, like not colluding, or the work week, or code of building, that will drive innovation. Without such a rule companies will compete on which data is delivered quickly, instead of the speed of quantity data delivered. Collusion will be the norm as companies form ties to deliver certain data quickly, while making competing data not quick. As most of us only have one ISP, particularly for the last mile, and often without choice, we will be forced accept service not on the quality of content but on the availability of delivery(And before people take this to anti-iPhone rant, everyone has access to a competing company and a competing smarter phone).
With net neutrality, companies will be forced to invest in innovation, which is of course why many do not want net neutrality. No one wants the government to force them to spend money on innovation. Can you imagine the uproar when building codes required indoor plumbing? Sure it makes sense where it is cold, but down south it is a waste of money! But the fact is with net neutrality companies are going to learn to make efficient use of available bandwidth so that all content can be delivered quickly, not just the content the ISP chooses. It will be create real jobs, with people installing fiber, people looking at the data, and engineers developing solutions, instead of simply provided money so that top executives can buy dates.
Which is why Android will win. Instead of getting a phone that will work from Apple, and having standard charging stations, and a sealed device, the military will send out a ten billion dollar contract to develop and purchase a million android phones. The military contractors can survive on legitimate business, so depend on these overly complex solutions to simple problems.
Which is what Apple is. It provides a reasonable simple solution to a problem. Android is trying to make the problem more complex so it can provide a complex solution.
Here is the thing. The military spends a lot of time in sand now a days. So much so that Velcro is a thing of the paste. Sealed is in. The military wants control of hardware. Apple provides a level of control that Android does not. Android with it's random Apps only leads to data leakage.
Exactly, this is just a case of the old boys club sticking together to keep their perks. After all, what is the point of being a top level executive if you can't use company resources to pay for dates.It was only 10-100K a pop to get the lady to have dinner. Not that much in the scheme of HP finances? He departure will certainly cost more than that, so it was silly to make him leave. It was only a woman after all, not a real person.
Skimming the essay the basic assertion seems to be that having too much to read is worse than the occasional killing of a story. This is common thinking of those that wish to protect us from unfavorable information. That there is someone who knows better than you what you need to know. Of course a selection process is neecessary, there is no way to print all the minutia that goes on in the world, but that selection should be based more on interest rather than the facts presented in the story. For instance, if one is interested in Miley Cyrus, then one wants everything on the subject, not just the Disney edited factoids.
Which is why burying is worse. Burying is act of preventing people from hearing differing opinions. While it is true that artificially inflating the importance of information also has negative effect, many different viewpoints can be overinflated, so we still end up with a variety of opinions. A comment system allows all to reflect on those opinions.
It is true that groups can game the system to inflate the ranking of stories, but look at it this way. On has a finite amount of time. It is relatively trivial to use the time to bury selective stories, but becomes more complex if one wants to do the same thing by inflation. One has to inflate a larger number of stories, and at the same time others are doing the same with stories they agree with. All sides are probably going to inflate the stories that reflect best on them, as inflating politically correct but embarrassing stories would not be beneficial.
At the end of the day, and inflation policy is more likely to result is a selection of the best stories from a variety of opinions, while a bury policy will likely cause the best stories to be buries simply because a few people disagree with the viewpoint. The question is one interested in presenting information that people can choose from, or if presenting an opinion in hopes that everyone will agree.
So does this mean that Android is not truly open source, i.e. available to anyone without right holder approval? I never realized that one had to a member of fruity club to develop Android hardware. I thought that was the point, anyone could innovate without corporate approval. It is just a gimmick to sell phones with promise of multi vendor support 'open apps', like MS?
On the other hand, could Gates have done what he has done without the access to people and equipment he had as a harvard student. I know many people who dropped out of college and are now successful, and know that much of their success stems from the exposure that college facilitates. Many people waste that opportunity, but Gates was not one of them.
Me and many of my friends grew up in and around university and the experience changed our lives. Access to real libraires, hanging out in labs, listening to major discussions. I think that people who minimize the experience do so simply because they have no basis of understanding, just like people who think foreign travel is a waste of money.
OTOH, that does not mean that additional educational opportunities can't be formed to provide services to more people. Colleges in the United States were founded to provide an educational opportunity to the colonies even though the colleges in England were superior, as well as because London was periodically in plague. Which is to say that although the web may nor provide an equal education, it might provide an adequate education.
I would have to respectfully, and completely, disagree. Work computers are for work. The company is responsible for the machine, and to some extent what is done with it. If the IT staff let a rumor fly, it may well have been strategic to remind the staff that what is on their computer is not private.
Given the naivety of the question, it is clear such a reminder was justified. The question implied that no one knows exactly what was on the machine, porn, naked pictures of the spouse, naked pictures of a lover, love notes between the spouse and the lover, plans for a jewelry heist, communications with a wetware person to terminate the spouse or lover? Who knows. The content is not the issue. It is that a company-public computer may have extensively used for something that could be embarrassing to some people.
As far as the comparison to HR, that is faulty. Again, the post strongly indicated that no details were released. A better comparison would be HR telling staf that person was no longer employed because they were in jail. This may be done so the staff know that a round of layoffs is not happening.
I only do work stuff on work email. I have personal emails accounts to do personal stuff, all web based. Many people use gmail for this. It is not private, and after one dies it might not go away, but unless one is important no one will really have a reason to look at it. Certainly your local sys admins will not have access to it, unless they are just nosy and can get your passwords, but that is an issue with any solution, which is why the paranoid don't even use company machines for personal business.
Apple has me.com which provides email and storage for $100 a year. Many people balk at the price and use the free servers of their work email, but the repercussions of that is the reason for the question. It is plug and play and friendly to the non-techie, with password protected space for all the things you describe. For about the same price, or a little less, you can get a shared server account, bluehost, terrabyte, dreamhost are the companies I have dealt with, set up a personal domain, and host your email, save files, do pretty much whatever. They will generally give you much more storage space and allow ssh access.
I cannot imagine what someone is selling you $400 a year. Probably setting up and hosting an exchange server. A quick google search for MS Exchange hosting still seems to be les than $100 a year for small accounts.
I am not sure if there is an in between for the free gmail and google docs account and the $100 a year shared server account, or if all this useless because Exchange is the only solution. In any case, $400 seems way too much.
When I was in middle school we used teletypes even though most people have terminals. In high school I worked on a PDP 11-34. By that time most colleges and others were using VAX and microcomputers. We used Apples, but there was no formal class for them. We programmed using vi in Fortran, Basic, Pascal. Somehow when I graduated from high school I was able to microcomputer to design spreadsheets and databases for small business and hook the emerging LAN. I was not the only one, many people I knew leverage the boring basics we learned on antiquated machine in high school into paying work.
With anything technology, the basics are where it is at and they don't change. The way to build and calculate the mechanical advantage on a pulley has not changed. We are still discharging components prior to repairing them. We are still telling machines sequence of commands, and knowing how to write a working swap function is still important. I am still sliding daughterboards into motherboards, still making connections, still soldering for electrical connections and added stress relief for mechanical connections. And tech is coming back. My experience with ed and vi means that I can wander around and make changes to the modern *nix systems.
The main problem I see in education, beside forcing all students to pass through the exact same curriculum, is that we are, to use the cliche, teaching people to fish using a certain brand of fishing rod, and not showing them what to do when that fishing pole breaks. We train them on Calstar and when they are given a Okuma they claim not to be able to do their job because they were not trained on that tackle.
If we teach boring basics we will lose some of the less interested students, but those that left will ones who can innovate for the new world that comes at every sunrise. Basics are mostly not being taught in school because mostly everything revolves around training on a piece of software. The computer is not integrated into regular classes where use cases on a variety of software can be explored. If you don't believe me let me ask one question. How many programming classes revolve around learning and IDE instead of simple programs that be run from the CL?
All Google products are useful. What worries me about Google is since most of the services are at least incidentally supported by ads. Therefore the services can be cut when they cost more than they are worth.
Some services like mail are here to stay. It costs relatively little and builds brand loyalty. Other services are more costly and may be cut off. There are people who really depended on Wave, who were trained on wave, and have to move to other platforms. The goodwill to Google has been lost.
I am going to be running Googledocs, building loyalty to a large group of people in the process. Training them in Google not in MS Office. Of course if Google plays games, that will ne lost as well.
While the price of books may have hit a bubble, those of us who are skilled based craftspeople do not want not want to live in a world where our craft, be it software development, writing, or teaching, becomes a commodity. A python book may be expensive, and one may be able to get it cheaper, but what does that cheap book mean. A general impression that software development is a cheap thing to do, that the knowledge contained in the book is cheap, and that rates that used to hover around $50 an hour can drop to $20.
Minimizing cost is not always the name of the game. Look at the current immigration issue. In a free market economy, firms should be able to hire workers from anywhere, and workers should be able to able to organize to create value to firms. We should not be treating firms like criminals simply because they have a source of lower cost workers. But we do. Because we know the race to the bottom is a losing proposition for everyone. Of course we don't like high prices, so while we complain that immigrants are taking jobs, we demand the price only sustainable with cheap immigrant labor.
Local generic bookstores are a failed model because they have to stock multiple the number of books they will sell, and that costs money. Small bookstore with handpicked selections for their customers might survive. We may be in a restructuring where pricing cannot support the overhead of coke addict executives and big box stores. If we are going restore a middle class, we must start paying craftsmen, and that may mean $50 for a book that helps us improve our craft.
Here is the way that it was when I was in school. We had a bunch of stuff available to us. We went to class, took notes, then went out and used whatever equipment was available to help us process what we had learned. It might be typing a paper on the computer, or running equation through mathematica to check them, or processing data in a spreadsheet, or writing a program to simulate an atom, or building a circuit, or running a hypercard stack for latin.
Here is the key. We were expected to go out and get the appropriate experiences for ourselves. We were not stuck in a classroom for 8 hours a day where information and activities were filtered for us, where we were forced to a hands on activity or use a graphic organizer. We had the choice on how to process the ideas.
Furthermore, we had the freedom to learn what we did not know. If you did not know how to program, you had better learn. If you did not know how use some piece of lab equipment, you better learn. If you did not know how to write, you better learn. College students are supposed to be at a place where they can make these decisions, and do not need an adult monitoring their every action
So here is the answer. University should provide a wide range of equipment and opportunities so that students can gain experiences. It is not going to look like high school where student are carefully lead through contrived experiences because college s not high school. A college students should have the ability to learn mathematica or revit without having someone on top them demanding they work. Fifteen hours of classes, even with part time work, still leaves one hundren hours a week in which to experience the resources of the university.
So yes, professors should integrate technology in classes. All professors I have known have done this, and have modeled this. But because it is college, it is up to the student to use it.
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Some say this is only because Oracle now has Java, but if the issue is the mobile platform, we also see that Google is playing hardball with the phone. Google is suing companies that use Google tech on Android without Google approval. Google is charging $5 to play in the Chrome field. Google is clearly aggressively protecting it's IP. Not allowing Sun to do the same is hypocritical.
With a unified Java we have a language that one can do many interesting technical things in without a required $1000 IDE. The applications from Java is about the only thing that competes with MS and Adobe. Openoffice.org is one of the very few alternative we have to paying MS a huge amount of money or giving Google control over our data. Defending Java is a big deal. Taking it down would provide competitive advantages to many big players.
The five dollars has to be to cover costs, which is fair. One wonders, however, why Chrome is such a risk that it can't use the same model as firefox. I suppose it is simply that Google has to protect itself since Chrome is it's products. They have to create a closed garden to insure security.
It seems to me what people want is the convenience of a corporate produced product without the inevitable compromises that such a product entails. I mean if you are going to use MS products you are going to have deal with security and the occasional changes that are not end user friendly. If you are going to use google products,you have to deal with the fact that most of the time the end user is not the customer, so all decisions go back to ad revenue. If you are going to use apple, you are going to have to deal with a culture of aesthetics and novelty, which means anything ancient, more than three years old, the old way of doing things, is not going to work.
Is anyone making anyone use these products.No. We choose to use them because on balance they provide a piratical solution. If they do not provide a solution, don't use them. If your life is based around yahoo maps, then then Apple products may not be for you, just like if life is based around Flash or IE. You know, ancient tech.
It is exposing younger players to the injuries of this and other sports that is going to be a problem for an already strained healthcare system and limit the opportunities for gainful employment due to physical and mental disabilities. I have seen parents as young as 10 in situations where they can be injured. Though young children are plastic, injuries do occur. It is reported that ACL injuries, for example, cannot effectively be treated in adolescents. Brain injuries, of course, are not treatable at any age. Concussions,the subject of the present report, simply have more time to accumulate.
The sad thing is that many skills that some say can only be achieved through hgih impact sports can often be achieved with superior results in other ways. Fine motor control, of course, is legos. Hand eye coordination can be achieved by disassembly and things such as soldering. I can assemble mechanical system without even looking at them, just by touch. Lower impact sports, like running, casual futbol, and tennis or even simple hoops provides superior fitness without as much risk to injury. And of course, increasingly school are only giving partial scholarships for sports while full scholarships are still available to students with useful skills.
DNA, like a fingerprint, should not be enough to convict. Many articles have been written on the faulty statistics that are used by prosecutors to posit faulty odds like 1 in a million, when in fact the odds are more like there are many possible people who could have done this, and we have randomly chosen one. The job is then to prove that this is not just a random choice from a database, but, based on other evidence, this is person who actually committed the crime.
This is going to become more of an issue as we get more DNA in databases and solve crimes by matching DNA to the database. In this case, the match will be a random choice between several people, and it will be a mistake to convict based primarily on DNA evidence.
Many years a US discount retailer would make up prices and discount off these prices. The ad copy basically said they were made up, but in such a way that the consumer would think there were based in fact. This enabled the retailer to offer 50% savings on almost everything, though the prices were comparable with any other discount retailer. The company, whose name slips my mind, is out of business.
A department store, maybe Foley's, also got in trouble due to a tactic that many would think was legitimate. They would offer clothing at a rather high price,then advertise a sale discounting off the high price. Now, these products were actually offer for sale, so the retail price was legitimate, but it was still seen as deceptive as there was no intention by the retailer to actually make a sale at this price, just to set a price for advertising a discount. There might have been some sales at the high price, but that was not an issue. This practice is not illegal, but one will see ad copy that states no sales may have occurred at the advertised high price.
So really, on one hand this is not a big deal. The 'up to' might be enough. But given these two cases, and the fact that so few people get the 'up to' amount(much les than 10%), I would say additional ad copy would be required to make this legit. At minimum I would think a note saying that nearly no one achieves this speed. Ideally I would like to see a listing of the speed that the second and third quartile gets, in this case 0.5-2 mb. This would be most useful for the consumer as it would at least help the consumer know the kind of speeds they are likely to get. The fact that this is not done clearly indicate the 'up to' numbers are meant to be deceptive.
I have no problem with this. To be caught for drunk driving one must not only make a choice to drink, but either be foolish enough to drive through a checkpoint, most of which are announced in advance, or drive erratically enough to be caught by the law. Look at the number of people leaving a bar drunk, and compare to the number who gets stopped. For the most part the cops seems to be stopping those who pose some danger and lack reasonable self control. Such a device may help these people maintain their driving privileges.
I would hope that first time offenders might be able to 'graduate' from the device after an amount of time, and that the number of licenses revoked due to abuse of the privilege would not be reduced.
Look at it this way. If one is raised in the city, then one might have problems dealing with rabbits running around the perimeter, taking baths in the cold creek, the pitch blackness of night, and the crickets singing you to sleep. Some would die of pneumonia within a week. But that does not mean we have to kill all the crickets and use the creek to cool a nuclear power plant.
What people do not get is that learning is hard work, with stress. One can make it easier by selectively enrolling a kid in school, my two years in private school were the easiest and least productive of my life, but that hardly prepares one for the real world, where one might not be able to find employment in a faraday cage that is sanitized and hermetically sealed.
Hans is introduced as an amoral smuggler with little regard for life. All he wants is cash. He hangs out the bar not as a person who has to due to his chosen profession, but as a person who enjoys the life. There is no question that he is going to shoot first, because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge the needs of others. Obi-wan sees this in his character which is why he offers a small fee up front, to tweak his interest, with a large fee at completion. The thought that goes into this not only insures that Hans will not space them as soon as they leave the planet, but will continue on to the rebel base instead of doing the logical thing and abandoning them at the death star. There is a reason that Harrison Ford has a career. He was able to pull off a very complex character.
By the end of the movie the Force and Luke had changes Hans from a self centered opportunist to a person willing to acknowledge that the universe was greater than himself. He was willing to risk his life for something that would not benefit him. Of course it is hard to believe that such a huge transformation could occur in a person, but that is why Star Wars is a fairy tale. Unfortunately, like all fairy tales, it has been cleaned up to suite a wider audience to gain more profit. In effect, Star Wars, and many of Lucases project, has taken the opposite trajectory of Hans Solo. Rather than progressing from amoral to enlightened, Star Wars started out as a rather gruff view of the Transformative power of Faith, to an amoral tool of profit.
IMHO, what this study show is a more generic issue with abstraction. On way to solve this is to teach simple coding skills in middle school. Proper coding is, by definition, abstracting a process so if a students knows the bascis of coding, they also have learned the basics they need in math. The difference between equality and assignment, the difference between a constant and a variable, how to swap numbers. I would argue that the equal thing is a symptom of deeper issues.
Apple has learned to compete on price. This is why a base iPad is $500, and the phone is $200 with contract. Android, which is essentially free, can be used to make phones that compete on features and price. MS Mobile, obviously, cannot. What I think we have seen is that the MS model of gouging OEMs is not going to work in the mobile market. This is why so many of the 2010 competitors have failed to materialize.
Near term I think the threat is going to Blackberry. RIM, like Apple, has control of hardware and software, and unlike apple to some degree the network, and has corporate tools. They should be able to put together something nice, and people will buy it.
On a longer scale, 2012, Android will become a major player as it moves from being simply a phone stack to a full mobile OS. I think Google et al is going to have to more liberal about the requirements if it wants to stay in the game. I think HP will be a major player with WebOS.
I don't see MS going head to head with Android or Web OS. The tablets will simply be too expensive. The HP Windows 7 model is listed as $549. I spent quite a bit of time this summer on Windows 7, it still sucks. Explorer crashed at least every other day. Rebooting your Pad is not acceptable. And this was fresh install. $500 for an iPad, $300 for an Android Pad, $600 for a Windows 7 Pad. I think a $250 WebOS pad could kill the iPad in the same way that the $500 Palm V put the death nail in the Newton.
So what does this mean to net neutrality. Net neutrality is a basic rules, like not colluding, or the work week, or code of building, that will drive innovation. Without such a rule companies will compete on which data is delivered quickly, instead of the speed of quantity data delivered. Collusion will be the norm as companies form ties to deliver certain data quickly, while making competing data not quick. As most of us only have one ISP, particularly for the last mile, and often without choice, we will be forced accept service not on the quality of content but on the availability of delivery(And before people take this to anti-iPhone rant, everyone has access to a competing company and a competing smarter phone).
With net neutrality, companies will be forced to invest in innovation, which is of course why many do not want net neutrality. No one wants the government to force them to spend money on innovation. Can you imagine the uproar when building codes required indoor plumbing? Sure it makes sense where it is cold, but down south it is a waste of money! But the fact is with net neutrality companies are going to learn to make efficient use of available bandwidth so that all content can be delivered quickly, not just the content the ISP chooses. It will be create real jobs, with people installing fiber, people looking at the data, and engineers developing solutions, instead of simply provided money so that top executives can buy dates.
Which is what Apple is. It provides a reasonable simple solution to a problem. Android is trying to make the problem more complex so it can provide a complex solution.
Here is the thing. The military spends a lot of time in sand now a days. So much so that Velcro is a thing of the paste. Sealed is in. The military wants control of hardware. Apple provides a level of control that Android does not. Android with it's random Apps only leads to data leakage.
Exactly, this is just a case of the old boys club sticking together to keep their perks. After all, what is the point of being a top level executive if you can't use company resources to pay for dates.It was only 10-100K a pop to get the lady to have dinner. Not that much in the scheme of HP finances? He departure will certainly cost more than that, so it was silly to make him leave. It was only a woman after all, not a real person.
Which is why burying is worse. Burying is act of preventing people from hearing differing opinions. While it is true that artificially inflating the importance of information also has negative effect, many different viewpoints can be overinflated, so we still end up with a variety of opinions. A comment system allows all to reflect on those opinions.
It is true that groups can game the system to inflate the ranking of stories, but look at it this way. On has a finite amount of time. It is relatively trivial to use the time to bury selective stories, but becomes more complex if one wants to do the same thing by inflation. One has to inflate a larger number of stories, and at the same time others are doing the same with stories they agree with. All sides are probably going to inflate the stories that reflect best on them, as inflating politically correct but embarrassing stories would not be beneficial.
At the end of the day, and inflation policy is more likely to result is a selection of the best stories from a variety of opinions, while a bury policy will likely cause the best stories to be buries simply because a few people disagree with the viewpoint. The question is one interested in presenting information that people can choose from, or if presenting an opinion in hopes that everyone will agree.
So does this mean that Android is not truly open source, i.e. available to anyone without right holder approval? I never realized that one had to a member of fruity club to develop Android hardware. I thought that was the point, anyone could innovate without corporate approval. It is just a gimmick to sell phones with promise of multi vendor support 'open apps', like MS?
Me and many of my friends grew up in and around university and the experience changed our lives. Access to real libraires, hanging out in labs, listening to major discussions. I think that people who minimize the experience do so simply because they have no basis of understanding, just like people who think foreign travel is a waste of money.
OTOH, that does not mean that additional educational opportunities can't be formed to provide services to more people. Colleges in the United States were founded to provide an educational opportunity to the colonies even though the colleges in England were superior, as well as because London was periodically in plague. Which is to say that although the web may nor provide an equal education, it might provide an adequate education.
Aren't they supposed to work to protect us from these type of stories. Does not /. rate a Patriot group, are we not as good as Digg?
Given the naivety of the question, it is clear such a reminder was justified. The question implied that no one knows exactly what was on the machine, porn, naked pictures of the spouse, naked pictures of a lover, love notes between the spouse and the lover, plans for a jewelry heist, communications with a wetware person to terminate the spouse or lover? Who knows. The content is not the issue. It is that a company-public computer may have extensively used for something that could be embarrassing to some people.
As far as the comparison to HR, that is faulty. Again, the post strongly indicated that no details were released. A better comparison would be HR telling staf that person was no longer employed because they were in jail. This may be done so the staff know that a round of layoffs is not happening.
Apple has me.com which provides email and storage for $100 a year. Many people balk at the price and use the free servers of their work email, but the repercussions of that is the reason for the question. It is plug and play and friendly to the non-techie, with password protected space for all the things you describe. For about the same price, or a little less, you can get a shared server account, bluehost, terrabyte, dreamhost are the companies I have dealt with, set up a personal domain, and host your email, save files, do pretty much whatever. They will generally give you much more storage space and allow ssh access.
I cannot imagine what someone is selling you $400 a year. Probably setting up and hosting an exchange server. A quick google search for MS Exchange hosting still seems to be les than $100 a year for small accounts.
I am not sure if there is an in between for the free gmail and google docs account and the $100 a year shared server account, or if all this useless because Exchange is the only solution. In any case, $400 seems way too much.
With anything technology, the basics are where it is at and they don't change. The way to build and calculate the mechanical advantage on a pulley has not changed. We are still discharging components prior to repairing them. We are still telling machines sequence of commands, and knowing how to write a working swap function is still important. I am still sliding daughterboards into motherboards, still making connections, still soldering for electrical connections and added stress relief for mechanical connections. And tech is coming back. My experience with ed and vi means that I can wander around and make changes to the modern *nix systems.
The main problem I see in education, beside forcing all students to pass through the exact same curriculum, is that we are, to use the cliche, teaching people to fish using a certain brand of fishing rod, and not showing them what to do when that fishing pole breaks. We train them on Calstar and when they are given a Okuma they claim not to be able to do their job because they were not trained on that tackle.
If we teach boring basics we will lose some of the less interested students, but those that left will ones who can innovate for the new world that comes at every sunrise. Basics are mostly not being taught in school because mostly everything revolves around training on a piece of software. The computer is not integrated into regular classes where use cases on a variety of software can be explored. If you don't believe me let me ask one question. How many programming classes revolve around learning and IDE instead of simple programs that be run from the CL?
Wave did not fail. Like the Nexus One online store, it was such a success it had to be canceled so it did not destroy the world.
Some services like mail are here to stay. It costs relatively little and builds brand loyalty. Other services are more costly and may be cut off. There are people who really depended on Wave, who were trained on wave, and have to move to other platforms. The goodwill to Google has been lost.
I am going to be running Googledocs, building loyalty to a large group of people in the process. Training them in Google not in MS Office. Of course if Google plays games, that will ne lost as well.
Minimizing cost is not always the name of the game. Look at the current immigration issue. In a free market economy, firms should be able to hire workers from anywhere, and workers should be able to able to organize to create value to firms. We should not be treating firms like criminals simply because they have a source of lower cost workers. But we do. Because we know the race to the bottom is a losing proposition for everyone. Of course we don't like high prices, so while we complain that immigrants are taking jobs, we demand the price only sustainable with cheap immigrant labor.
Local generic bookstores are a failed model because they have to stock multiple the number of books they will sell, and that costs money. Small bookstore with handpicked selections for their customers might survive. We may be in a restructuring where pricing cannot support the overhead of coke addict executives and big box stores. If we are going restore a middle class, we must start paying craftsmen, and that may mean $50 for a book that helps us improve our craft.
Here is the key. We were expected to go out and get the appropriate experiences for ourselves. We were not stuck in a classroom for 8 hours a day where information and activities were filtered for us, where we were forced to a hands on activity or use a graphic organizer. We had the choice on how to process the ideas.
Furthermore, we had the freedom to learn what we did not know. If you did not know how to program, you had better learn. If you did not know how use some piece of lab equipment, you better learn. If you did not know how to write, you better learn. College students are supposed to be at a place where they can make these decisions, and do not need an adult monitoring their every action
So here is the answer. University should provide a wide range of equipment and opportunities so that students can gain experiences. It is not going to look like high school where student are carefully lead through contrived experiences because college s not high school. A college students should have the ability to learn mathematica or revit without having someone on top them demanding they work. Fifteen hours of classes, even with part time work, still leaves one hundren hours a week in which to experience the resources of the university.
So yes, professors should integrate technology in classes. All professors I have known have done this, and have modeled this. But because it is college, it is up to the student to use it.